Airbnb

“It's not easy, but it's fairly simple. They can turn very passionate local experiences into thriving businesses. If I had to guess, you can make many hundreds of thousands of dollars a year doing experiences based off of history and food just like this.”

“So we track the performance of every single listing on Airbnb, Vrbo, booking.com around the world.”

“And we've seen that hiring a professional manager can generate higher returns than managing yourself. You're gonna have a full-time revenue manager. You're gonna have someone that is generating direct bookings. Not having to pay the fees to Airbnb and Vrbo for…”

“The general rule of thumb is you don't want to be too dependent on any one channel. So I don't want, I'm more than 60% of my revenue coming through any one spot, because then I'm dependent on them, right? If I get a bad review and Airbnb delist me, like that's…”

“So if you're getting going and you don't, and my suggestion is, is you do lower your prices at the beginning, you get five, 10 reviews. On Airbnb, Vrbo that's going, and with the algorithm, if you're getting booked, you're getting reviews, they're positive rev…”

“They'll only make maybe like, all right, I want to drive direct booking. So I'm only going to make the next three months available on Airbnb and everything outside of that are going to block off. Like that is going to hurt you on the algorithm. So making sure …”

“A lot of times they'll get the cathodic nature of complaining out to you through that text message and then not do it through the review.”

“Brian Chesky got kind of roasted, but I thought it was an insightful point when he said, it's not clear to him that like the right interface for hotel booking is a chat interface. And he was kind of called a Luddite and this and that, but like, I think he was …”

“So many breakthroughs rely on a little bit of pushing the boundaries. I mean, Uber did with taxi regulation. Airbnb did with regulation. You're right. Polymarket did in terms of how they're regulated. So I'm actually going to get off my high horse and say you …”

“When you look at our total amount of transactions, our room night for alternative accommodation, you see that we are approximately three quarters the size of Airbnb, and that's just our alternative accommodation area, the whole much bigger hotel business on to…”

“For the last five years, we've grown faster than Airbnb in the alternative accommodation area. We do like to like. We've been growing faster the last five years.”

“Early last year, Joe Gabbia, founder of Airbnb and current US chief design officer recruited a handful of his most trusted early Airbnb engineers to embed at the Office of Personnel Management to solve the retirement paper problem.”

“At one point, Airbnb, when they were launching experiences had, their original idea was that you'd have, like, Michael Minna come cook in your home, and all these amazing experiences, and I said to Brian Chesky, you know, I don't want Michael Minna, with all d…”

“Pick a market with weak competition. Like ideally not competition that's other big tech companies or other AI labs. Like don't pick a market with Weak competition or analog competition. For example, Uber competed with taxi companies, analog competition, not a …”

“The problem with that is if you look at all the companies that, that have done that, so the Airbnbs and others that they basically, you know, that's great for your private market investors. That's great for the VCs. That's great for any of the founders that ar…”

“We've accelerated growth for the first time since the pandemic. We grew 10% last year in revenue and this quarter we announced that revenue was 18%. So from 10 to 18%, which is a pretty big acceleration.”

“60% of our code is now written by AI, which is twice our, a benchmark of our competitors and peers, and it's really, really helping us.”

“It's helped us with customer service, the cost per customer service tickets down 10%, 40% people who contacted me, the AI solves the problem for them”

“I think AI is gonna create, like, the equivalent of an AI founder mode, which is now you gotta be even more hands-on, and I don't think in the era of AI there should be any pure people managers, because you're so close To the details, to the data, that everyon…”

“I mean, we have typically four or five million people staying in an Airbnb every night in more than a hundred countries around the world.”

“I actually think the guest app would be pretty easy to copy, and I think in the age of AI, you can make a better app than ours, and we want to make that app before anyone else does, and we want to be agentic, but I think the key is most of Airbnb is not the ap…”

“Said differently, if I were starting Airbnb today, I'd be vibe coding and cloud code.”

“I think that could probably double one day. I don't know how long that one day is, but for every person who stays in Airbnb, eight or nine stay in a hotel, I think we can get one extra person in an Airbnb eventually. And I think that can get you to two hundred…”

“I don't think we'll ever be a hotel dominant site, but we are going more aggressive into hotels.”

“If they didn't, we wouldn't be spending, like, a billion dollars here on advertising, so I want to admit that advertising does influence us more than we realize.”

“Just for example, we spent a lot in advertising, but the most popular marketing we've ever done is like when the Barbie movie came out, we took a house in Malibu, we turned the Barbie Malibu dream house, and it was like new, and the whole internet talked about…”

“You do not want to learn on the job how to be a CEO. In other words, trial and error is bad for a CEO. You know why trial and error is really bad? Because you hire somebody, they build an empire, they leave, and now you get to unwind their empire, and it takes…”

“And then the pandemic happened, and we lost 80% of our business in eight weeks.”

“I don't think people managers will have any value in the future. What I mean people managers, people that only manage people. I think everyone's gonna have to be a hybrid people manager or manager IC.”

“I mean, almost every app on my home screen has not changed fundamentally since AI, including Airbnb. I think that's going to change in two years.”

“They ended up Delivering the equivalent of, I think in year one, two, three hundred million dollars in kind of revenue for the company. The following year was like four or five hundred million dollars. Now, you know, we're at a run rate of like over 600 basis …”

“For every thousand dollars spent in the world, one dollar was spent on an Airbnb.”

“Every investor wants to go into big markets. I don't like big markets. Big markets have a lot of competition. Go into a small market and make it big.”

“You know, we have like, 40% free cash flow margin. We're very profitable. We do a hundred billion dollars in sales. Customer sales.”

“And the reason our stock has been flat is because we only do one thing, and we have kind of, you know, we've started to saturate a little bit of the core idea, so we've had to reinvent ourselves.”

“And the way to get to product market fit is to just create a six or seven star experience. But you can't create a six or seven star experience without going beyond. In other words, go beyond the edge of reality and work backwards.”

“The best businesses are ones that founders run and they reinvent and they create so much equity in such a great moat that then when they hand it off, they will endure and grow after them.”

“The bedrock of Airbnb is gonna be identity, Profile. The person's preferences. I want to develop the most authenticated identity on the internet.”

“The better the people, the less they need to be managed. The more time you spend on recruiting, the less time you have to spend on management. It's one to one.”

“I am the co-hiring manager for the top 200 people in the company. This is very radical. A lot of CEOs think it's their job to hire their executive, and their executive team hires their team. I think that is fatal.”

“Paul Graham made an exception to let me in early YCometer. He believed in me. I was an engineer, and he almost never funded non-engineers. He thought the idea was not a good idea, actually. He said, people are actually doing this? I go, yes. He goes, what's wr…”

“When I tell somebody it's not good enough, I'm not saying you're not good enough. I'm saying I see potential and you don't see in yourself. That is the most motivating thing you can do, to say I believe in you and I believe you can do even more. And people wil…”

“Two Republican-led House committees, they're probing specifically Airbnb and AnySphere, which is the owner of Cursor, over their use of Chinese models.”

“Isaac French came on and he was here to talk about his Airbnb Like business where he built this like a little seven cabin Airbnb business and sold it for seven, eight million bucks.”

“We did that at Thin for our own teams. We did that for third parties, like Airbnb and a bunch of other people and operations teams that start automating and streamlining work.”

“I'd probably find another company to start and I probably would have failed considering most startups fail. So I'd probably be in this like, oh no, is this thing a thing I should be doing? I'd be in a, on the struggle bus of startup life probably. And then pro…”

“Airbnb, DoorDash, Unity, Snowflake I'm sure I'm missing a few others. Mongo, Square.”

“In many of the countries where they operated, like in Latin America, there would be some local cash pickup service that you could, like, kind of like a Western Union, but it was different ones in different countries. And they typically had very high fees, like…”

“He used to say that he wants to launch an airline.”

“Something like an Airbnb, you know, you can have all the vibe coding in the world. Like, their network effect is incredibly powerful.”

“Like, I think this is one of the hardest challenges I've ever faced. Besides how do you get a stranger to stay in a stranger's home? This is like the next biggest challenge. How do you upgrade a whole web of outdated digital experiences for the American people…”

“The first version we built of that product, we built that backend orchestration piece. We used a cloud native service for that, something called SWF, Simple Workflows. And that was good, but what we found was we needed something a lot more dynamic, and we need…”

“Definitely not. No, I mean, that was me having a debate with the board as to how we needed to grow. I really wanted to create a massive company, and I really thought we had the opportunity to create the Airbnb of crowdfunding, because it should all be consolid…”

“So, cash, like cash million, I made it when my wife worked at Airbnb, and it went public. And that, that's when we made our first. And then about three months later, I think it went later in December, my company sold in February, and then we made a lot. Leadin…”

“I had a job offer at Airbnb, which got rescinded when I got there because I'd lied on my resume about getting a DUI.”

“The issue and the trick for the folks in our seat is it's got a three-fund shelf life. By the time you finish fund three, everybody you know at Airbnb is left. By fund four, you're talking to strangers.”

“We evaluated Tekton. This was a couple of years ago now. At the time, we couldn't wrap our heads around using it on the charge path, just from like a latency and reliability perspective. Like we've got to be operating at six nines. We got to be like, Decisioni…”

“Airbnb, obviously, like Sequoia was the first investor or the seed round. Sorry, not first investor. They did YC, but you know, we invested 600,000 dollars, like a three million dollar valuation, and they went through some incredibly hard times.”

“A company that is used to growing 30, 40% a year went to losing 80% of its revenue.”

“Obviously we needed to raise money. Do we do it in equity? Do we do it in debt? Equity would be very punitive at that time. We decided to do it in debt.”