The Ledger, every show

“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.”

“People who have lots of recurring one-on-ones are not going to survive.”

“By the way, I think founder mode is going to be The only way to operate in the age of AI. If you're a giant professional CEO, I think you can operate in a founder mode, but if you're like, you know, risk averse, you want to be incremental, those types of peopl…”

“I think the future are not apps, the future agents, but I don't think they're going to be text forward. I think they're going to be really rich user interface.”

“The referral traffic from these chatbots are converting higher than Google, and so actually the chatbots are actually additive to travel companies.”

“I think you're going to even be able to see real time AI generated interface the next year or two.”

“I would predict that most revenue is going to go be going to codex. That's my, I might be wrong, but just given how much money is going to Claude.”

“The next wave of AI is going to be consumer AI. Consumer AI is going to be the big prize.”

“Subscriptions. Unfortunately, they're probably going to hit a local maximum percentage of users subscribing because Claude and Gemini are giving away for free.”

“My prediction is that we're living in the age of enterprise AI. And I think in the next 12 to 24 months, you're going to see the beginning of a consumer AI renaissance.”

“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.”

“I don't think there will be apps in the future. I think there will be agents. So, like, if we're attached to apps, I don't think there will be apps, so we better, like, let go of that.”

“My prediction is that in the next three to five years, not in the next year, you're going to see a huge boom in the consumer space of AI.”

“Where I think it goes is I think ChatGPT has to build an SDK that's really robust, and it will be just a channel. That's my guess, but we'll see. And I might be wrong”

“In fact, I think the AI tools will allow more people to be designers because you won't need to be a craftsperson. You just need taste. And I think more people can learn taste than can get through the craft, and this allows engineers, designers, and everyone to…”

“I am very optimistic that generative AI is going to like, you know, really lift design In the world and make it one day equal to engineering. I think that, I don't think that's a crazy thing one day.”

“I'd like to like make the announcement that I think flat design is over or ending. You know, I think if you remember the 2000 was dominated by skeu morphism. The 2010 have been dominated with the launch of iOS seven by flat design. I think we're going to move …”

“I mean, maybe the most fundamental change that I see in our world that's going to happen, if you're so fortunate enough, typically upper middle class person or upper class, not everyone can do this, but for those who can, They're realizing, maybe I'll go a mon…”

“People are gonna, instead of traveling to the same 20 cities, going to the same hotel districts that are really crowded, and then standing in line, To get their selfie photo, instead of the same landmarks, to put it on Instagram, say, look, I got that too. The…”

“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 if designers sit out, what you're going to see is engineers and product managers designing for them.”

“I think the highest turnover job of any executive at Silicon Valley might be the CMO. I don't know for sure, but like, you know, you don't see a lot of turnover CFOs. You don't see a lot of turnover CTOs”

“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…”

“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…”

“We have two hundred million verified identities. There's only a hundred million one hundred eighty million passports in circulation, U.S. Passports.”

“By the time we went public, we had cumulatively burned, I think, zero dollars of cash or very little free cash flow.”

“Without having intended to be in that business, we're probably one of the largest, largest RV rental companies in the world. As far as they're not our RVs, it's the communities, but yeah, I'm sure thousands and thousands of RVs.”

“So it dropped by about 80%, and I mean, you know, nobody knows if this is pent up demand or not, but no, we're around last year's levels.”

“It, the long story short is we ended up getting in Y Combinator, and I remember on the interview, he brought the cereal, and, you know, Paul Graham said, I remember him saying, like, he wasn't entirely sure of the idea. He said, well, it sounds different, but …”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“Proof of personhood is going to be really, really important in the age of AI.”

“In fact, I'm on the board of Y Combinator. Almost all the startups we are seeing are enterprise. There are not a lot of companies doing consumer.”

“I don't think AI is going to change how we go on vacation, the physical aspect of it that much. It might change how we book it, how we connect”

“And by 2019, We're spending a billion dollars on AdWords.”

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

“We spent 12 years building Airbnb, and then we lost 80% of business in eight weeks.”

“We cut over a billion dollars of planned marketing spend.”

“Then we quickly raised two billion dollars... Thankfully we had some great investors step up but we had to do that deal, and that was like over the course of 72 hours to like get that deal done.”

“First thing is we had over, we had customers cancel over one billion dollars of reservations.”

“On couch surfing, you saw the photo of the person. On Craigslist, you saw the photo of the place, but on no website did you see both, like, the person and their place. I think that was one really important ingredient that made it really compelling.”

“Barry Manilow's drummer changed the course of our company forever because we met Barry Manilow's drummer. He, we realized that he didn't want to just list his bedroom. He wanted to list his entire apartment. Why? Because he goes on tour with Barry. And they go…”

“All of a sudden, we actually became profitable over the course of Y Combinator. You know, our, the revenue we're making was then funding our operations.”

“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.”