Airbnb

“Now I think they rent more nights, ah, every night in New York than Hilton Hotel.”

“And in the same sense, Airbnb and Uber and Lyft are fundamentally enabled by smartphones. They may, they would not be possible without smartphones. They certainly wouldn't be possible without the internet, but they're not in The technology business. They're no…”

“10 years ago, Airbnb would have tried to sell software to Hilton, and that probably wouldn't really have worked at all.”

“Airbnb right now is doing about a million nights a day people staying in Airbnbs.”

“Airbnb this year is just blown by HomeAway in terms of total total user spend, or nights, user spend on the system.”

“A lot of companies now are taking, like, you know, Invitation Homes puts homes up on Airbnb if they think that that, That one or two day yield is going to beat the month of like the cheaper rent.”

“So, during the entire lifetimes of both of those companies, there's always been an excess of demand, and supply has always struggled to keep up.”

“10 years ago it would have taken you a hundred million dollars just to get the app out of the door. Today, you can get that out of the door for five.”

“And the interesting thing that is starting to happen with computing and with software now is it's pushing out of the technology industry. And so when you have, you know, when you have mobile everywhere, when you have payments being pulled in, when you look at …”

“It's the interaction that a user has that really, ah, reigns supreme here, and that's what each one of our companies actually owns is that touch point with the user. As far as they're concerned, you know, it's DigitalOcean, it's Airbnb you know, it's local, lo…”

“There's actually 4000 boats on Airbnb”

“Where one out of every five people in Brazil was staying in someone's home on Airbnb.”

“Now we've actually innovated on insurance policies and programs and so through Lloyds and others there's now sharing economy insurances, not only for homes, but for cars and other things out there that didn't exist even two years ago.”

“Believe it or not, there's 500 tree houses on Airbnb.”

“The open source components that, that make up a large part of the DCOS are used by a large number of companies today. Some of the biggest users out there are companies like Twitter Airbnb, HubSpot, eBay, and PayPal are using it for running things. Netflix is u…”

“We're not gonna end up with just Airbnb clones and Pinterest clones, right, eventually we'll start to get very interesting applications that are designed, you know, I'm a biologist, I'm working on cancer, this is purely for solving, for helping me solve cancer…”

“The other advantage Airbnb had, has, is the supply and the demand actually overlap, right? So, for example, I was first a customer of Airbnb, but then I was open to listing the place as well. So, only some marketplaces have that overlap effect, where you could…”

“The Airbnb is arguably supply constraint.”

“There's definitely companies in our portfolio like Brian Chesky at Airbnb that that care deeply about the interest of people that are joining Airbnb. Do they believe in the movement? Do they believe in the cause?”

“If they had to live by all the laws of, like they were a hotel, I mean, that doesn't make any sense, or Lyft, or Uber. Having to, you know, be under the regulatory confines of the old taxi laws. We would never have this competition innovation coming to consume…”

“The challenge is, if you go into the realm of money, and you say, you know what, KYC. Know your customer laws. AML. Anti-money laundering laws. Those are stupid and antiquated. We're not going to follow those. You go to jail. So the consequences are much, much…”

“People have told me that I was stupid because I chose the other way. I spent about nine months before showing the product to anyone, going through the FCA, then FSA regulation process and licensing. So we took the way, unlike Uber or Airbnb, to be a fully lice…”

“Consumers are gonna spend ten billion dollars this year on Airbnb for, you know, that couch and room in the, in your house.”

“And so, hotels have been disrupted now because Airbnb has changed the business model.”

“In terms of the future of ownership, I do think that basically the interface to every physical object will be, ah, ultimately digitized, in the sense that you won't own a car, you won't have, you know, you already don't have books, you have Kindle, right? And,…”

“So by the same argument, if we increase the fraction of the population who are owners, if we shift people away from being labor providers and towards being owners of tiny short-term accommodation businesses on Airbnb, of tiny retail operations on Etsy, of like…”

“Well, I think it's actually going to evolve to other stakeholders and not just the platforms also being part of the regulatory solution. For example, homeowner associations may become the entity that decides a building's policy towards Airbnb.”

“It almost took 36 months for them to build critical mass and see network effect.”

“I think for Airbnb, supply was really hard. So they were, they spent dollars right from the early days to acquire the host.”

“The first three years of Airbnb was a real slog, because it's a global marketplace and they were trying to build supply. At the same time, they were also trying to build demand, and they needed to sign up the homes. They needed to make sure that people were, p…”

“So you mentioned Airbnb before. They are now soliciting their host community to take in refugees on on an emergency basis.”

“The way we've been thinking about it and the way that we try to do it now is that the business leaders who are responsible for furthering the business also have goals that are associated with bugs, performance, like all the things, like systems science.”

“Some of the areas that we're exploring now is like, how can we, you know, find other embeddings in those images that can take the unstructured data of the image, turn it into something that can actually be tagged and labeled and then used in that ranking algor…”

“And one of the areas that we're experimenting with now is being able to use the reviews that were given on a place as a predictive signal in the matching model all the way back.”

“So, so one of the things that we did was we changed it so that we have a simultaneous reveal of the reviews. So both the host and the guest have two weeks to write a review, and then they're revealed at the same time.”

“We regularly open source our own internal technologies, particularly around data, like everything we do from managing data pipelines to how we do data analysis, we pushed out to open source.”

“We're going to get autonomous cars in the United States if the technology works out. I don't think the political power of the taxi cab industry is going to stop it, just like I don't think the hotels can stop Airbnb.”

“OpenTable and Airbnb are both typically much more episodic. Most people don't dine at fine dining restaurants with high frequency. Our median user dine twice a year on OpenTable, and so that has completely different marketing implications and user implications…”

“At eBay, we encourage our employees to trade, buy and sell on eBay. I'm on the board of Airbnb and Brian Chesky strongly encourages the employees to host or be a guest on the platform because it keeps you connected to the value and philosophy and, you know, th…”

“They've taken the kind of real estate line item you know, and softened that because it is in home. They've made it so that it's closer to the children and the families that they're actually serving because it is in home. So they've kind of restructured the bus…”

“Most of the huge winners are lightning strikes. Facebook was the second or third social network, but you know, no one was thinking social networks when they talk about a trillion dollar company. EBay was Collectibles online, weird Facebook, hot or not, you kno…”

“So, Airbnb, for example, built Superset, and they luckily open sourced it to the world, and now it's used by hundreds of companies.”

“So Facebook has Scuba. Google has Dremel, Rasta, and a whole bunch of others. Airbnb built Superset. Uber built Aries DB.”

“Lyft, Uber, they're doing it. Airbnb probably is going to do it. They're also going to have companies that have not even been internet companies starting to offer this.”

“Hospitality, services like Airbnb, messaging, things like WhatsApp, ride sharing, services like Lyft, you know, I think all of these, I believe we'll see over the next decade, all of these things kind of reinvented.”

“The way we came up with this was in 2012 to 2014, we analyzed the 200 fastest growing unicorns in the world and said, how are they doing this? How's Uber scaling so fast or Airbnb or Ted or others? And we found that all of these organizations had what we call …”

“What we find with exponential organizations, they found a way of dropping the cost of supply exponentially, right? So you think about Airbnb, the cost of adding a room to their inventory is near zero. If you're hired, you have to build a hotel. Same with Uber …”

“There's a live and work anywhere program from Airbnb, but the reason why that was developed for them was because their mission as a company was to find a place for everyone to feel like they belong. And so that worked really well for that organization.”

“Yeah, these are, you know, Ben Silverman and Brian Chesky, these guys are, like, top end technical founders in addition to being, you know, good designers, great designers.”