BONUS EPISODE! Live from Pivot MIA: Kara & Scott in conversation with Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb

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Hi, everyone.

This is Pivot from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today we're running a bonus episode.

It's our conversation with Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, recorded at Pivot MIA on February 16th.

Our conversation covered everything from the impacts of the pandemic to regulation to the personal struggles of CEOs.

Enjoy.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Cool.

So thank you for coming to this.

Our first one.

Brian's been to code many times, and I said we were trying out this new thing in Miami.

And he first to say yes, it was great.

So let's start off.

Let's talk a little bit about, I guess I'll let you crow about your earnings really strong.

After, I think it was a year ago we did an interview or maybe a year and a half ago.

You laid off 1,900 employees, made a decision to refocus to local travel.

Really difficult existential time for your company.

And then this yesterday, you turned an astonishing quarter as opposed to a lot of other companies who were seeing some trouble.

Can you talk a little bit about that journey, the beginning of the journey?

Yeah, I mean, the short version of the story is I probably started the year of 2020 like everyone, thinking your life was going one direction, and all of a sudden life came at us fast.

And I think we were one of the first companies affected by the pandemic because we had a business in China.

I remember making a kind of naive statement like, wow, if this thing spread beyond China, it'd be really bad.

And because our business dropped 80% in like a matter of two, three weeks in China all of a sudden we're preparing for IPO.

I've written the S1.

Our whole life is going one direction and we lose 80% of our business in eight weeks.

And then suddenly the banks are like no IPO and for the next couple years all of a sudden there were a lot of press articles.

Is this the end of Airbnb?

So suddenly we have to take this take this huge reevaluation of who we are.

I've luckily never had a near-death experience, but I've of course been described to me that when that happens, your life flashes before your eyes.

And I think that kind of happened in a business sense, that our business flashed before our eyes.

And I kind of came to the conclusion, we might, we're going to lose half our business.

And if we lose half our business, which half do we want to keep?

It's like if you're running an inverting building, what do you keep?

And I said, we're going to have to just go back to the original idea of Airbnb.

And so we shut down, we had 10 divisions, we shut down nine of them.

We became a functional org.

Talk about the ones you shut down.

We had a transportation division where we were going to launch this new way to book flights.

We had a travel content group.

We had a business travel group.

Business travel, as we know it, is completely over, despite what other people say.

Like, you know, there will be people travel for business, but the bar to get on a plane for a meeting is much higher.

Which you said early on that you early on.

And I think a lot of people, I mean, a lot of people thought we were going to recover after hotels and airlines because in 9-11, September in 2008, business travel came back before leisure.

And I said, these are totally the wrong analogies.

That was pre-Zoom.

We've totally revowed how we're going to live our lives.

So we had a lot of other businesses, and we just had to get really, really focused.

You know, we were burning at one point a few hundred million dollars a month, and we still took $215 billion

off our balance sheet and gave it to hosts.

I had some investors saying, you are completely crazy.

You're putting good money after bad.

And I said, no, we're in the business of trust.

If we don't have hosts, we have nothing.

We need goodwill.

We need to be able to give them money.

And then, of course, the hardest thing I ever did was a layoff.

I was always warned, if you ever do a layoff, it's going to be the worst.

day of your business life.

And I said, it's going to be bad for me.

It'd be worse of people getting laid off.

So we tried to just do things that were more than what expected of us.

Like, we created an alumni directory where people were allowed to publish their information.

We had a half a million recruiters reach out to our former employees.

So that obviously made a huge difference.

And that was it.

We thought, like, it's June.

I'm thinking, okay, like, you know, I remember one of the banks said, you're not going to have to dust off your S1 for a while.

And all of a sudden, after Memorial Day weekend in 2020, we started noticing

people were booking Airbnbs.

They weren't getting on planes.

They weren't traveling for business.

They weren't crossing borders, but they're traveling nearby and staying in homes.

And all of a sudden, we realized we have a really adaptable model.

And we're not just a travel company.

You know, we're moving more into housing.

And people are starting to book homes for a week, for a month.

So we pivoted the entire company, kind of rebuilt the company from the ground up.

And I mean, I guess what you're seeing now is a bit of the momentum of that.

So

read through your earnings call.

Yeah.

But I think we were talking about yesterday, there's so many companies that are below their IPO price.

You're not only dramatically above, I think you're 5% off your all-time high.

So

and the thing that struck me in your earnings transcript that really stood out was

22% of your bookings are now for 30 days or longer.

50% of your total nights are for seven nights or more.

And it kind of

opened my eyes and I thought, you're not in the hospitality business.

You're in the residential business.

Aren't you the next big residential company?

Aren't you the place people have been coming to you for vacations, but

aren't you now housing America?

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I think that the ground.

I'm the new IR person for Airbnb.

Yeah,

I think that before the pandemic, people, this very simple model, that you lived one place 50 weeks a year and you traveled two weeks a year elsewhere.

And we're not a long-term housing company at this point.

But I think what happened with the pandemic was there's a category in between.

That in a world of flexibility where many people aren't going back to the office five days a week, you have more flexibility.

And so what we're starting to see is people traveling to thousands of communities.

Before the pandemic, everyone went to Miami, Las Vegas, you know, New York City, Rome, Paris.

What we're seeing now is number one, people are going everywhere.

The place to be, I'm not sure it's Miami as much as it's the internet.

And meaning you just, the place to be is everywhere.

And so what we're seeing is population redistribution.

And we're seeing a lot of people not stay in one place.

So we're having people go for a week, a month, or a season.

So I just think the line between travel and living is blurring.

There's a generation of people that are going to have more flexibility.

And yes, housing is a major thing.

And the longer you're away from a home, the more you want to be in a home.

And so, like, you know, a hotel is great for a night or two nights for a week.

It's probably cost prohibitive for a month.

It's like, you know, I mean, no one would do that.

How about that idea?

Because one of the things you said at the time of the, when you were sort of in the midst of the bottom, you said, I don't think business travel is coming back, which was problematic for your business because I use Airbnb on business a lot.

I don't like hotels as much.

That has sort of borne out.

How do you look at that now?

How do you look at business travel right now?

I mean, I like to just try to go to first principles.

Like, I thought, well, why do people travel for business?

They were traveling for meetings, and everyone's made arguments, like, well, if you don't travel for a meeting, you're going to lose that deal.

And I said, well, while you're on the airplane trying to get to the meeting, their person's already Zooming and building a relationship.

So I think that the transactional part of business travel is over, like people getting on a plane for a transaction.

I still think people are going to want to have relationships.

Like the one thing I also have seen with Zoom is like, it can be exhausting.

Your circles circles get really small, and we want to have connection.

There's a reason this conference is a conference.

And so I think that business travel as we know it is over.

There will be some of it, but I think what's going to be replaced is as employees redistribute all over the country, they're going to have to come back to a headquarters.

And when they come back to headquarters, they're going to come back for maybe a week or a few weeks at a time.

You're going to have a lot more gatherings, a lot more conferences.

And so I think it's going to change everything.

I even think remote work is going to change our orientation to offices.

Because I don't think people are going back to an office.

I think an office is, as we know it, a little bit of an anachronistic kind of form factor.

You know, like people are going to regather, but do you want to regather in a drop ceiling like space around a conference room?

Maybe not.

And so I think what we tried to do in the really early days was just look at the data and realize like, how are people living their lives?

They like working from home.

They want more flexibility.

A lot of cities are cost prohibitive.

Suddenly the playing field's leveled.

You can live anywhere.

For families, they can't live nomadically, though many of them can live somewhere else for the summer.

People without kids or empty nesters actually have a lot more flexibility.

And as borders reopen, you're going to see a lot more people living abroad.

I mean, that's the next thing.

And so I think our orientation around housing and travel has completely changed forever.

And I think some other people in our industry were just thinking the world was going to go back to the way it was.

The only thing I'm going to know about the future is it's going to be different.

And so, like, people saying that the world's changing but travel wasn't was always going to be, I think, a kind of a wrong prediction.

So, what happens to those travel businesses?

Because you had experiences, you were thinking about planes.

Any of those, the things you put in the drawer, you said I put them all on a drawer.

Yeah, some of them depressed.

Experiences still exist.

So, experiences, you know, we paused because

it was prohibited to have people gather together.

That has now come back, and you know, I'm very excited about that business.

And I think, you know, there is pent-up demand for people wanting to meet other people.

I know, Scott, you were saying that the number of people that would meet their significant other at work,

like, how the hell are people going to meet each other in the future?

You're not going to meet your significant other on a Zoom call.

I'm not, they're going going to do audio porn, but that was yesterday.

But yeah, so I think that people are going to have a need to gather in the real world, want to have experiences.

And so I think experiences are going to be pretty big.

The rest of the businesses, though, we're kind of just waiting and seeing.

Are there any that you think you want to bring back are the ones you put in the drawer?

I mean, I think down the road, like transportation, I think it's going to go through evolution the way we fly, but I think it's going to take a while.

A lot of airlines,

there's trillions of dollars in infrastructure.

They're essentially subsidized.

But I think there might be like a lot of, I'm not saying we're going to do this, but there's a lot of opportunities.

I think there's going to be a gap in the market between private flying and commercial flying.

There's thousands of private airports in the United States and around the world.

The government subsidizes and keeps these together for national security reasons.

There's a lot of unutilized capacity.

So you'll have a lot of interesting places.

But I also think it's a hard business to get into right now.

And this is not a really good time to get into that part.

So we're looking at a bunch of things, but I think to Scott's point, two things I'm really excited excited about housing I mean this is just a whole paradigm shift and the other thing is just addressing another reality which is loneliness you know I think we ought to be really careful that we don't recreate the movie WALL-E where we're just staring at screens all day totally disconnected from those people around us and I do think the more time we spend online sometimes the more lonely and isolated we get and you know there's something about like real-life interaction that I think creates a little more empathy.

That's why you said yes, because I've been talking to Brian from his house.

Yeah.

I think he meant with your parents, right?

Yeah, oh yeah.

No, I, I mean, the pandemic was a pretty weird experience for me because it was both a growing up experience for me.

You know, like one of the things, and we've talked this, it's like, I started the command as 26.

And, you know, when you are 26 and you have this crazy ride and you like raise billions of dollars, like it's very easy for no one to say no to you.

And it's very easy to think because I can do anything, I can do everything.

I had a teacher at RISD once said, you can do anything you want in your life, just not at the same time.

And I think a lot of us founders that had a lot of never really had a reality check.

You know, we didn't really see the unintended consequences of our platform.

No one really said no to us.

And then suddenly, the pandemic was the ultimate growing up experience.

And so I started confronting the consequences of like 10 years of decisions and having to say goodbye to people and just being a lot more thoughtful about when I start something, I'm going to finish it.

I'm not just going to willy-nilly just think I can go in 50 different directions at the same time because I feel the downside of having to like lay people off.

And so it was a growing up experience.

I felt like I was like 39, going on 49.

At the same time, I'm like 39 years old.

And I remember when I was growing up, my mom's a social worker.

And she told me, she said, I chose a job for love and I got paid no money.

So you should choose a job that pays you a lot of money.

And I said, okay, I've decided I'm going to be an artist.

And she said, you've chosen the one job that's going to get paid less than a social worker.

You're going to like live with me.

You're going to be.

And she said, I remember her telling me, you're going to end up 40 years old and living with me.

And here I was, 39 years old, and I was actually living with my mom.

She moved in with me.

and I had a golden retriever, and it was like baking cookies.

And I said, this is so much like less sexy of a story than these other tech founders living my lives.

I'm baking cookies on Zoom all day with my mom making me a quiche.

It was not a glamorous life, but it was very focused, and maybe that's what I needed during a crisis.

All right, okay.

All right, well, let me just like wiping my car.

I don't know what to say.

I have no comment.

They have no comment.

Your mother's very nice.

Yeah,

she's really good.

Yeah.

Okay, so let me try to pivot somewhere.

So

one of the things is when he was talking about housing, we had WeWork CEO here, and obviously Adam Newman is back.

I'm actually meeting, he's here in Miami.

I'm going to meet with him.

He's trying to go into housing, redoing housing.

You had bought a hotel tonight, which is sort of you wanted to be in that space to offer people that.

I use it.

I love the app.

My kids use it, actually, interestingly.

They like it.

a lot.

But is that the way to go, or do you think you need to be in apartments?

What do you think of that idea?

Is that somewhere you all need to go?

I mean, sorry, which idea specifically, Adam?

Buying apartments.

That's what Adam's doing.

Oh, buying apartments.

He's going vertical.

Would you ever go vertical and actually own

real estate?

Well, I'll tell you a story I told Adam because we had a conversation years ago about

could there be a partnership and could we build basically the equivalent of Airbnbs or some combination of we live and Airbnbs we live.

He did.

Yeah, we live.

And it's like, and the one thing I told him is, so we have six million homes.

Let's take a like a really rough guess.

And let's say like the average home is half a million dollars and that's conservative because in a city it would be much more expensive.

But if we're averaging out Latin America and Asia, let's go to half a million dollars per apartment.

So if you want to add two million apartments, that's a trillion dollars of capital.

And so, I mean, one of the things I said, like, you're going to pretty much pretty quickly get to like the GDP of Italy is from a sense of capital to build them out.

So if we were to get into vertical integration, it would be probably more like a brand statement, you know, like the reason why you do like an iconic flagship.

But from a scale perspective, it's just really hard to get the kind of scale.

You know, you literally need trillions of dollars.

And one of the great things about our model is you don't have to pour concrete to get millions of people.

And I think our business is really more about community than it is about like real estate and like concrete.

So not anytime soon.

We have some really cool ideas though.

around funding people to build unique Airbnbs.

So for example, there's a whole asset class to get your apartment built and funded.

There's an entire division.

The most profitable Airbnbs are tree houses, tiny homes, igloos.

I mean, there are tree houses that make $100,000 a year.

You can get 100% return on your investment.

A bank won't give you money.

A venture capitalist is not interested.

So there's a lot of really interesting spaces where we actually can be helpful.

But there's a lot of people who build apartments and they're really good at them.

And I'm not sure we have a lot to add to that.

Right.

And so, like, you have a Yurt, for example.

You mean that people just want to try it.

People want to try the Yurt or whatever.

I mean,

people are like, the thing is crazy is that that the best ROI thing I've ever seen other than like tech companies that work are unique spaces on Airbnb because think about it if you build a yurt a tree house a tiny home the property is very cheap because you're in the middle of the nowhere.

A tree house is like

slightly costs slightly more than like a shed to build.

I mean well some of them are really they can cost a lot but like a tiny home and yet people it's a romantic idea like people will want to have an experience.

They want to do something different.

And so there's a really interesting arbitrage designing really unique spaces that don't have to be too expensive.

Which you would fund.

I'm sorry.

So, which you would fund or help potentially.

And that's that's something we're looking at.

So, what I'm trying to do is like I want to make sure to help the everyday people that could use help.

I think there's a lot of property managers and hotels on Airbnb.

We want to support them too, but they don't need as much help from us.

There's entire ecosystems that are already supporting those companies.

There's a lot of regular people, there aren't ecosystems for them, they don't know where to get capital.

And so, that might be an area that we could probably help a little bit more.

So, you've been living, and you're going to live in Airbnb now?

I'm living in Airbnb right now.

I don't know.

How long?

This reminded me, at first, I was like, remember when Mark Zuckerberg went around the country?

He killed everything he ate.

Oh, no, it's not.

He killed everything he ate.

That was another year.

Yeah.

Yeah, I haven't killed anything in the last four weeks.

Okay, good.

No, when he went around the country, he rode around on tractors to meet the real people of America.

Although real people are everywhere, actually.

I had an argument.

I'm like, there are real people in San Francisco.

There's real people in New York.

There's real people in Texas.

But you're staying in them.

Is it I'm staying in them?

I'm sleeping in them.

What is the point of this?

It's a little stunty, but I like it.

I enjoy that.

What is the point for this?

Well, to be clear, like it's totally a stunt and it's also real, meaning even if there was no press, do I want to, I'm 40, I live by myself in San Francisco, I'm on Zoom 16 hours a day.

I walk to Dolores Park.

So at some point, I'm like, I have to get out of the city for a little bit.

You know, there's no office there.

So I'm thinking, where do I go now?

Should I go to New York?

Should I go to Miami?

And I'm like, well, actually, I guess I can go for a week here or a few weeks there.

I know not everyone can do it, but even without the stunt, I would probably still do it.

It's fun.

And I was in Atlanta.

I went to Nashville, Charleston.

So I did a little tour of the south.

I hadn't seen those cities before.

Los Angeles, Miami.

Stay a week.

I typically stay a week.

Those cities, I stayed a few days.

I'm in Miami for like a week and a week and a half.

And then I don't know where I'm going to go after this.

Maybe I'll go to, I'll probably go to a place in the, like, New Mexico or Arizona or something.

And what's your learnings from this?

Just to please yourself or get away from your mother?

Exactly.

Getting away from my mom, she definitely is probably, yeah, that's why I can't publish my itinerary ahead of time.

But

no,

so

I'm one of those annoying bosses that makes the rest of the.

Brian, that was funny.

I'm one of those bosses that makes kind of like an annoying list of things.

I check into Airbnbs and we made 150 upgrades last year.

So I thought, wow, we've perfected this service.

It's great.

And then I check in.

I'm like, why the hell can't I find the Wi-Fi on the app?

Why do we put it there?

So you always see things.

I think a big problem with CEOs is the bigger you get, the more your job gets abstract.

You start like managing your board and talking to Wall Street and dealing with reorganizations.

And you just kind of forgot like why the hell you're doing it.

Like at the end of the day, you're making a thing that people have to like and to provide value.

And so a lot of it's just me like.

cutting out those layers.

But also like when you live in Airbnb, it's different.

Like you need a comfortable desk and an office chair.

You can't just sit around the kitchen table.

I have a golden retriever, Sophie.

She's seven months.

So like that's a whole new experience.

And so, it just you pick up little things when you live in a home versus when you travel and stay in a home.

And so, the bar gets a little higher.

And so, I'm trying to refine it.

You're doing private homes over like staying in a room in a home, that kind of thing?

Yeah, right now, they've all been entitled homes because of the dog.

But I definitely would like to, it'd be fun to stay in a private room.

I show up with my dog, and I'm in one bedroom, someone's on the other side of the wall.

I mean, I've done that in the past.

I, years ago, I stayed in a house, I didn't actually know the host was there, it was in San Francisco.

It turned out to be a shared studio apartment with a woman older than my mom.

It was me, her, and her parrot.

And the parrot would not shut up.

So, you know, you always get, actually, the last year

I stayed in,

this is slightly embarrassing, but I'll say it because I have to be at least somewhat interesting.

I was in LA and I saw this really cool listing.

It said Fairytale Cottage.

And I kind of looked, okay, it's a nice fairytale cottage.

I get to the listing.

It's a themed fairy tale princess Cinderella cottage.

And it's supposed to be for like girls who love Cinderella that want to have a once-lifetime experience.

So the bedroom is all pink.

There's no shower.

It's like a small children's bathtub.

I haven't been in a bathtub actually since the 80s.

I kind of, once I turned like nine or ten, I just started showering.

Yeah, good idea.

So

I got to take a bath and there was like a treehouse.

There were two pigs in the backyard.

No one told me about, oh, I should have read the description.

My dog loved the the pigs.

So you get like a lot of really interesting experiences in Airbnb.

Yeah.

When we return, Brian Chesky discusses the lonesome life of a CEO.

That's coming up in a moment.

Charlie Sheeten is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next next week I'll be ready for the show.

No.

Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

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Welcome back.

Here's more of our interview with Airbnb's Brian Chesky at Pivot MIA.

We're going to ask you a tough question.

Yeah, I got it.

I got it.

All right, go, go.

Tough.

Tough.

So

if the story goes long enough, the hero becomes the villain.

I think any company that gets to the market cap that you're breaching has externalities.

And I was struck by when I go to the West Coast, when I go to San Francisco, or when I go to LA, just the homeless problem.

Yeah.

And just the natural economics of Airbnb, good for a lot of stakeholders, but it has increased the cost of housing in certain areas.

It feels like you're uniquely blessed with the model, the data, and quite frankly, the capital to really try and

zig where other big tech companies have zagged and say, we're going to commit our capital, we're going to commit our time, our treasure, and our talent to working with local governments.

I don't know what the format is, but to really, you know, try and stay the hero and do something around homelessness.

Have you given any thought to this and what you might do?

Is this an opportunity to make a big, bold commitment in front of Keraswater

around?

Yeah, I totally should.

I'm just going to make something up right now.

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know,

I've been the underdog.

I've also, you know, before the pandemic, you know, we were a bit of a piñata at periods of time.

And I totally agree.

You know, when I came to Silicon Valley, the word tech may as well have been a dictionary definition for the word good.

You know, like YouTube was cat videos, and Facebook was a king up with your friends, and Twitter was to just say, I'm drinking a milkshake.

It was all very innocent feeling at the time.

And I think one of the things that I had to learn, I think we all grew up very quickly, is it's not that tech, I don't think we should think of tech as per se good or bad.

I mean, it's on balance good.

That's like saying, is nuclear power good?

Well, it can light up a city or destroy a city.

The designer in me says it depends on how you design it.

And one of the things that I had to learn the hard way is when you build something and 100 million people or more use it, unintended consequences are going to occur.

How could you possibly imagine the way 100 million people are going to do something?

And so I think it's been a big growing experience for me and probably for everyone in the industry.

And I think we're all better for recognizing the externalities you put on society because I tell people either we self-regulate or we'll invite more regulation.

It's just a choice.

There's no third path here.

As far as providing housing for those in need, we're definitely interested in that.

Obviously, homelessness is a very difficult problem.

It takes a lot of capital.

One just thing we have been doing is

in 2012, many of you remember Hurricane Sandy occurred, and we started providing housing for evacuees.

And we've provided housing for about 100,000 people in need.

We've housed nearly 20,000 Afghan refugees for free.

So, and yeah, thank you.

So, you know, I don't, I don't, you you know, we have our challenges.

I don't want to pretend like it's all perfect and all good.

But I totally think that the bigger you get, you know, Pablo Caso had a saying, the older you get, the stronger the wind gets.

It's always in your face.

I think that's true of tech companies.

The bigger you get, like, the harder you have to try to fight against the skepticism of your power.

Your regulatory pressure was quite high.

It was very high.

And we were under scrutiny.

We kind of took the opposite Amazon approach where Amazon didn't really have any scrutiny until they got big.

Most tech companies had scrutiny because they're big.

We had scrutiny because we were in your neighborhood.

I remember having scrutiny.

We had 10 employees in a three-bedroom apartment and

the city council in New York City was coming after us.

And I didn't even know, like,

I didn't know anything.

I mean, you know, like two years before that, I thought angels were crazy.

People were crazy to believe in angels.

I didn't know they meant angel investors.

So I was like, I had a very long road to Silicon Valley, and it's definitely gotten better.

I mean, partly it's because we collected and remitted $4 billion of hotel tax.

Right.

And that money's gone to the bottom.

That's a big fight that was going on with that.

That was a big fight.

But we were, to be clear, we were always trying to pay tax.

It turns out some cities didn't really want us to pay tax initially because to tax us is to regulate us is to legitimize us.

And so there were some challenges.

The city of New York.

What's the big regulatory challenge now?

Because

you had faced some.

I mean, almost every market interview.

You had that 40 thing.

You had the party house.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, yeah.

The homes and hotels are popular for orgies.

Yes, you told me that once.

Yeah.

You said that on this panel.

It was so funny.

I didn't, this is a nice, sweet man, and then all of a sudden he's like, you know, people have been having orgies in hotels forever.

And the whole crowd was like, yes.

Exactly.

Exactly.

By the way, I'm not saying I had, like, I knew that.

It's just that was a reasonable speculation.

You seem

to know that.

Well, I was just piecing things together.

I'm not

walking into some of your best friends.

And in fact, it's probably true.

Yes.

So,

what is your biggest regulatory scrutiny right now that you that that

are not available?

So I think before the pandemic, there were a lot of concerns about the price of housing in cities.

People living in San Francisco, obviously there's limited housing, and if people are renting Airbnbs year-round, that's a really big problem.

Now, it's a whole different situation where everyone's redistributing.

And I think it's a pretty exciting time.

I mean, one of the things I told a recent mayor is

The way to think about your citizens is almost to think about them as customers who have choices now because they are nest tethered.

The other side of that, though, is that we have to now be careful because instead of having to deal with five or ten cities, we have now a hundred thousand cities.

And you know, not everyone wants a ton of travelers in their neighborhood.

And you know, so we have to be making sure that people are contributing to communities, they're not just passerbys, they're not just creating a nuisance.

So, I think just making sure that our community of hundreds of millions of people can live in communities and be respectful, that's probably the biggest challenge right now.

I would say safety if I had to pick one, because I've gotten a lot of notes about when I talked to you, like, does he know the lack of safety, the response?

Yeah, I mean, safety, safety, neighborhood, safety, community, safety, the travel, safety of the host.

We're doing a lot on safety.

I mean, like, for example,

you know, we have a 24-7 team.

We are continuing to develop our urgent safety line.

We try to have really good support for people if they ever feel unsafe.

You know, we try to take action whenever we feel like there's going to be a bad situation.

We offer this new product called Air Cover, which is a million-dollar protection against theft or property damage to your property.

So we're trying to continue to innovate on that area.

Have you, the thing I think there's going to be case studies about in addition to the business model is you're sort of known now for executing the best firing

and as

firing.

Oh, yeah.

You did you were praised for how you did that.

What advice would you give to managers or CEOs that have to go through the uncomfortable experience of laying people off?

Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, if you run a huge company, I wouldn't say it's inevitable you have to do that, but it might be in your future.

I think that

I think CEOs and leaders are more human than they come across.

I mean most of these people are real people.

They do have feelings.

I think the problem with corporations is the lawyers and HR people and others sand the edges off the person in an effort to protect the person.

And that is a major disservice because they just reduce them to something that's not even a human being anymore.

They're just this very cold person.

So a CEO seems really personable and then suddenly they do a layoff and it's like a different person.

It's like a split personality.

The other thing is, I mean I think that like in a crisis you have to make principal decisions, not business decisions.

A business decision is knowing like, I'm going to try to game this because I know what the outcome is going to be.

A principal decision is I have no idea how this is going to go out.

So how do I be remembered?

And in a crisis, I wanted to make sure that we could do whatever we could to take care of people.

So the two things I would say, and if you you ever have to do a layoff, is I would do more than is expected of you.

In a crisis, you can do less than expected.

What is expected or more isn't expected?

I would try to do more as expected.

I would try to be incredibly transparent.

There's so much advice around take the layoff playbook off the shelf, be like paint by numbers, very corporate.

I used the word love in the letter.

I said, I love you all.

Like, I felt that.

It was a weird kind of thing to say.

I can assure you, no internal comms person would have ever written that for me or recommended I say that.

And then we did some things that were a little controversial.

Like we published an alumni directory.

There's reasons why companies don't do that.

You could reverse engineer the entire organizational chart.

Like there's there's reasons why that might not be a good idea.

And I always viewed like just do whatever you think is the right thing in that moment, take care of people, and then they'll root for you.

And I do think that like the way we handled the crisis made people root for us a little bit more, which I think did contribute to the rebound.

But you never try to do it to get that result.

You just try to like follow what you think is the right thing to do.

We'll be back in a moment with more from Airbnb's Brian Chesky.

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You had taken a lot of controversial stands around

January 6th.

Before that, you had done them.

You got a lot of pushback on those things.

How do you think about having done that?

You had limited people, you had barred certain people from coming to the inauguration?

I think we're a little different than other platforms because on Airbnb, like

safety ends up becoming taking precedence over things like free speech because people's safety, like they're really concerned.

And I actually came from the other direction where I used to have an ideological view of being hands-off.

I believed in the Craig Newmark Pure Midiar original Marketplace 1.0 that the internet's an immune system.

You build moderating tools and they moderate their cells.

And then people's homes are getting trashed, and people are having orgies, and they were doing meth and Airbnbs.

And then suddenly they said, you know what?

We don't like your immune system approach.

You're going to have to be much more hands-on.

If you're not hands-on, you're going to be regulated out of existence.

It was a pretty serious growing up experience.

So we took responsibility much earlier on than I think a lot of internet companies.

And the basic idea was all this came from 2016.

There were a number of African Americans in the United States, black people, who were describing gaming discriminated against, trying to get Airbnbs.

There was a hashtag trending on Airbnb, Airmbby while black.

This became a huge crisis for us, and we thought we can either put our heads in the sand or we could try to do more as expected of us.

So we created this community commitment saying, like, you got to just, it's an honor code, but just check this box saying that you will not discriminate against people.

A million people refused to check that box.

We kicked them off the platform.

And at that moment, I said, to hell with it.

Like, this platform is not going to work if people aren't going to accept one another from different values.

So why the hell are you using it?

And why are you traveling if that's how you feel?

And then, of course, we heard about this rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

I never, I didn't really know much about it.

And I thought, like, you know, if people are part of what, you know, FBI and others are saying or hate groups, that feels like, I don't want to be the arbiter.

That feels like a reasonable violation of our community commitments.

So, you know, we did that.

And then January 6th was actually more of a safety thing.

We were just really concerned with people going into neighborhoods in D.C.

and like really dangerous things happening.

So we canceled all reservations.

But again, I didn't want to screw over the host.

So we actually paid out all the host reservations.

It was probably $300,000 of booking.

So we said, we'll take it.

We'll continue to do that kind of stuff.

You don't mind.

Was there a blowback for doing that?

There's a blowback to everything I've ever done.

Yeah, there always is, because these things get kind of politicized.

Yeah, and how do you, does it make you do it less?

No.

I mean, you know, like, you just do what you think is right and people are are gonna agree with or disagree.

So you're editing.

You feel okay about editing.

I have big arguments, you know, with Spotify or whoever, the person of the day saying they have no responsibility.

I'm like, you have some.

Well, we all have responsibility.

If you have a platform with hundreds of millions of people on it, like and things happen and you could have done more and you didn't, that sounds like the definition of responsibility.

Now, whether you choose to do something or not, I understand different platforms have different risks.

I would argue the risk energy is greater than the risk of speech because it's such a physical body.

I mean, really bad things can happen.

And so we have to just take a slightly different and I think more hands-on approach.

I have one last question: is the metaverse cryptocurrency in the metaverse?

I've always been talking about how does the are you accepting cryptocurrency?

Do you expect to do that?

We're not accepting cryptocurrency, but I like to, every couple years, go on Twitter and ask if we launch anything, what should we launch?

And crypto, probably not surprisingly, was the number one voted response.

And so I've committed to looking into it.

And we're absolutely looking into it.

Most people don't realize we actually have a pretty big payments platform already.

We've handled $330 billion in our homegrown payments platform since we started.

So I'm definitely looking into crypto.

I think that the Web3 movement is super interesting.

I think that people building Web3 companies have to know that they're basically in the community business.

And I think you should be very thoughtful about if you're trying to financialize the community from the very beginning, you should think about, I think a lot of people in Web3 entrepreneurs, I hope they know that one of the most important things you start a technology company is your ability to change and pivot.

And when you build immutable laws, now you need consensus of many people.

I mean, I've run a company in the past where I try to run things by consensus.

It's very difficult.

It takes a really long period of time.

And I think the metaverse, I mean, I think the main thing I'll just say at the metaverse is

it is no doubt inevitable that the internet will become more three-dimensional and more immersive.

Like, who would deny that everything is going to get higher fidelity?

And I think what's going to happen is the real world and the digital world are going to start to blur together.

That's exciting and also, if not done correctly, quite terrifying.

So, just before we, because we have a bunch of of questions, but I want you to have very rough edges here and just say what comes to mind.

What are some businesses you might be in five years that would surprise us?

No commitments, just top of your head, what are some businesses you might be in?

I think we're going to do a lot more around like housing, people living on Airbnb.

That's one arc.

But I think the other one is really just bringing people together.

I think we're living in one of the loneliest periods in human history.

Is that dating?

Absolutely looking at dating.

I mean, it would have to be something that would make sense to people, and there would have to be probably higher verifications, really good matching.

But when people are traveling, they're very interested in meeting other people.

So I'm absolutely looking at things like that.

You know, a lot of people use their meets to work out of.

So there's obviously

potentially co-working.

Probably things that are built with more community are really interesting.

You know, you and I have talked a little bit about ideas around loyalty programs, subscription services, membership.

You know, I mean, you know, the biggest loyalty programs aren't retail, they're travel.

The biggest loyalty programs are only usually travel.

So there's a lot of opportunities there.

Actually, we were developing something and we paused it.

So we're looking at that as well.

So I also just think a lot more services for host.

We want to get the next generation host and millions of them.

And I want it to be something that anyone can do.

So we're going to be looking at a lot of services for host as well.

But I mean, the sky's the limit.

You know, I'm a designer by training.

I don't want to feel like the best ideas I had were in my 20s.

So I want to, you know, the bar is hard.

The original idea was pretty good.

But we're trying to find some new things too.

Services for hosting.

We're just trying to get my house on.

I'm like, no fucking way.

Yeah, we'll work on it.

No, no one's touching Cara Switcher's things.

Go ahead.

Hi, Brian.

I'm Libby.

I work at Klarna.

And yesterday we heard from a speaker that talked about the age of a company.

So, like, toddlers who need a lot of care, and then you've got like,

or toddlers that are kind of falling up, getting up, whatever, falling down, and then teenagers who are self-sabotaging, things like that.

What age do you think Airbnb's at?

And then what are some things that scary over the next couple of years?

It's a great question.

I actually thought about this a lot.

I felt like between 2009 and 2014,

I felt like I knew what I was doing actually because it was a startup, it was intuitive, and I know how to manage a few hundred people.

Even you can kind of figure it out.

Around 2015, 2016, it got really hard.

And I would describe that as the adolescence.

And my corporate adolescence was unfortunately almost as awkward as my actual adolescence.

And it wasn't good.

I went through basically multiple executive teams.

I didn't know how to run the company.

At one point I tried to run it the way Bezos runs Amazon.

That did not work for us.

It was a bad idea for me.

And I think what the crisis did is

I kind of grew up a bit.

You know, I had to confront every decision I ever made.

Every promise I made, it came home to Roost.

Some worked, some didn't.

I had to look every employee in the eye, all 2,000 people we laid off, I went through every single person,

one by one.

I didn't want to be systematic, and it was pretty tough.

And so I think, as I said, I grew up like 10 years in a year.

And I would say now we're definitely an adult company.

I mean, we did $1.6 billion in EBITDA last year.

This is a company that some people ask would never make a profit.

And

I think it's clear that we're disciplined now.

So, what is the biggest challenge going forward?

I think expectations are really high now.

And I think that once you're a hundred billion dollar plus company, the amount of responsibility you have kind of skyrockets.

And I want us to be, I would like us

to be a role model for a new generation of entrepreneurs.

And that doesn't mean that I want to act like we're perfect or wholer than thou, but I want people to feel like there is a model.

I also, I'm a designer.

When I started MB, there were no role models.

There's no designers running giant companies.

And I always thought, you know, a creative person could run a company.

And I want people to know that creative people can have a seat in the table and you can run a company a little bit differently.

And so that's what the next few years will probably be about for us.

Okay.

Yes, sir.

Thanks, Dallas.

First super host, love being a super host.

I want to thank you also.

Really cool move letting us participate in the IPO.

Of course.

That bought a lot of goodwill from all of your super hosts.

Where's your igloo?

In the desert.

A question about one of the things that we're seeing with the local cities clamping down on timeframes, you know, minimum 30 days, getting away from the short term.

Are you seeing them start to kind of lessen their restrictions now as this work anywhere mindset comes in place?

Are they revisiting the tightening restrictions they passed in the years?

Are they holding fast?

Yeah, all the restrictions are being reevaluated, both landlord restrictions and cities.

So

before the pandemic, the vast majority of businesses in big cities, landlords were like renting all their apartments.

They had no problems with their yield and cities were like, we have plenty of tourism.

Suddenly, the city of San Francisco, they have low occupancy.

Tourism is like, I mean, most people don't realize the number one export in San Francisco was not tech.

It was tourism.

They were making more money every year on tourism.

It was critical to the economy.

So now cities go from an over-tourism problem to, in many cases, an under-tourism problem.

So we've had a lot of cities reach out to us.

They want help.

And then landlords are now wanting to allow airborne in their buildings because they actually realized it'd be more likely to be able to rent their apartments to people because a lot of people want to do it.

So a lot of laws are being reevaluated, but doesn't mean they're only going to be better.

There are going to be more restrictions because you've got these little beach communities that suddenly all people are moving into.

And so every city is now, and every town is reevaluating.

But I think the laws trying to arbitrate between travel and housing have to go, I think we have to think about it differently.

We used to live in a world where you live 50 weeks one place and a week or two another place.

And some people still live that way, and other people live somewhere in between.

And we have to design laws for that, I think.

Hey, Brian.

Big fan of And User.

Maybe I shouldn't admit this because I work for a hotel hospitality group.

So I'm president of Fina Rose,

which is a private membership club.

Have you ever thought of getting into that space?

Yeah, there's a lot of that.

We haven't really, no.

You think?

Yeah, what do you say more?

Just curious.

Nope, just curious.

Yeah.

It's really interesting.

A lot of people are doing it.

And there's been a bunch of picasa.

There's been a bunch of that.

You don't see.

I mean, we've looked into it a little bit.

I mean, I haven't looked into Twivera BB, but I've looked into those models.

It's been limited to very wealthy people.

Yeah, yeah.

I think there's like Insperado and exclusive

resorts.

We have a Lux business, and and anyone can book, but I do think there's, I think one of the things that will be really interesting is people being able to host within a kind of defined community.

Now, at the same time, you want to be careful because you don't want people saying, I want to host certain kinds of people.

That can get a little bit dangerous.

But there is an affinity where, like, I love to host other creative people or something.

That could be pretty cool.

And so that's a good thing.

I think Pablo's question was different.

Pablo runs something called Faina Rose, so I don't want to put words in your mouth, or it's sort of a membership community that they bring together to talk about cultural events.

Oh, I see.

Okay.

Oh, I see.

Oh, that's that's cool.

No, we haven't really thought about that very much, but I do think that would be something that would be quite popular for people.

Because again, they want to be part of a community.

And then suddenly when you're living, I mean, one of the things I'm learning is when you live on Airbnb, it can be really awesome, but if without the right community, it can be a little isolating.

So we just trying to connect you to local communities is going to be really important.

Yeah.

Hi, Brian, Catherine Krimmins from Oscar Health.

Similar to you, I left my New York City apartment to go travel and taking advantage of a bunch of co-living and co-working spaces.

Similar to the last theme, it seems like there's a lot of innovation in the space that's going to happen.

Curious, your approach to acquisitions going forward, and do you see it looking similar to Hotel Tonight?

Or would you approach it kind of differently, strategically moving forward?

Yeah, I mean, we've done like two really big acquisitions, Luxury Retreats, Hotel Tonight, both really great acquisitions.

I think that going forward, we'll probably do fewer acquisitions, but if it really counts, we'll do it.

I mean, we did probably 20 acquisitions before the pandemic.

Maybe we did more.

It's a lot of work administratively to integrate companies.

I don't think I appreciated that.

So I think our source of innovation is going to be primarily internally, but we are absolutely going to be opportunistic about acquisitions going forward.

But we'll probably be bigger and fewer.

Bigger and fewer.

This is something Aswat talked about.

Yeah, because he doesn't like acquisitions.

I'm sorry.

He thinks innovation is better internally.

100%.

If you're creative.

I think that so much of big tech companies are going to be precluded from doing a lot of acquisitions, so they're going to be forced to innovate.

And if you're forced to innovate, you have to have a creative culture.

You have to have an innovative culture.

You can't just growth hack your way to an optimization.

You have to actually have an idea.

You have to be research-based.

You have to use your own products.

Creative people have to be at the table.

You have to have a design sensibility.

Marketing and engineering need to be close together.

You can't just build something and hope people use it.

So,

I guess that's a good word.

But you have to be creative.

That's the beginning.

Hi.

I was wondering, you have spoken a bit about wanting to create more community experiences for people and

kind of trying to

decrease loneliness and bring people together.

I'm wondering if you've thought about like a subscription kind of program for frequent Airbnb users who maybe if you pay a monthly

monthly fee, you get access to exclusive events with other Airbnb users, or maybe you it makes it kind of easier to book subsequent Airbnbs, maybe a decline in the

kind of cleaning and administrative fees that are sometimes like hidden like it says it's a hundred dollars a night and then it's you know a little bit more by the way I love Airbnb but just wants more Brian I want more yeah no I'm not so that that that we've definitely thought about for sure and we've even had conversations around like I just think people want to be able to connect with other people.

They would pay to do that.

There's a potentially elevated service people would want.

So it's a great suggestion.

It's something we've definitely thought about.

So yeah.

Yeah.

I like it.

It's really important.

They may trust you more.

It's interesting.

We had a Twitter space on Peloton, even though everyone's sort of dumping on them.

And the Peloton losers love them so much, they want more stuff from them, which was really interesting.

And that's Airbnb, I feel like I have a trusted relationship when I use it.

And I would accept more.

Same thing with Apple.

There's certain brands that you would accept.

But you would do a little bit more work.

Well, if they offered it, if they brought it to you, your attention.

Hi, I'm Claire Crusoe.

I work in legal technology.

I actually think we do a little bit of e-discovery work for you.

But my question is actually from a friend of mine who is a real estate attorney and represents a lot of Airbnb hosts.

So bear with me a second with this.

A number of cities like Chicago are enacting strict regulations on Airbnb that require hosts and potential hosts to obtain prior permission from municipal governments before they can create an Airbnb account or a listing, and then that require hosts to delete their Airbnb listings if that city denies such a permission.

So what is Airbnb's stance on the attempt by municipal governments to regulate who can use your platform?

And what are you doing about it?

Well, I mean, this is something that's been going on for 10 years, including Chicago.

I have a long history working with the city of Chicago.

We're regulated in, I think, the largest 200 marks in the world.

I think we're regulated in just about every single one of them.

New York City is the primary one that we haven't had a major piece of regulation on the books.

Listen,

we're supportive of regulation.

I mean, not all regulation has to be onerous.

I used to say, like, I was one of the only tech CEOs that wanted to be regulated.

We were trying to pay taxes because that would legitimize us.

At the same time, I understand why cities have concerns with housing price that they want to stop Airbnbs.

And I said, well, you probably shouldn't have to stop all Airbnbs.

I started Airbnb with my friend because we couldn't afford to pay rent.

So I think it's really important that we don't have like a one-size-fits-all.

Like, it's either illegal or illegal.

So I used to say, like, well, why can't you limit it to primary homes to secondary homes if there's a housing crisis?

Why do you have to just limit it to 30 nights a year?

So we're in support of a regulation, but we want to be smart, nuanced regulation.

And I think a lot of times that requires a dialogue.

So we have, we work with our host and our cities all over the world to try to have face-to-face conversations.

And I find that usually when you like, it's hard to hate someone else up close.

And when you sit down with city officials, you have a reasonable dialogue, you realize that the other is not so other, that they're not as black and white as they said they are, and you can come up with a reasonable compromise solution.

And so that's what we've done.

I think we actually done that in the city of Chicago, and it will continue to evolve.

You had that experience in San Francisco.

One of the interesting things at the beginning of these two companies was watching Brian deal with the city of San Francisco and Travis Kalanik.

And it literally was like night and day.

Well, he was a secretary war of secretary of state.

Yes, that's right.

It was crazy.

Just before we get to Aria, I just have one.

I want to channel your mom.

Brian, when are you going to settle down?

You're four years old and single.

I asked the same question to Merritt, the CEO of the New York Times yesterday.

Can you talk a little bit about trying to balance your personal and your professional life?

I can't imagine you haven't been pretty much working nonstop for the last decade and a half.

It's a, man, that's the hardest question I've asked.

Yeah, I

no one ever told me, I mean, first of all, I'm like incredibly privileged, so I want to not sound like I'm complaining.

It's amazing.

But I thought the more successful I got, the more friends I'd have, the more people who surround me, and the less lonely I'd feel.

And I actually, some of the loneliest people I know are some of the most successful people I know.

There's something about success where the more success you are, the more people surround you.

The world gets smaller.

But your world gets smaller and it gets isolating.

And the pandemic...

it did something really good in my life and it did something that I wasn't expecting.

The good thing is it made me totally focus.

It made me grow up.

It made me make a lot of hard decisions.

And I think everybody made like 10 years of progress in a year.

But I worked 16 hours a day, seven days a week for probably 400, 450 days.

And one day I wake up, I'm almost 40 years old, living by myself with a dog, and I'm like, wow, on the one hand, I've done so much in my life professionally, more than I ever thought I would.

On the other hand, when I was a kid, I thought I have a family by now.

And so, you know, you do sometimes put things on hold.

And I, you know, once you, I turn forward and I'm like, okay, I have to really be intentional about what kind of life do I want to have.

I do want to eventually have a family, and that requires making the time to meet people.

It gets, you know, it's not natural when you're like, you know, like in my position to meet people in the same kind of way.

So it is something I'm actively thinking about.

And, you know, maybe that, maybe that's partly why I just felt the desire to get a little bit out of San Francisco as well.

Good idea.

I always tease Brian.

I text him sometimes.

It's like, how did I have two children in the pandemic and you have none yet?

I'm worse than his mom.

Last question of the comments.

Hey, Brian, Ari Horowitz here.

I also formerly a super host and currently automate lending to e-commerce businesses.

So we can talk about that if you want.

My question though is, you know, I've read data that people actually book their restaurant reservations before they book their lodging.

And we could really use a Yelp killer.

Any plans for that?

That was Google as the Yelp killer.

Go ahead.

Yeah, no plans on restaurant reservations.

I mean, that was one of the other things that we started getting into before the pandemic.

And, you know, I think one other lesson I've learned is companies can confuse their assets with their capabilities.

We have an asset.

We have a global brand.

brand, we have tons of traffic, we could fill a restaurant, but that doesn't mean we have the capability of understanding the restaurant business.

And I think it's very important for me that if we're going to get into something, I mean, you mentioned Apple, like, they don't get into something unless they reinvent it and they do it well.

And I like that approach.

I don't really want to go into something unless I feel like we can reinvent it, add a major contribution to it.

And if we can't, then I think someone else should do it.

And right now, you know, I don't, I think there could be a day we could do something there, but you know, probably not the first thing on the list right now.

So, how do you like Miami?

I actually like it a lot.

I mean I would say people seem really happy here.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't know if...

You're in Wynwood, right?

May I?

Yeah, yeah, I'm staying there, and it's, I love the city.

I think

it's not, I mean, I'm not saying it's like San Francisco when I first moved to San Francisco, but I remember coming to San Francisco in 2007, and there was just this excitement and optimism like the first day on a college campus.

Yeah.

And it feels like everyone's like new at college and they're happy to be there and they're just, it brings out the very best of mentalities.

And that's really good for tech because you need to be in a high trust environment and you need to be optimistic, right?

Like, because there's a fine line between being an entrepreneur and being unemployed.

I learned that when I was starting.

I said, I'm an entrepreneur.

My mom said, no, you're unemployed.

And so you need to have an environment of creative, supportive people that are optimistic.

And, you know,

the spirit is a lot lighter in Miami than it is in San Francisco, to say the least.

It's a little heavy there.

And heaviness is not great for entrepreneurs.

You know, you're kind of dragging an anvil behind you.

So it's really important that that lightness kind of comes back to cities if they want to have great ecosystems.

And where's your next city?

I don't know.

I'm definitely in the market for ideas.

So I haven't booked it yet, but I'm open to ideas.

Any ideas?

You've been to Nashville?

I just came from Nashville, actually.

All right.

Anybody?

Philly.

Go to LA.

Philly.

Philly.

Durham.

Charles.

Asheville.

Sydney.

Sydney.

Okay, that's going to be really hard on the time zone for me.

All right.

Yeah, all those are great ideas.

They're all fine.

Charlottesville.

Charlottesville.

Wow.

Yeah.

New Jersey.

There you go.

All right, I'm going to New Jersey.

I grew up in New Jersey.

Don't go to New Jersey.

Anyway, Brian, thank you so much.

Thank you, all of you.

Thank you, thank you.

We'll have more bonus content from Pivot MIA this week, so stay tuned.