Chip Conley is an American hotelier, hospitality entrepreneur, author, and speaker.
Education
Graduated from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe program at Long Beach Polytechnic High School. Received his Bachelor in 1982 and an Master of Business Administration in 1984 from. Holds an honorary doctorate from Saybrook University.
Career
In 2010, after having created and managed 50 boutique hotels mostly in California, Conley sold his company to Geolo Capital. The last hotel concept he created for the company is The Epiphany in Palo Alto. As of February 2014, Conley remains a private owner in more than a dozen hotel properties and no longer has an operating role in the company.
Conley spoke at the annual TED conference in 2010 on creating a business model driven by our need for meaning as outlined by Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and as presented in his book Peak: How Great Companies Get their Mojo from Maslow.
Conley’s other books include The Rebel Rules: Daring to Be Yourself in Business. Marketing that Matters: 10 Practices to Profit Your Business and Change the World.
And Emotional Equations: Simple Truths for Creating Happiness + Success in Business + in Life. In 2013, Conley became Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy for Airbnb. and founded Fest300.
At Airbnb, he was asked by the three young founders to help evolve the company into a hospitality company with more than one million hosts in 191 countries.
Conley worked closely with Chief Executive Officer Brian Chesky as a mentor and helped to build a bridge to the travel, hotel, and real estate/development/landlord industries. He is also the leader of the annual Airbnb Open, the company"s iconic hospitality conference that brought 5,000 hosts from 110 countries to Paris in the fall of 2015 and will be held in Los Angeles, California in 2016. And he created the annual Hotel Hero that celebrate line-level hospitality staff for the work they do daily.
He served on the Glide Memorial Board for nearly a decade and is now on the Boards of the Burning Manitoba Project and the Esalen Institute.