Airbnb

“I do not use Airbnb under any circumstances anymore.”

“Over the years, it's made its limited partners and its own rainmakers who pocket around a quarter of the gains plus a management fee a total of over seventy billion dollars, thanks to early bets. On future tech darlings like Airbnb, Apple, Google, and Nvidia.”

“And he worked on Airbnb and DoorDash, which netted the firm over twenty billion dollars. Isn't that crazy when they went public in December of 2020?”

“We're not going to do like a matchmaking service.”

“When we're in public, We popped from like, we were marked at eighteen billion dollars. Five months, six months later, we went a hundred billion.”

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

“You know, we are absolutely looking at loyalty programs, things like that, that could create incentives.”

“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”

“Our philosophy is to be extremely discerning around public M&A. The reason why is we've taken an approach to run Airbnb. That's kind of similar to Apple in this early days where we are one app, one brand, and we're a functional organization and we have one cus…”

“We generate four to five billion of free cash flow every year.”

“I felt like it was harder to be a late stage private company than a public company.”

“Two out of three people who book an Airbnb, leave a review. That's not true of most platforms.”

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

“All time best three 15. I was better at deadlift. I deadlifted I think five 95.”

“We're going through this whole electrification, so to speak, period over the next three years of putting the latest models into our apps. And for us to do that, we have to basically rebuild the apps from the ground up.”

“There's a lot of things that precluded us from being able to have a really good integration with the current SDK as it is.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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 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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”