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- [00:00]
Tomer Cohen
It's the holiday season and to market, let's dial up one of our favorite interviews from Big Technology past a one on one with Airbnb CEO and co founder Brian Chesky. We cover so much ground in this conversation, including cleaning fees and Chesky's early thoughts on what will become his founder Mode leadership philosophy. Since 62% of you found this show this year, according to Spotify, this interview will be new to many of you and it's always a fun listen, even if you've heard it before, especially in this season of travel. So Ranjan and I will be back next Friday to pick up where we left off. And now here's Brian Chesky in person in our first ever best of Big Technology.
- [00:43]
Brian Chesky
Hey, I'm Michael Kovna, host of the Next Big Idea Daily. The show is a masterclass in better living from some of the smartest writers around. Every morning, Monday through Friday, we'll serve up a quick 10 minute lesson on how to strengthen your relationships, supercharge your creativity, boost your productivity, and more. Follow the Next Big Idea Daily wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:07]
Tomer Cohen
I'm Tomer Cohen, LinkedIn's chief product officer. In my new podcast, Building One, I interview some of the best product builders out there, people at the intersection of dreaming and building and learning. Together, you and I will learn from their experiences. If you're just as curious as I am, follow Building One wherever you listen and check out the conversation on LinkedIn. LinkedIn presents welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We are here in person with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky for a conversation about the latest with Airbnb tech in general and plenty more on the sharing economy. Brian, welcome to the show.
- [01:52]
Brian Chesky
Well, thank you for having me.
- [01:54]
Tomer Cohen
Okay, I'm going to start with this. So, on behalf of all Airbnb customers and on behalf of everyone who would like to see Airbnb succeed as a counterweight to the hotel industry, and on behalf of everything that is good in the world, please do away with the cleaning fee.
- [02:13]
Brian Chesky
Should we talk about the cleaning fees?
- [02:15]
Tomer Cohen
Yeah.
- [02:15]
Brian Chesky
Yeah. So obviously if I was a host, I probably would not charge a cleaning fee. And we thought about removing the cleaning fees just to give a little bit of background. You know, a home is different than a hotel. A hotel, they're going to have cleaners in the building they build. It's not like you don't pay a cleaning fee insofar as the cleaning fee is baked into the nightly rate. So what we want to do is move to an all inclusive pricing where if hosts have a fixed cost, they can amortize that fixed cost. So like, you know, if they, sometimes they actually do need a cleaner to like that they want to pay a living wage to that needs to show up and they might live half hour out of town, they have to come clean the property for the next person. But we really want that rate to be baked in the nightly rate. So a year ago last December, we created this toggle this that you could turn on total price display. When you turn the total price display on, it is essentially the way hotels price where any of their fixed costs are amortized across their nightly rate. And about a third of our guests turn on the price filter the other, the price toggle. The other thing we do is we rank now the very best value properties high. So if somebody has a property that is a kind of lower value, it's going to get down ranked in search results. I think it's a bit of a process that we have four and a half million hosts all over the world, and I think one of our secret sauces and the challenge of Airbnb is we got to try to make sure that we balance the needs of, you know, four and a half million hosts with hundreds of millions of guests all over the world. But the most important thing is I hear people that you want a simple service. What you see is what you're going to get. The price is a fair price. You don't have owners checkout chores when you leave. And that Airbnb is always a better value than a hotel because everybody was always founded as an affordable alternative. And that's something that we're totally focused on.
- [04:10]
Tomer Cohen
Right. I mean, I definitely understand that like you can, you can, you're moving to show what the full price is. And my question is, like, why even make it something where like you'll toggle between. Because you end up getting something where you start to. You start the search process. So I'll talk to you about a search process I did today. I was looking for a home to stay in an upstate New York, and it seemed nice and the price was $215. And then I go to the checkout page and it's, it's $150 cleaning fee, a $51 Airbnb service fee, $18 of tax. The total is $434.78. So what I end up, you know, I start and I'm interested and I have this moment of discovery and excitement to book the property. And by the time I get to that checkout page, I now see that the fees are going to actually be double that night that I was going to stay there. And I feel like that's just a common path for a lot of Airbnb customers. Now look, I have to give you some credit. It is really, really hard to manage a two sided marketplace in the hospitality industry, probably the hardest job in tech. But it just seems to me that everybody would be better served hosts as well if, if this was less of a surprise and more of baked in at the front.
- [05:22]
Brian Chesky
Yeah, let's, let's talk about that. So this is a primarily US phenomenon. In the Europe, for example, prices are regulated and you have to show the total price upfront. We would wish, we would love if they actually regulated pricing in the United States. But here's the when people come to Airbnb, if we only show upfront pricing and people aren't aware that the prices are upfront, they often are confused and they go to competitor websites that no one in our industry that I'm aware of, I think Marriott has a price toggle. It's not as prominent as us, but the other online travel platforms, Expedia, VRBO Booking, do not have upfront pricing. They have progressive pricing. And so people come to Airbnb and they wonder why have our prices change different? So that's where we got to this price toggle. We decided we're going to make it totally upfront. When you turn that toggle on is as if there are no service fees or there is no cleaning fee because it's completely baked in. Now we don't show it after taxes. Very few things you go to a store, do you see post tax? Most everything is, is pre tax. But we've even thought about moving the taco down the road to a post tax. There is a benefit to doing that, which is I have a budget of $1,000. What can I get for $1,000? So totally, I mean, our vision is to get to a place where we are showing total price display. We just think of this solution that we're in as a transitional state from the old progressive pricing display, which nearly every online travel site in the United States uses and they still use today. If you go to any other online travel site, you'll see there's a progressive pricing, especially for home rentals. But again, remember, hotels have resort fees and sometimes you don't even see those. But when you check in, they'll have resort fee. They'll ask, they'll ask. Put your credit card on file, they'll ask for a deposit. There's a lot of other things that they do when you check in. So we want to move to a world where we have upfront pricing. So I totally hear you, but I'd also just tell people like it's the first thing on the homepage. You turn that thing on, it will remember you. And when you come back in a month, that toggle will be showed, it will still be on and you will always have upfront pricing.
- [07:20]
Tomer Cohen
Is it fair for me to say that with hotels there are those resort fees but you don't typically get the $150 cleaning fee in the same way, like you're not.
- [07:30]
Brian Chesky
They're baked in. Yeah, yeah. So the hotels bake there. It's not. The hotels don't have fixed costs, but what hotels do is they bake them into the nightly rate. And so we noticed is like if a host does a one night stay versus a one week stay, they still have to have a fixed cost to clean the place and have a turnover. And so then if we don't have a cleaning fee then they'll stop accepting short reservations. So they even take a one night stay. They won't even do a two night stay. So there are some downstream consequences. I mean, believe me, we've really thought about a lot of different solutions. Every time you make a rule, that rule has these second and third, like secondhand third hand kind of consequences. So what we're trying to do is navigate the community towards total price display, trying to make sure the prices are affordable as possible. We've built total, we built like a lot of pricing and discounting tools. So we now have like 4 out of 5 hosts are using like these pricing tools. And the result of all this, here's the important point, point. At the end of the day, I think people want to see what they're going to get up front and they want to make sure it's a good value. We now are enforcing against owners checkout chores. People can leave reviews if they feel like they're paying like the wrong chores. We have a total price display that a third of people are turning on, but we encourage everyone to turn it on. We do intend to move towards an upfront pricing play display that is going to require an kind of transition and education process over time as people get used to the way we, we charge prices. And the other thing I'll just say is that prices today on Airbnb globally are actually lower. Well, this is as of July data compared to hotels, they're 1% below a year ago. And hotels, and this is according to costar, they're a site that does analysis of hotel and Airbnb prices, say that their prices are up 10%. And so I hope that over the course of next year, we're going to continue to make progress on affordability and compared to hotels, the Gulf, the gap is going to widen, not going to close.
- [09:25]
Tomer Cohen
Would you call for regulation in the US that would effectively make everybody display the upfront pricing.
- [09:32]
Brian Chesky
Not only do we call for regulation, we actually went to the White House with President Biden.
- [09:37]
Tomer Cohen
Where's going on there? Yeah, well, I wasn't asking this whole.
- [09:41]
Brian Chesky
I wasn't, I wasn't at the, I wasn't at the event, but our head of policy communications, Jake Carney, I think was there and they actually. President Biden, who has called out hotels for resort fees. We, we actually did an event. It was after we made the upfron pricing change and they kind of called us out as a good, a good standard. I mean, and we told them, I said, like, you know, you know, we think a model where you enforce against everyone fairly is probably good because what ends up happening is if you don't do that and one company does upfront price and the other doesn't, some customers are savvy enough to know that the prices are not apples to apples, but many people aren't. And so what ends up happening is a lot of people end up like, under a false pretense that we're more expensive. And we see this in the data. So we're, we're all in trying to, we're doing our very best to try to educate people that when you see a price in Airbnb, it's actually a different price. It's, it's treated differently than other competitor sites. And we need to actually have an education process tell people our prices aren't apples to apples. We're now baking fees in. They're not baking fees in. And so these have to be apples to apples. But I think a standard approach, like what they do in Australia or they do in Europe is great. It's, it's, it takes away all this and it trains the customer that every site they go to is going to treat price exactly the same way. It's when you go to different sites and there's a cognitive overload that they're treated differently that then creates a lot of confusion.
- [11:12]
Tomer Cohen
Yeah, I see. I mean, I see you're getting very passionate about this.
- [11:15]
Brian Chesky
Well, I'm in the Details. Let me just say this. Like, the other thing I'm like, pretty excited about is like, I actually stay in the details of the product. I don't know everything. I want to, like, not, I don't want to suggest I'm in the detail of every part of the product. But, you know, we're a pretty big company now. We're like, we were just, we were just added to the s and P500 index. So that's a pretty good, like, standard of what I would consider a big company, a Fortune 500 company. And I think most the CEOs of S&P 500 Fortune companies, I don't, I just get the impression, I think most of them aren't really in the details of their product. I think at some point these companies get so big that it's pretty typical that you get a little detached, that it's someone's job to listen to customers, but it's not your job. And I've always wanted to be the kind of company that felt more like a startup. I assume people listening can, can, can, can relate to this, which is when I started Airbnb, my two friends, we were the customers. And then I would meet the customers and it was easy because there weren't many of them. And I would go like, we go door to door, meeting host and we talk to guests and we say, what can we improve? And I would say, as we went on this hyper growth rocket ship from 2009 to 2019, over the 10 year period, I think we got further and further removed from the customer. And we went from us talking to customers to hiring people to talk to customers who, people who manage. People who manage. People who talk to customers. Now what I'm describing is almost every technology company in the world, that almost every large company has layers of management. And there's a detachment that emerges over time and happened to us between the leaders of the company and the customers and the feedback the customers give you and the roadmap that you have. And what we wanted to do over the last couple years is to be able to flatten that, to bridge that, to have our ear on the ground. And so what we did is we completely overhauled how we develop product development at Airbnb. I came to the conclusion that the classic way that we develop products, which is not that different than other tech companies, I mean, literally we hired people from other tech companies. They brought their way with them. Our way of doing things through 2019 was some average of the people I hired who brought their methodology from their Company. I picked some kind of general average that seemed to make everyone happy, and guess what? No one was really happy, especially the customer. And I got to this point where during the pandemic, we lose, like 80% of our business in eight weeks. We had to simplify the company. We had to get back to basics. And we realized, like, what we should do is we should just focus our core business, make it as lean as possible, as efficient as possible, and build something that people truly love. And let's start with building a blueprint. Like, one of the things we did is we developed a blueprint of the end to end experience for guests and hosts. We looked at the tent, like the key frames for every guest and every host, from finding an Airbnb to booking to staying. Then we mapped all the customer service complaints, every customer service contact, tens of millions of calls and emails, you know, a social media request. You know, we would do like thousands of town halls or like, we meet with tens of thousands of people in these, like, you know, online, like, kind of town halls where we get feedback. And through those, we're able to get a list of, like, issues, reasons that people are fresh of Airbnb. And I'm on social media and I engage quite a lot on Twitter. And we made a bunch of updates. I mean, last year, year we moved towards, you know, total price, display toggle. In May 3rd of this year, we announced 53 upgrades and features based on feedback directly from the community. By the that by the time the day was over, I went on Twitter, I guess now X and I said, okay, what else can we improve? We will prioritize your top suggestions. I think we got like a few thousand responses and I ended up having our team essentially tally the top eight responses. We made a list of eight in priority order of the most common to the least common. The good news is most of the eight things, we were already working on a couple of them, like adding a king bed filter. We weren't, but it was on our list and we're like, let's bump it up. And now today, why I'm here is. Yep. And now I'm here is because we have updates on five of them. And I wouldn't say we've totally resolved five of them because, like, you know, we want to build a perfect service and perfection is like an ideal you never quite get to. But we have some pretty big updates. Let's go to affordability. You know, we show that our prices are now down 1% year over year globally, while hotels are up 10%. We we showed an update that 260,000 people around the world have removed or lowered their cleaning fees.
- [15:44]
Tomer Cohen
Right. That's news that you're breaking today.
- [15:45]
Brian Chesky
100% that 2.8 million listings do not have a cleaning fee. 2.8 million listings is almost three times the inventory of Hilton or Marriott. Are properties on Airbnb globally that don't have a cleaning fee out of how many? Out of seven million.
- [16:00]
Tomer Cohen
Okay.
- [16:00]
Brian Chesky
And, and, and, and, and the average cleaning fee is typically less than 10% of the total reservation when there is a cleaning fee. But again, just remember that that's an average. When you type a city in Airbnb, the first homes you see are typically the best value and the ones with the highest ratings and the highest rating for value. So generally, you know, if a host wants to charge an exorbitant cleaning fee, they're going to get pushed down in search results. They're not going to get as many bookings. And I think that has created an incentive for hosts to lower their price and be more competitive. Because one of the things we realize is like, they're not our Airbnbs. They're not our homes, they're our host homes. So what we have to do is we have to build tools and incentives to bring the best out of them, to provide the best service for guests. And it's really this balancing of supply and demand. So that's one of the things we did. I mean, obviously you mentioned, you know, pet filter and king bed filter. Like, king bed is like this, like it's this tiny little thing. Everyone's been asking for it. We wanted to make sure we had good data because there's no point to have a king bed filters. No one's filled it out. So the first thing we did is we started collecting data. We got to a million king beds on Airbnb. I don't think there's a hotel chain in the world that has a million king beds, but we now do. So if you hit the King B filter, there's a million options around the world. We have a pet filter. We had 7 million guest arrivals last year where people travel with pets. So Airbnb, you know, it's really hard to travel and stay in a hotel with a pet. Airbnbs generally are pretty good. We have this new flexible date carousel. So one of the problems is people listening. They might relate to this. You type a city and Airbnb, you add dates, then you go to the map and you zoom in to some like, four block radius, and then you might be Doing this during a popular time when other people are booking. And what ends up happening is there's not as many good homes available. All the great homes you've now narrowed in, right? You've, like said, this place, this block, this date, and it really narrows in. And what we want to do is say, you know what? If you are flexible on one day, on either side your reservation, there's all these other homes. Now, you may not be flexible, but if you are, we want to show you. Because the vast majority of people who book an Airbnb are traveling for vacation, they have flexibility. So we have this new flexible day carousel. It's the equivalent of adding like a million properties, typically, to a search result, because it gives you a lot of options. So these are maybe the last thing I'll say is we have an update on verified listings, right?
- [18:19]
Tomer Cohen
Five countries that you're going to roll this out on.
- [18:21]
Brian Chesky
And let me. Let me just go into this. This is a challenging problem of the Internet. How do you know when you see information online if it's true, if it's verified? The word verification, verified has been a very, very hot topic. I know Twitter had their ver is.
- [18:35]
Tomer Cohen
Pay $8 and it's. Then it's true.
- [18:37]
Brian Chesky
Exactly. So we've been working really hard on verification, both verifying people's accounts and now verifying their properties. And let me just say a little word on each. Let me first start by saying nothing is completely like, airtight, any system you can get around. So the key is, can you get to a pretty high confidence level where it's very difficult to spoof or move around. We've now verified more than 100 million guest and host accounts. And 100% of guests and host who book or accept reservation must be have a verified identity on Airbnb. And we're making upgrades over the next six to nine months on our verification system will eventually have a name lock. So you verify a name will lock your name, and you'll need to get permission to change it. We'll make sure the photo is a photo of you. So that's on the identity side. On the verification of the property side, we're now verifying the house is a real house. The address you gave is your actual address, and you have access to the property, and you've proven that you have that property of access and entry to that property. And the reason why is to make sure it's not a fake listing, it's not a real house, but it's not. Not your. So you're spoofing that's a fraudulent listing or you're giving it inaccurate address. And then somebody shows up, they get an Uber to the wrong place and they're like, where's my property? So then we're trying to figure out how do we verify millions of properties and how do we do it in a way where we can feel like it's pretty rock solid as far as like very difficult to get around. But it's not so much paperwork, like you're mailing in documents and then no one does it. And then we have a system that people don't comply with and how do you do that? So we found a system and I think it's a pretty good system. I'm going to explain how it works. It uses some pretty advanced AI technology that we developed to get around a lot of owner's paperwork. Here's how it works. You take your app and we tell the host to open their app and go to their physical property. When they go to the physical property, we take the GPS coordinates of that property. So if you say I'll make up an address, 222 First Street. Just a made up address. If you say you live on 22 First street, you got to go to your property and we'll use the GPS coordinates to confirm you're actually at 222 First Street. Then the next thing we do is assuming you've already uploaded your photos on your Airbnb, we're going to ask you to take a live photo of the exterior and the interior from the app. Once we take a live photo of the exterior and interior of the app at those GPS coordinates, then we use a computer visioning AI model to now cross reference the exterior and interior photos that you took of your property with the ones were uploaded. This then creates a cross reference map. Are the address the same and are the photos the same? And that creates a confidence score. If that constant score gets to a certain threshold, then we will assume it's verified. And then as a final step, we'll often do a human review just to make sure the AI system was accurate. And if that happens, then the system is verified. So this is rolling out in US, France, UK, Australia and Canada. We're going to get it to 30 countries by the end next year. But once we get by next summer, the vast majority homes near me will be verified. Because a lot of our business is concentrated in big key countries. And that's not the only thing we're doing on verification. That's just address in the property. There's a lot More coming out this November around the quality, making sure the property is really high quality, so we'll have more.
- [21:57]
Tomer Cohen
What about penalizing hosts if they let somebody book and then right before their trip, they end up canceling because they 100, for instance, like, this happened to be in south by Southwest, where, like Austin was the hottest Airbnb market, I'm sure, in the US that week. You know, you book early, you lock it in, host cancels, makes that available, tells you, oh, there was a flood, terrible. So, so is there going to mean. Of course it's a real listing, it's just a host, you know, I guess it's their right. But trying to optimize profit, it just sucks for the renter.
- [22:24]
Brian Chesky
Yeah. First of all, let me just say that's a terrible experience. And like, I understand when people get frustrated, and I want people to feel like when they come to Airbnb, they have an amazing experience every single time. Right.
- [22:34]
Tomer Cohen
Because the hotel, they wouldn't do that.
- [22:36]
Brian Chesky
They would typically not do that. So how do we solve for that? Well, first of all, let me just go through a couple things. We don't pay the host until 24 hours after check in. So we're not like prepaying the host to incentivize them to cancel. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that we now have a much stronger enforcement system. So if a host cancels, that cancellation rate affects their search rank. If they cancel consistently, they're removed from the platform, they're suspended. But if they cancel, they're typically warned. And we also have like a financial penalty system for host if they cancel. And I think we also, again, we have some updates coming in November that it will, I think, take this to the next level. But the good news is the vast majority of our hosts keep their commitments and, and the reputation system generally works really well. We've. We've had more than 300 million people guest leave reviews on Airbnb homes. 70% of stays after they're completed, people leave a review. So we typically get signal on if somebody went through this. And the main principle we have is to make our information as transparent as possible. Right. You see, what we can't do is we can't inspect every property and manage them ourselves. If I designed an Air Airbnb, I can assure you it'd be amazing. It would be perfect. Every single time I try to make it as perfect as our software, but they're not our homes. There are homes that belong to the community of millions of people. So we need to do is create tools for hosts to be better economic incentives for them. And then the other thing is we need total transparency. So every time you see a property, you know, this is a great one, this is one we have, it's new, so we don't know you're taking a chance, or this is one that isn't as good. And if it's not as good, then that will should create some economic incentive where they have to charge less because they don't have as high quality. And if they're really bad, they're just going to be completely removed from the platform because we have minimum enforcement standards.
- [24:40]
Tomer Cohen
That's good. All right, so let me ask you this. We're talking a little bit about the product itself. Then we're going to get into a little bit more about how you build it. You've brought up some really interesting ideas already. So advertising, you've talked at a Morgan Stanley conference that it's absolutely on the horizon for you. I'm looking at SKIFT today and they say first year for Airbnb, the estimate you'll make $317 million and then that could grow to 1.25 billion by 2026 and 3.7 billion by the end of the decade. I mean, talk about high margin business. We've talked about this on the podcast. We were talking about it Friday, thinking about Instacart, Right. Which was a delivery business, business that actually makes its money on ads. And Amazon, by the way, retail business that's making its money on ads. How far along are you. Is there something that you.
- [25:24]
Brian Chesky
Yeah, yeah. People don't realize how big the advertising business on Amazon is like a, probably the most profitable segment of their business. So, yeah, let's, let's just talk about it for a second. Two of my executives are from Amazon, my CFO and my head of PR and policy and communications.
- [25:40]
Tomer Cohen
So you're, you're on board with hiring Amazon people? Because we've had this, this debate. They come in with the Amazon culture.
- [25:45]
Brian Chesky
Yeah, we, we've hired significantly more people from, say, Apple than Amazon. That model is a little close. Let's take a quick detour. I'll, I'll answer that question. I'll come to this in a second. So we hired, we hired from all over. The way we run the company is if we had to compare it to one tech company, it's closest to Apple. The reason it's closest to Apple is we're a functional organization. So for people listening, you probably know what a functional organization is. A Functional organization is how every startup is organ. There's an engineering department, a product department, a design department, a marketing, operations, finance, sales, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Almost every large company, almost all companies, Fortune 500 are no longer functional. They are either some matrix or mostly they're divisional. They basically have multiple engineering departments, they have multiple marketing departments, they have multiple product departments. Amazon's divisional. Apple is functional. So we are functional like Apple. Basically what that means we have experts in every single function, we're highly integrated. And the other thing is we are data informed, but more like Apple than Amazon. What we look at every day is the quality of our product. We obsess, we use intuition, we use our imagination. We are a very design led culture. We try to be the marriage of art and science. And we do these product releases twice a year which are these big events which are more akin to either how you release an operating system or how you release hardware. And, and we don't think you should build software exactly like hardware. But I think my view is that software should not be the other pendulum necessarily of hardware. I think the best is a marriage of the constraints of hardware with the freedom in data available of software. Because when something is totally decentralized and totally bottoms up and you divisionalize the company, what ends up happening is. Let me give you an analogy of a car. Let's say we're trying to make a car and we have one team doing endless AB experiments of the tires. Now those tires have to fit on the wheels, but the wheel teams doing their own AB experiments and they don't fit. And now they fit. But now we need a better car body to fit around the wheels. But then that makes the car heavier. I'm just kind of using this example. Now we need like a stronger battery, but now that battery needs to be manufactured. That's going to create a new assembly line. That assembly line has to be capitalized. Now we got to go Wall Street. The point is that to make really big changes to your application, your service, it often requires the entire company to row in one direction. It requires you to have a single vision, not many small visions, because then you hit local maximums. It's important that you have a product story that you know how to tell. That it's not just enough to ship the product, it's that you have to tell the story and people have to know the product exists. You have to have a distribution in mind when you ship the product. So in these ways we are probably a little closer to the Apple model. And I've said this publicly, we have a product marketing function and, and most companies don't when they say product marketing. They have an outbound function. We have this inbound, outbound. So that's the whole thing. But let's go back to Amazon because we do have some Amazon people and I do try to take the best of every company and then we have some of our own things, only we do. But one of the things that Jeff Bezos said, and I really like it, and he was very smart about investing, is Jeff Bezos said you should focus on the most perishable opportunities first. So what that means is there's all these things you could do, but if you can do something later, don't do it now. If there's something if you don't do now, you can't do later. And we felt like the most perishable opportunities were around fixing our service because if people are complaining, the last thing they want is an ad platform. They want the service improved. And so, and also travel is finally recovering in a post pandemic world. So there's a lot of market share available. So we want to expand our service, recruit as many hosts as possible and perfect our core service. And that's the most perishable opportunity. The bigger we get and the stronger ecosystem gets, the more potential value an ad platform has down the road. So we're not rushing into anything on ad platform. We do think there would be a really great system we could build for host where they could, you know, like there's a lot of, you know, Amazon, Etsy, ebay, I think Alibaba, I mean our travel competitors, almost all of them have some sort of advertising. My general thing though, and this comes back to my, my, my orientation is I want to make sure we have a great user experience and I think I want to make sure the ads don't get in the way of a good user experience or become a tax and user experience. And so that means that we're just going to go into this a little bit slower and more cautiously. But you're right, right. It is a billion dollar plus revenue opportunity of very high margin that's totally available to this platform. And the bigger we get, the more valuable that opportunity is.
- [30:39]
Tomer Cohen
Brian Chesky is here with us. He is the CEO of Airbnb. We've been talking a lot about the Airbnb product, a little bit more about how product is built inside the company. And yeah, we're here in New York City, so we're going to touch on the New York Stuff right after the break. I'm Tomer Cohen, LinkedIn's chief product officer. If you're just as curious as I am about the way things are built, the insight behind what it takes to create world renowned products, then join me for my new podcast, Building One. Together we'll get to learn from leaders around the world, people with diverse backgrounds across multiple industries. Each will share insights into their craft. So listen and follow my new show Building One on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and check out the conversation on LinkedIn. It's going to be great. And we're back here with Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb. Brian, great to be here with you. You mentioned before the break a little bit about how you structure your organization. You touched on the product marketing function. You know, when you spoke about that at a Figma conference a little bit back, people said, all right, Airbnb is done with product managers. Lenny Rachinsky, former Airbnb, who has a very popular substack, started to explain that this was less about eliminating product management and more about shifting the company to be more vision oriented. Big splashy launches and an Apple style approach to product, which you just explained. So I text Lenny, hey, what do you want to know from Brian? He says, ask him how the move away from traditional product management is going and what he's learned making the shift. So, you know what? What?
- [32:16]
Brian Chesky
Well, first of all, yeah, let me first give a shout out to Lenny. Lenny worked for me for a number of years. He came via acquisition called Local Mine and he was one of the best product managers we had and he's really amazing and I've listened to some of his episodes on his podcasts and so I just want to give him a shout out. He's really great. So before I say how it's going, let me just recap a couple things and clarify a couple things. I went on Figma and I said something and it was a fire story. Yeah. Because it was tweeted a little out of context. So I said we got rid of the classic product management function and that people assumed I meant I got rid of all the product managers. I didn't. What I meant was we replaced it with a product marketing function. So let me, let me just explain how it's a little bit different. In a typical tech company, you have what they usually refer to as three legs of stool. You have engineering, you have design, and you have product management. And product management is sometimes shortened just to call it be called product. And at a lot of Companies, some companies, they're equal legs of stool at A lot of companies design reports to product and that some companies design engineering for reports the product, but very rarely does product report design. So, so, so there's, there's different models. Oftentimes product is what we might only call an inbound function. Their job is to build software and ship it. Their job isn't always to figure out how to market the features that they built that, you know, in fact, I think it's a weakness in a lot of modern software companies that people don't think about who is this for? They don't have a lot of like, like what, what Product marketing. Airbnb is inbound and outbound. It's product management plus product marketing. Product management is the building of the software. Product marketing is deciding what to build and to figure out how you're going to talk about the product and how you're going to distribute the story to the customer so they know about the benefits of the product. What's happened in Silicon Valley is, I believe it's become a very inbound function. And so you end up in the situation where people don't conceive of at a time what the story of the product is before they build it. And if you build a product and no one knows about it, was it worth building? Probably not. I also find that if you think about the story of the product as you're building, it affects how you're building it. It often makes the product simpler. You know, you're not going to build something if you don't know how to talk about it coherently. And I think having a story of the product along the way is a really good way to govern making a really great simple product. We also took a lot of.
- [34:51]
Tomer Cohen
So does that mean that that product mark, like the marketing comes first and then everything flows from there. Like this is how you operate that. So how does that work function?
- [35:00]
Brian Chesky
The story comes first.
- [35:01]
Tomer Cohen
So sounds Amazon like honestly a little different.
- [35:05]
Brian Chesky
Amazon uses press releases. We don't do, we don't do press releases. The problem with, we found with the Amazon style press release where they write a press release ahead of time is, okay, let's take the iPhone. What would the press release have been for the iPhone? The problem is like you don't know the press releases when you start the project because you learn what the project is as you start working on it. And so, so that press release is really good for efficiency type things like Amazon, where it's like half off or we're gonna, it's gonna now appear in a day. But for a lot of these features, you discover the product along the way. So often starts with insight. It starts with a fuzzy story. It might start with a rough keynote. But the key is the story is an evolving thing that you discover as you tell the product. But it often might start with an insight. So for example, Airbnb rooms We launched, we launched a refresh of Airbnb rooms. They were used to be called private rooms. And we insight that a lot of people were nervous about staying in a house of other host because they didn't know who the host was. And it was like just kind of sketchy. And so we developed this idea of a host passport, this new type of profile that they would fill out and you'd be able to have this really cool preview where the booklet would open up. You'd be able to get a sense of who they are. And then we also started doing research about that people were nervous about like, well, is the kitchen shared and is this bathroom my bathroom? And who's going to be living with me and are they there with their family? And so a lot of product marketing. Here are the things the product manager missing. 1. Good consumer insights. Sometimes product managers do this. Sometimes they have a quote research function, sometimes they put research and design. But a lot of times they just don't have great consumer insights. Like, like who, who is the customer? What are we solving? What are they saying? Really, really good customer insights. A lot of product managers do they just look at data. They look at site data in usage we might call engagement. And engagement data is important, but it's only part of the story. What does. So that's the first thing. The second thing is you tell a story. It's an evolving story. The third thing is distribution. How you can get that story out. Having a great story and no one hearing your story. It's like if you ship a product and no one uses it, is it because it wasn't good product or because no one knew that you shipped the product?
- [37:18]
Tomer Cohen
Depends who you ask.
- [37:19]
Brian Chesky
Depends who you ask. But it's often a combination. But so, so product and marketing should be connected. I always feel like you can tell the health of an organization by seeing how close engineering and marketing are. If you want to go into a just see how well the engineers and marketers get along. And by the way, I bet you have many companies don't even know each other. They may never talk to each other and that's red flag because you really want the product engine of the company and the storytelling engine. The company, I think, to be working in lockstep. If they're disconnected, that's not good for anyone. So we basically created this product marketing function. We have fewer people. Absolute. We basically had kept our headcount flat. We feel like most companies probably have too many product managers. So it's a leaner function. The most senior people have a title called Product Market Marketing. The Junior product marketers, I think they do have a product management title, but they're junior product marketers. We just took the title, the title convention from Apple. But we also have a very robust program management function, and a lot of companies don't. They have product managers doing program management, and we also have technical program managers. So the people making sure everything is on schedule and the nitty gritty aren't product managers, they're program managers. The product managers are ultimately. The product marketers are ultimately responsible, responsible for delivering the product, but they are working in lockstep with the program managers. And then the other thing is the engineers and designers probably have a little more power because at most companies, if the product manager is like the CEO of the product, they're telling the designer, here's your specs, here's what you're doing. Engineers, here's a schedule. Here's the build. Build on the schedule. In this case, the product marketers aren't in charge. They're just like the long pole in the tent. And so all of this is like an orchestra. Now, how do you make sure decisions get made, Decisions get made from me and the executive team. I review all of the work every week, every two weeks, every four weeks, every 12 weeks. There's a schedule. We call it CEO reviews. And I review the work and everything is works on a release cycle. So we do releases every May and every November. I know what we're shipping, typically as much as 18 months out. Some things, you know, there's a long horizon. So we're working on stuff now for next November, and. And we do these reviews. I try to make sure the work is really, really well enforced. It's already been reviewed by other people. And you'll just keep doing these iterations until you have something you're really proud of.
- [39:41]
Tomer Cohen
Do you inject ideas, like, into this process? Is that sort of what the idea of asking people what they want on Airbnb, on Twitter was? Was basically like you're sitting there, you're at like the kind of the focal point of all this stuff, and they're looking to you for guidance.
- [39:54]
Brian Chesky
So, yeah, I want to be Clear that like the majority ideas and majority insights do not come from me, but I always bring something to the. We have a really rigorous blueprint. So I want to say one other thing. We created, we created this thing called the Airbnb Community Blueprint where we blueprinted the end to end experience for every guest and host. Then we mapped every single screen of the site in the journey, every pixel, every user policy, every customer contact and we looked at every complaint and we used that blueprint to prioritize what we want to focus on. And then what I do is every six months we do a top down prioritization. So we basically, you know how companies have an annual plan and they tip typically have an annual planning process starts in September, ends in November. So we don't do that. We do have like an annual budget but it's like, you know, very, very short. What we do is we have a rolling two year plan and we update it every six months. And so we do a big leadership off site, like a two day off site. We just did one last week and we review all the priorities in the company over the next two years. I'd like to even get out three years because the problem with the plan is it's too short. One year is too short and you only update it every year. So in November you've got to imagine everything that's going to happen for a year. So all I, I, this is what's unique. I hold the roadmap, not the head of product. So I make all final product decisions. Now I'm not making every decision unilaterally. I'm like an editor. So most things are recommendations and I'm changing things 5 to 10% because my job is to like balance every stakeholder inside the company because it's functional, there's no general manager managers and I basically keep a living roadmap document that is kept updated with a two year horizon. So anyways, that's a little bit how it's, how it's different now I guess that's a really long winded explanation and I don't even know if I fully explained it. But now let's talk about how it's working. I have found that this system is far superior for Airbnb. Whether this is a good system for other companies I'm not certain yet. I'm certain that other companies should try this. Not everyone, but some companies should. I think that if you're really like care a lot about design, you care a lot about craft, you care a lot about the core technical talent of the company. And if, if you are a company where the CEO wants to be fairly hands on, if the CEO has a pretty good product sensibility, if you are really just one app and one brand and you don't want to do lots of disparate things, then I would argue to be as integrated as possible. If you want to do lots of disparate things, like if we wanted to have like a clothing line and a fast food line and a jet turbine line, then this integrated model would be so much context switching. And the head of engineering for software is not the kind of head engineering you need for a jet turbine. So if your business is going to do lots of disparate things, then this is not a good model. The Amazon model is good. If your business is going to be really integrated and you're like Apple and you're not going to do that many different things, you're going to be really focused, then as integrated the models possible is great. When I told people here's, here's a counter, I'll give you some count something counterintuitive. When I told people about this model, you know what the biggest criticism was? They said this is going to be, you're going to be a huge bottleneck. Like you, the CEO in this model is going to be a huge bottleneck and everything's going to be slower and you're not going to ship as much. What I would say is what we found is we've shipped more than we ever have. We've shipped by Last count, over 300, 350 upgrades, new features since we moved to this model. The velocity is somewhere between 2 and 5x greater than it was before. It might even be greater. The quality of the product is better. And it's just like I think that people think like when a CEO reviews work, it slows it down. In the end it actually speeds it up. The more review work, the faster people work. Because if people are blocked or there's a bottleneck, if you're reviewing work frequently, you will be able to. I see those bottlenecks. We never, we've. I've, I've not encountered in the last two years a situation where some person in one department refused to collaborate with someone in some other part of the department or they like didn't prioritize their work. That happens all the time at big companies. At Airbnb, if that were to happen, a project would be stalled. I'd see it in a review and I'd be like, what's going on? Why is this blocked, and then we'd immediately elevate the situation. So I think this really enforces the right kind of pace. I didn't invent this model. Walt Disney did things this way, Steve Jobs did things this way, and Elon in his own way, although it's a little less like. It's a little more, maybe chaotic. Yeah, a little bit. But he does it in a certain way. Now, what most of them have in common is they involve hardware or production. So what's new is most people haven't applied this to software. The basic idea is, is we have ubiquitous data. Just give people a mission, don't tell them what to do, don't tell them how to do it, and make them free of constraints and give them autonomy. And that's the classic conventional wisdom of software development. And what I found is giving lots of autonomy seems good in the short run, but it's very stifling to empowerment in the long run. Because what ends up happening is you have like 10 teams going in 10 different directions. None of them have enough resources. So they now advocate during budgeting season to get many more resources. They get more and more controlled. They're always underutilized. They never have the weight of the company behind them. There's uneven standards across the divisions. They're using different technology stacks, they're putting out different messages, and they're often inadvertently, sometimes work in the same projects, conflicting each other. What ends up happening is you end up getting bureaucracy, you sometimes get politics, and you often get basically chaos. And out of all those things sometimes comes complacency.
- [45:44]
Tomer Cohen
Right.
- [45:45]
Brian Chesky
If a CEO doesn't know what's going on, how could he hold anyone accountable? And when everything is integrated in one system, then you suddenly have a lot more information about and you have more accountability. People want accountability. Accountability can sound stifling, but actually, do you want to work at a company where people don't know the difference between who's doing a good job and bad job? That's horrible. So someone can just do, like, nothing or be toxic, and no one knows the difference. Difference. Somebody can be a high performer and it doesn't matter. That would be a world where you become completely nihilistic. Nothing would matter. And so we want to be the opposite of complacent and nihilistic, where great people are noticed and rewarded and held onto and attrition is down, productivity is up. The downside is we are not able to do lots of disparate things. Very, very disparate things. Doesn't mean we can't do a lot of things, but we can't do things that are disconnected. So if some opportunity were to emerge, merge, that has nothing to do with travel or Airbnb, it might be a great business, and we won't go into it because it may compromise our model, because it would require another division. And that tax is not worth it for the way we run the company. So everything you do has a pro and a con. We've decided to optimize for integration. Optimized integration is good, so long as you don't want to do lots of disintegrated things.
- [47:02]
Tomer Cohen
We have a few minutes left. I want to talk to you about something that you've been talking about a lot, which is low loneliness and how you're trying to connect people. And Airbnb can be a solution for some of the loneliness we see in the world. I just want to present the other argument. You know that, and see what you think about it. So, you know, we've been moving to more and more lonely society, a less engaged society, and a lot of that is due to the dissolution of our civic society, where we need stronger, where we've lost what really were strong neighborhoods and strong communities. Now, I was looking at your tweet, asking for ideas is for the product. And here's one from a woman named Desi Ivanova. It's not really an idea. It's more of a complaint. I'm sure you're sick of the. The complaints anymore, but I want to pose it to you and see what you think. So she says Airbnb is ruining. Ruining the communal feel of the neighborhood I live in, which is a very residential area. Tourists come in for a couple of days and leave. So, personally, I think a top priority should be a policy that restricts the number of. Of Airbnbs. I mean, basically, it is that the. The core of the argument is, is it creates more morality in communities as opposed to roots. What do you think about that and how does that fit into your.
- [48:07]
Brian Chesky
Well, I would just tell. I would.
- [48:09]
Tomer Cohen
Loneliness.
- [48:11]
Brian Chesky
I. Okay, there's a couple things going on here. Let's start with the neighborhood, and let's then zoom out to loneliness. I think they're just distinct topics. Okay, so on the neighborhood topic, we want to strengthen the communities we're in. We don't want to detract from the communities. I do not think communities should be totally transient. And I think it really depends on the nature of every community. Community. The way we've tried to solve this is not for us to impose caps on Cities, but work with cities and let them impose their own restrictions. So many cities, so if you take the top 200 markets in the world, 80% of them have a law on the book. In our jurisdictions, there's some regulation in place. The regulations they usually put in place have a registration system. The registration system will often provide like a nice cap, like you're allowed to host six months a year, 120, 20 days a year. You need to get this license, this registration. And we' learned is that a one size fits all imposition that we use on every city doesn't work because some cities like, live and die by tourism. They need it. Some cities have too many tourists. And so we think is number one principle is treat every city personally, comply with local laws, regulations, and really make sure that cities have the right jurisdiction. Right, right solution for them. The second thing is, I don't like there is this concept of over tourism in. Over tourism is a very real thing, but over tourism isn't too many people in the world traveling over tourism, I believe, is too many people going to the same place at the same time. I remember a number of years ago I went to Paris and I met with the minister, I think of tourism, and he said to me something like, there's too many people visiting Paris, but there's not a lot of people visiting park places in France outside of Paris. And I thought, I just think to myself, well, a lot of people visit Paris because they've read a, seen a movie of Paris. They probably couldn't name you a French town outside of Paris that a lot of Americans couldn't name like, like they couldn't name as or. Or Provence or something, but they can tell you Paris. And so we all tend to gravitate. Just like we gravitate celebrities, we gravitate to iconic destinations. One of the things I'd love to do with Airbnb is redistribute travel. Instead of having everyone go to the same cities in the same districts, spread people out as many places as possible. So one of the things we're seeing is that we're seeing a lot of what we call travel redistribution, people traveling to more locations than flooding the same zones in New York City here. Well, New York City's a unique example. Let's get to that in a second. But let me fully answer this. Everyone in New York City pretty much stays. 85% of people, I think, stay in a hotel district. So not staying in different neighborhoods, they're staying in one crowded hotel district. And then they're patroning multinational corporations and restaurants in that hotel district. I think the best model would be to diffuse travel across as many destinations as possible and to get people to stay longer. Airbnb, you know, nearly half our business people stay for longer than a week and a fifth of our business is longer than a month. So this is really what we're trying to do. So I guess I just recap by saying we try to comply the local laws and regulations. Every city wants to be treated differently. The way cities generally solve this is by having registration systems. They can govern the amount activity in their system by setting up systems that we will comply with. We want to diffuse travel, we want people to stay longer. But yes, you're right, I'm going to be self critical. Like we do not want to create a museum ification of cities. This is often why we've worked with cities to try to find sensible regulation to work for them. At the same time, a city that has no outsiders is not healthy either. A completely insular society where no one from outside comes in is generally not good for the economy. I'm not even sure it's good socially to never have an outside in your community. Those are typically closed off communities. So we think the best societies are the ones that have the right mix of locals and travelers. And generally there's always more locals and travelers, but there's this really good mix. Now we'll just do quick loneliness and we can talk about New York. I think that loneliness, first of all is much bigger than Airbnb. Loneliness has been rising since I think like World War II. There's certainly.
- [52:13]
Tomer Cohen
I'm not blaming Airbnb.
- [52:14]
Brian Chesky
Yeah, yeah. And, and well, well, I mean, we're much more part of the solution to the problem. Let's just start with that. But let's go into why loneliness has been rising certainly in the last few decades. There's a bunch of reasons potentially why there is an erosion of physical communities. But it's mostly people aren't going to as many physical places. They're not. The mall is now Amazon, you know, the theater is now Netflix. The office for many people is now Zoom. And the bank is now like online banking. And not as many people go to church. And fewer people live with their families or their extended family. And they're not going to as many physical community spaces. None of these individual things is bad. Like, I think there's been a generally increase in standard of living that's been really, really great. But the aggregate is. I think we're designing a system where modern life is Starting to make us a little bit lonely. And I've identified with this think that like there's a lot of great things about society, but we have to be very careful that technology often wants to find the the shortest point between A and B. And human connection is often very inefficient. So if we're not careful, we can design solutions that remove people from the equation. And each thing seems like a step forward for humanity. But when you take a larger step back, it's almost like we're on the path to recreating Wall E where we're in these like self driving podcasts, pods, we're staring at screens all day and we're a little bit disconnected from those around us. So what is the solution? There's probably going to be a lot of solutions. I think the one of the big solutions is just get people to spend time in the physical world, not just digitally, but in the physical world with others. I don't think social media is per se good or bad. If social media is a destination for your social interaction, it's probably not good for loneliness. If social media is a way station to connect you to people that you eventually develop real world relationships is probably good. The same thing with Airbnb. Are we a gateway to physical interactions? And one of the things that could help is getting more people to travel with their friends and family. So for example, I have college friends. We live in different parts of the country. I don't see them except for a couple. Once or twice a year we do an annual trip and we stay in Airbnbs because we choose to stay in Airbnbs. Because if we stay in, I mean, beyond the fact that I'm a founder, if we stay in a hotel, we'd have to be in four different rooms. Instead we can be in one house, sit around the pool, hang out. And the reason we travel is because we all live in different places. Instead of all of us going to one person's house and then that person's the burden, hosting all of us, we can all go one place. That's just one small example. So I would love for Airbnb to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. And I think the main way we can be part of solution is we can encourage more people to travel with their friends, their family, their loved ones. And we also can use Airbnb as a way to map, match people in the physical world, both for travel experiences and maybe beyond travel experiences. And I think that's something we can really do. We also, by the way when they do travel, we would like people to feel less transient. Like they're, they have a context in the community. A context, a neighborhood that they're hosted, that the host gives them the context, the type of place they are in, and that we can connect them to the local spots so they can feel like they can participate in the daily life of locals.
- [55:24]
Tomer Cohen
And that plays into the New York question. Let me just heat up because this can be the last question. We're running out of time. I think some of the backlash has been that people stop seeing Airbnb is like, you go, you rent a room, you're part of a community, and that person kind of tells you about the neighborhood and shows you around. And more like people see this as a good investment opportunity. They buy seven apartments, they rent them out whenever they can, and they sort of hog some of the neighborhood real estate. And that's what Airbnb has become to a lot of people. And hence this crackdown in New York. There's something like 77% of the short term rentals have been taken off the markets and New York had had this clamp down. We're, we're right. I mean, I started in New York City government right down the block from the old office that I used to work at at New York City's Economic Development Corporation. We were always protect. We wanted more tech to come into the city. So it's kind of interesting to be sitting here with you now. But I'm kind of curious in, in this context. So I am curious what you think about, about the back, like the, the background that sort of led to this and what's happening in New York right now.
- [56:19]
Brian Chesky
I think it's, I think it's a hugely disappointment. Disappointing. It's a cautionary tale for New York and it's a very bad decision and I think they're going to come to regret it. And it's not popular. Let's talk about why. First of all, the statement you said that 77% of housing stay off the market is not true. You don't know that. The fact, the fact, the, the vast majority is that people see entire homes on Airbnb.
- [56:39]
Tomer Cohen
No, no, that's, that's, that's the Airbnb short term rentals.
- [56:42]
Brian Chesky
No, no, I'm saying, I'm saying, I'm.
- [56:44]
Tomer Cohen
Saying, I'm not talking about apartment.
- [56:46]
Brian Chesky
Okay.
- [56:46]
Tomer Cohen
I'm talking about airbnb. Since, since this is according to Skift.
- [56:49]
Brian Chesky
Okay, you're talking about been delisted.
- [56:51]
Tomer Cohen
Your, your inventory. The Airbnb Inventory is what has been delisted since.
- [56:56]
Brian Chesky
Okay, sorry. So, yeah, a lot of it's going to be affected. It's, it's going through a whole process where properties have to be registered. But the big challenge here is that a lot of our hosts were everyday people. People. I think there was this like, point of this thought that like a lot of people were professional real estate prospectors. The way other cities have dealt with this and every city's chosen to be, to be a little bit different is that there they could have set up a registration system, set up a registration system that has a nights cap. You're allowed to host X amount of nights a year. You can prove ownership or residency in that area. We will collect or hotels tax. And I think that what ended up happening was these were laws that were like passed. I mean there was an original law passed in 2010. There was another like registration law that was passed under the plasma administration. And it's just, you know, at this point, we're at this point where obviously tens of thousands of hosts won't be able to travel or be able to host. And then another consequence is this going to be that like, if people are now going to travel to New York City city, there will obviously be fewer Airbnbs. They're not going to build enough corresponding hotel rooms in the near term. And so what's going to happen is you're going to have more demand, less supply, and probably prices will go up. So I do think this was, this could have been a win win. There, there was. I really wish there was a way we could have worked together where we could have found a system that could have worked for everyone. We could have collected remitted hotel tax. We could have had a, like a registration system that worked for everyone. I mean, we ultimately want to exist in cities in a way that works for them. And if in and. But we don't want to do business if we're not welcome. And so obviously you know that this is how it's played out. But I think that, you know, the thing about Every is we're 100,000 cities, so you get to see like a hundred thousand different applications of how airbnb works. And I think there's probably some better examples of Airbnb and other cities, but we'll play it by year. I'm, I'm, I'm optimistic in the long run. I'm optimistic that at some point in the future we maybe all be able to come back to the table and people will realize, wait, I can use Airbnb in most other cities in the world, there's gotta be a workable solution for Airbnb. And maybe the question shouldn't be, should Airbnb exist? But maybe the question should be, how should Airbnb exist? Well, how should it exist in a way that helps your city? And, you know, right now, the way we existed for stays of longer than 30 days and the way we exist in New York is to book an Airbnb experience. You. And we have these like, three hour walking tours or cooking classes or, you know, music experiences. But I'm, I'm optimistic that at some point down the road there will be a way to work together, but probably not anytime soon. You know, we're going to, we're. This has been a kind of a long, drawn out process. I feel, I feel, I really do feel for the host who, you know, obviously a lot of them told us that they need this income, income to be able to pay their rent or their mortgage. And obviously they're going to have to find some other supplementary income to be able to do this. So. But, you know, we, we're always willing to, you know, kind of try to find a workable solution with cities.
- [60:13]
Tomer Cohen
You know, Brian, one of the questions that people had for me that they wanted me to ask you is, you know, you're one of the few CEOs who's been around more than decades still running the company, and they wanted to know why you're still doing it and how long you're going to stay. But I don't even need to ask that too, because hearing you speak about the, this business and hearing you speak about the company is, makes it eminently clear. So I appreciate you coming here.
- [60:33]
Brian Chesky
Thank you.
- [60:34]
Tomer Cohen
Passionate about the business, engaging with the community, engaging with our audience. And, you know, not everybody does that. And you're out there talking about what Airbnb is about and where it's going. I appreciate you doing it, appreciate you being here and hope we can do it again soon.
- [60:47]
Brian Chesky
Thank you very much.
- [60:48]
Tomer Cohen
All right, thank you, Brian. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Thank you, Nick Watney, for handling the audio LinkedIn, for having me as part of your podcast network, and all of you for listening. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.