The Exchanges

Q So, I mean, clearly, there were times in the founding of this company where you were really coming up with different creative ideas and trying different things out to see what worked. What's that version of the, of the cereal box now? What are Some of the things that you are doing as a business to get creative and to think about building resilience.

A When the pandemic hit, we said, we are going to be decisive. Felt like if I was a captain of a ship, it felt like suddenly something hit the side of the ship and you had to move very, very quickly. And so it was kind of all hands on deck. First thing is we had over, we had customers cancel over one billion dollars of reservations. Now this would already have been hard, except for the fact that this was a billion dollars that our hosts were expecting. And these people, many of them depend on to pay the rent or mortgage. And we had a huge predicament. What do you do when a billion people want a billion dollars of refunds and another group of people tell you, well, if you don't get that billion dollars, then we're going to be in a really bad spot. Well, that's a really bad, no-win situation. It's not our money. We just hold the money. What we decided to do is we refunded all stays related to the pandemic, um, where people need the cancellation because they can travel. But then this caught us a huge shortfall with our hosts. And we're bleeding cash at this point, like, and have never in our history have we bled cash. In fact, we, we had more money in the bank than we raised before the pandemic. Suddenly, We're losing a lot of money. We took a quarter of a billion dollars, two hundred fifty million dollars, and we sent it to our host. Just didn't loan it, just sent it to host. You k…

AI assessment note: “We took a quarter of a billion dollars, two hundred fifty million dollars, and we sent it”

Q You know, to this point of, of going public, I mean, is that on the back burner now of, of taking the company public?

A No, I've, uh, when this interview is over, I will be resuming work on that. I, uh, um, to go public, you've got to write this securities document called an S-one, and it's like, A 300 page, uh, page turner. Um, it, it, it's, it will not, it will not compete with your favorite American literature as a Sunday night reading. But, um, we were, we're going to file it late March. We put on the shelf and, uh, recently we've been dusting it off, you know, and, and you have to update it because the business has changed. So you've got to kind of write it more, more differently. So that's what I'm doing. And we don't know when we'll be public, but I basically said, we'll be ready this year if the market's ready for us. Um, if the market's not ready, we'll be ready when they are.

AI assessment note: “No, I've, uh, when this interview is over, I will be resuming work on that.”

Q And, and so is there sort of a future scenario where Airbnb more aggressively gets into the business of RVs?

A Oh yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, I don't even know how many thousands of RVs are on Airbnb right now. I'm going to have to look, but we're probably, you know, 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. We have thousands of tree houses, thousands of airstreams, thousands of yours, thousands of houseboats. And I think that people are discovering unique, one of a kind. They want things that are a little more intimate, more local. And one of the cool things about Airbnb is like, The most insane space that you ever imagined, these A-frame homes, or these, like, really interesting architectural gems. They're saying, I want to go somewhere with an interesting home. This home is in the middle of blank, and it's really cool looking. And so you're starting to see some really interesting homes in Airbnb being booked. There, there, there is a giant boot that you can sleep in in New Zealand. Somebody built a giant boot. It's like a 15 foot high boot. There is a dog that you sleep in. It's called the Dog Bark Park B&B. It's like a 20 foot high dog, and it's a B&B, and I think in Idaho, and it's got a waiting list now.

AI assessment note: “Oh yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, I don't even know how many thousands”

Q Yeah. I mean, look, all of these examples are awesome and exciting. This is a question, I love this question from Jip Yee. Have you guys considered having a category of, like, houses suitable for work from home or quarantined homes, like a, like a little bit of category for those things?

A I love that. We have not done it yet, but I love the idea. I feel like this is a good sign that we should do it. One of the things we now do is, for example, we, your internet speed never mattered, mattered more in your life than it does right now, right? Like one of the things is making sure that people know the wifi speed. So over a thousand hosts have already updated the speed of their wifi on their Airbnbs. We want to get hundreds of thousands of hosts just to update. What kind of internet do you have? What's the speed of your wifi? Um, what's the buffering rate? Just cause some people like they have work where they need to rely on it. And then We're going to ask like in reviews to confirm like wifi speed. So really basic things like that, which you kind of took for granted before we asked, do you have wifi now? It's like, well, how fast is the wifi? Cause it really matters to people.

AI assessment note: “We have not done it yet, but I love the idea.”

Q I mean, 1900 employees had to be laid off, but you still have a large workforce, How are you making sure that you're keeping morale among the people who, who are still working at Airbnb?

A Oh, it's so hard. I was warned ahead of time that not only is the layoff going to be difficult, but the months after a layoff, when you can't even gather people, that gets even more difficult. One of the things I've done is for the last five months, I do a weekly kind of Q&A. I said, no matter what question you ask, I have this iMac and it's got like this, you know, what the camera got, this little green light next to it. And I said, I'm going to stare Into that green light every week. I'm going to just tell you everything that I can, and that's going to be our point of connection. I tell people, you're not alone. We're going to go on this together, and I think that the key is you have to be optimistic, and optimism is not blind hope, but there are a lot of reasons to be optimistic. You know, when I was a kid, my dad used to say to me, things are never as good as they seem and as bad as they seem. Well, if that's true, things weren't maybe as good as they seemed in January, But that also probably means things aren't as bad as they seem here in July. I'm seeing the humanity of people, the love that's come through the surface. I mean, you suddenly now, in a crisis, we're reminded of some of the things that are most essential. And those things that are most essential are not the things that come in cardboard boxes to our front door. That that is essential is the relationships that…

AI assessment note: “for the last five months, I do a weekly kind of Q&A”

Q And that's because people aren't getting on planes?

A Makeshift from hotels to homes. I mean, if you're in a city, and you want to go out of the city to a small community, The smaller the community, less likely they have a hotel because a hotel only works with density, right? You need a bunch of rooms, you need efficiency, and so people are basically traveling and going to small communities. Well, it turns out that's actually a really good use case for a home, and we try to be very responsible. We work with local governments to have reopening protocols. We hired or brought on the former Secretary General of the United States, Vivek Murthy, to create a cleaning protocol, and then people don't want to be in crowds and they perceive Airbnb as a safer option.

AI assessment note: “people are basically traveling and going to small communities”