Best of Big Technology: Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky

22:39So if a host cancels, that cancellation rate affects their search rank. If they cancel consistently, they're removed from the platform, they're suspended. But if they cancel, they're typically warned. And we also have like a financial penalty system for hosts if they cancel. And I think we also, again, we have some updates coming in November that it will, I think, take this to the next level. But the good news is the vast majority of our hosts keep their commitments and the reputation system generally works really well. We've had more than 300 million people, guests, leave reviews on Airbnb homes.

23:2270 % of stays after they're completed, people leave a review. So we typically get signal on if somebody went through this. And the main principle we have is to make our information as transparent as possible. You see, what we can't do is we can't inspect every property and manage them ourselves. If I designed an Airbnb, I can assure you it would be amazing. It would be perfect. Every single time I try to make it as perfect as our software, but they're not our homes. They're homes that belong to the community of millions of people. So we need to do is create tools for hosts to be better, economic incentives for them.

24:00And then the other thing is we need total transparency. So every time you see a property, you know, this is a great one. This is one we have, it's new. So we don't know you're taking a chance, or this is one that isn't as good. And if it's not as good, then that will should create some economic incentive where they have to charge less because they don't have as high quality. And if they're really bad, they're just going to be completely removed from the platform because we have minimum enforcement standards. That's good. All right. So let me ask this. We're talking a little bit about the product itself.

24:29Then we're going to get a little bit more about how you build it. You've brought up some really interesting ideas already. So advertising. You've talked at a Morgan Stanley conference that it's absolutely on the horizon for you. I'm looking at Skift today and they say first year for Airbnb, they estimate you'll make$317 million. And then that could go to 1.25 billion by 2026 and 3.7 billion by the end of the decade. I mean, talk about high margin business. We've talked about this on the podcast. We were talking about it Friday, thinking about Instacart, right? Which is a delivery business that actually makes its money on ads.

25:04And Amazon, by the way, retail business that's making its money on ads. how far along are you? Is there something that you have? Yeah. People don't realize how big the advertising business on Amazon is like probably the most profitable segment of the business. So yeah, let's, let's just talk about it for a second. Um, two of my executives are from Amazon, my CFO and my head of PR and, um, and policy and communications. So you're, you're on board with hiring Amazon people because we've had this, this debate. They come in with the Amazon culture. Yeah, we've hired significantly more people from, say, Apple than Amazon.

25:35That model is a little close. Let's take a quick detour. I'll answer that question. I'll come to this in a second. So we hired from all over. The way we run the company is if we had to compare it to one tech company, it's closest to Apple. The reason it's closest to Apple is we're a functional organization. So for people listening, you probably know what a functional organization is. A functional organization is how every startup is organized. There's an engineering department, a product department, a design department, a marketing, operations, finance, sales, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Almost every large company, almost all companies Fortune 500 are no longer functional.

26:13They are either some matrix or mostly they're divisional. They basically have multiple engineering departments. They have multiple marketing departments. They have multiple product departments. Amazon's divisional. Apple is functional. So we are functional like Apple. Basically what that means, we have experts in every single function. We're highly integrated. And the other thing is we are data informed, but more like Apple than Amazon, what we look at every day is the quality of our product. We obsess. We use intuition. We use our imagination. We are a very design-led culture. We try to be the marriage of art and science.

26:49And we do these product releases twice a year, which are these big events, which are more akin to either how you release an operating system or how you release hardware. And we don't think you should build software exactly like hardware. But I think my view is that software should not be the other pendulum necessarily of hardware. I think the best is a marriage of the constraints of hardware with the freedom and data available of software. Because when something is totally decentralized and totally bottoms up and you divisionalize the company, what ends up happening is, let me give you an analogy of a car.

27:24Let's say we're trying to make a car and we have one team doing endless AB experiments of the tires. Now those tires have to fit on the wheels, but the wheel teams doing their own AB experiments and they don't fit. And now they fit, but now we need a better car body to fit around the wheels. But then that makes the car heavier. I'm just kind of using this as an example. Now we need like a stronger battery, but now that battery needs to be manufactured. That's going to create a new assembly line. That assembly line has to be capitalized. Now we got to go Wall Street. The point is that to make really big changes to your application, your service, it often requires the entire company to row in one direction.

27:58It requires you to have a single vision, not many small visions because then you hit local maximums. It's important that you have a product story that you know how to tell. That it's not just enough to ship the product. You have to tell the story and people have to know the product exists. You have to have a distribution in mind when you ship the product. So in these ways, we are probably a little closer to the Apple model. And I've said this publicly, like we have a product marketing function. And most companies don't. When they say product marketing, they have an outbound function. We have this inbound outbound.

28:29So that's the whole thing. But let's go back to Amazon because we do have some Amazon people and I do try to take the best of every company. And then we have some of our own things, only we do. But one of the things that Jeff Bezos said, and I really like it, and he was very smart about investing, is Jeff Bezos said, you should focus on the most perishable opportunities first. So what that means is there's all these things you could do, but if you can do something later, don't do it now. If there's something, if you don't do now, you can't do later. And we felt like the most perishable opportunities were around fixing our service because if people are complaining, the last thing they want is an ad platform.

29:08They want the service improved. And so, and also travel is finally recovering in a post-pandemic world. So there's a lot of market share available. So we want to expand our service, recruit as many hosts as possible and perfect our core service. And that's the most perishable opportunity. The bigger we get and the stronger ecosystem it gets, the more potential value an ad platform has down the road. So we're not rushing into anything on an ad platform. We do think there would be a really great system we could build for hosts where they could, you know, like there's a lot of, you know, Amazon, Etsy, eBay, I think Alibaba, I mean, our travel competitors, almost all of them have some sort of advertising.

29:52My general thing though, and this comes back to my orientation is I want to make sure we have a great user experience. And I think I want to make sure the ads don't get in the way of a good user experience or become a taxing user experience. And so that means that we're just going to go into this a little bit slower and more cautiously. But you're right. It is a billion dollar plus revenue opportunity of very high margin that's totally available to this platform. And the bigger we get, the more valuable that opportunity is. Brian Chesky is here with us. He is the CEO of Airbnb. We've been talking a lot about the Airbnb product, a little bit more about how product is built inside the company.

30:32And yeah, we're here in New York City. So we're going to touch on the New York stuff right after the break. Did you know your credit card points and miles can lose value to inflation? Credit card companies often reduce the redemption value of your points and miles. Now, imagine a credit card with rewards that can grow in value. With the Gemini credit card, you can earn Bitcoin or one of over 50 other cryptos instantly with no annual fee. Every swipe at the store or gas pump earns you instant rewards deposited straight to your account. Plus, sign up now for a$200 Bitcoin bonus to kickstart your rewards.

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32:02and wherever you find your podcasts.

32:16And we're back here with Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb. Brian, great to be here with you. You mentioned before the break a little bit about how you structure your organization. You touched on the product marketing function. You know, when you spoke about that at a Figma conference a little bit back, People said, all right, Airbnb is done with product managers. Lenny Rychinski, a former Airbnb-er who has a very popular substack, started to explain that this was less about eliminating product management and more about shifting the company to be more vision-oriented. Big, splashy launches and an Apple-style approach to product, which you just explained.

32:54So I text Lenny, hey, what do you want to know from Brian? He says, ask him how the move away from traditional product management is going and what he's learned making the shift. So you know what? Well, first of all, let me, let me ask that question. Yeah. Let me first give a shout out to Lenny. Lenny worked for me for a number of years. He came via acquisition called local mine and he was one of the best product managers we had. And he's really amazing. And I've listened to some of his episodes on his podcasts. And so I just want to give him a shout out. He's really great. So before I say how it's going, let me just recap a couple of things and clarify a couple of things.

33:26So I went on Figma and I said something and it was a firestorm. Yeah. Cause it was too tweeted a little out of context. So I said, we got rid of the classic product management function and that people assumed I meant I got rid of all the product managers. I didn't, what I meant was we replaced it with a product marketing function. So let me, let me just explain how it's a little bit different. In a typical tech company, you have what they usually refer to as three legs of the stool. You have engineering, you have design and you have product management and product management is sometimes shortened just to be called product.

33:59And at a lot of companies, some companies, they're equal legs of stool. At a lot of companies, design reports the product. And at some companies, design and engineering reports the product, but very rarely does product report design. So there's different models. Oftentimes, product is what we might only call an inbound function. Their job is to build software and ship it. Their job isn't always to figure out how to market the features that they built. In fact, I think it's a weakness in a lot of modern software companies that people don't think about who is this for. They don't have a lot of like, like what, what product marketing Airbnb is inbound and outbound.

34:43It's product management plus product marketing. Product management is the building of the software. Product marketing is deciding what to build and to figure out how you're going to talk about the product and how you're going to distribute the story to the customers so they know about the benefits of the product. What's happened in Silicon Valley is I believe it's become a very inbound function. And so you end up in a situation where people don't conceive of at a time what the story of the product is before they build it. And if you build a product and no one knows about it, was it worth building?

35:15Probably not. I also find that if you think about the story of the product as you're building it, it affects how you're building it. It often makes the product simpler. You're not going to build something if you don't know how to talk about it coherently. And I think having a story of the product along the way is a really good way to govern making a really great, simple product. We also took a lot of - So does that mean that the marketing comes first and then everything flows from there? Like how do you operate that? So how does that work functionally? The story comes first. So - Sounds Amazon-like, honestly.

35:50A little different. Amazon uses press releases. We don't do press releases. The problem we found with the Amazon-style press release, where they write a press release ahead of time is, okay, let's take the iPhone. What would the press release have been for the iPhone? The problem is like, you don't know the press releases when you start the project because you learn what the project is as you start working on it. And so that press release is really good for efficiency type things like Amazon, where it's like half off or it's going to now appear in a day. But for a lot of these features, you discover the product along the way.

36:22So often starts with insight. It starts with a fuzzy story. It might start with a rough keynote, But the key is the story is an evolving thing that you discover as you tell the product. But it often might start with an insight. So for example, Airbnb rooms. We launched a refresh of Airbnb rooms. They used to be called private rooms. And we had a court insight that a lot of people were nervous about staying in a house of other hosts because they didn't know who the host was. And it was just kind of sketchy. And so we developed this idea of a host passport, this new type of profile that they would fill out.

36:59And you'd be able to have this really cool preview where the booklet would open up. You'd be able to get a sense of who they are. And then we also started doing research about that people were nervous about like, well, is the kitchen shared? And is this bathroom my bathroom? And who's going to be living with me? And are they there with their family? And so a lot of product marketing, here are the things the product manager is missing. One, good consumer insights. Sometimes product managers do this. Sometimes they have a quote research function. Sometimes they put research and design, but a lot of times they just don't have great consumer insights.

37:32Like who is the customer? What are we solving? What are they saying? Really, really good customer insights. What a lot of product managers do, they just look at data. They look at site data in usage, what we might call engagement. And engagement data is important, but it's only part of the story. What does the data mean? So that's the first thing. The second thing is you tell a story. It's an evolving story. The third thing is distribution. How you can get that story out. Having a great story and no one hearing your story. It's like if you ship a product and no one uses it, is it because it wasn't a good product or because no one knew that you shipped the product?

38:04Depends who you ask. Depends who you ask. But it's often a combination. But so product and marketing should be connected. I always feel like you can tell the health of an organization by seeing how close engineering and marketing are. If you want to go into a company, just see how well the engineers and marketers get along. And by the way, I bet you have many companies don't even know each other. They may or may never talk to each other. And that's a red flag because you really want the product engine of the company and the storytelling engine of the company, I think, to be working in lockstep.

38:33If they're disconnected, that's not good for anyone. So we basically created this product marketing function. We have fewer people absolute. We basically had kept our headcount flat. We feel like most companies probably have too many product managers. So it's a leaner function. The most senior people have a title called product marketing. The junior product marketers, I think they do have a product management title, but they're junior product marketers. We just took the title convention from Apple, but we also have a very robust program management function. And a lot of companies don't, they have product managers doing program management.

39:09And we also have technical program managers. So the people making sure everything is on schedule and the nitty gritty aren't product managers, they're program managers. The product managers are ultimately, the product marketers are ultimately responsible for delivering the product, but they are working in lockstep with the program managers. And then the other thing is engineers and designers probably have a little more power because at most companies, if the product manager is like the CEO of the product, they're telling the designer, here's your specs, here's what you're doing. And engineers, here's the schedule, here's the build, build on the schedule.

39:39In this case, the product marketers aren't in charge. They're just like the long pole in the tent. And so all of this is like an orchestra. Now, how do you make sure decisions get made? Decisions get made from me and the executive team. I review all of the work every week, every two weeks, every four weeks, every 12 weeks. There's a schedule. We call it CEO reviews. And I review the work and everything works on a release cycle. So we do releases every May, every November. I know what we're shipping typically as much as 18 months out. Some things, You know, there's a long horizon. So we're working on stuff now for next November and we do these reviews.

40:18I try to make sure the work is really, really well enforced. It's already been reviewed by other people. And you'll just keep doing these iterations until you have something you're really proud of. Do you inject ideas like into this process? Is that sort of what the idea of asking people what they want on Airbnb on Twitter was, was basically like you're sitting there, you're at like the kind of the focal point of all this stuff and they're looking to you for guidance. Yeah, I want to be clear that like the majority ideas, the majority insights do not come from me, but I always bring something to the table.

40:48We have a really rigorous blueprint. So I want to say one other thing we created. We created this thing called the Airbnb Community Blueprint, where we blueprinted the end-to-end experience for every guest and host. Then we mapped every single screen of the site and the journey, every pixel, every user policy, every customer contact. And we looked at every complaint and we used that blueprint to prioritize what we want to focus on. And then what I do is every six months, we do a top-down prioritization. So we basically, you know how companies have an annual plan and they typically have an annual planning process starts in September, ends in November.

41:23So we don't do that. We do have like an annual budget, but it's like, you know, very, very short. What we do is we have a rolling two-year plan and we update it every six months. And so we do a big leadership offsite, like a two-day offsite. We just did one last week and we review all the priorities in the company over the next two years. I'd like to even get out three years because the problem with the plan is it's too short. One year is too short and you only update it every year. So in November, you've got to imagine everything that's going to happen for a year. So all I, I, this is what's unique.

41:56I hold the roadmap, not the head of product. So I make all final product decisions. Now I'm not making every decision unilaterally. I'm like an editor. So most things are recommendations and I'm changing things five to 10 % because my job is to like balance every stakeholder inside the company because it's functional. There's no general managers. And I basically keep a living roadmap document that is kept updated with a two-year horizon. So anyways, that's a little bit how it's different. Now, I guess that's a really long-winded explanation. And I don't even know if I fully explained it. But now let's talk about how it's working.

42:34I have found that this system is far superior for Airbnb. Whether this is a good system for other companies, I'm not certain yet. I'm certain that other companies should try this. Not everyone, but some companies should. I think that if you're really like, you care a lot about design, you care a lot about craft, you care a lot about the core technical talent of the company. And if you're a company where the CEO wants to be fairly hands-on, if the CEO has a pretty good product sensibility, if you are really just one app and one brand, and you don't want to do lots of disparate things, then I would argue to be as integrated as possible.

43:12If you want to do lots of disparate things, like if we wanted to have like a clothing line and a fast food line and the jet turbine line, then this integrated model would be so much context switching. And the head of engineering for software is not the kind of head engineering you need for a jet turbine. So if your business is going to do lots of disparate things, then this is not a good model. The Amazon model is good. If your business is going to be really integrated and you're like Apple and you're not going to do that many different things, you're going to be really focused. Then as integrated a model as possible is great.

43:42When I told people, here's, here's a counter. I'm gonna give you some counter, something counterintuitive. When I told people about this model, you know what the biggest criticism was? They said, this is going to be, you're going to be a huge bottleneck. Like you, the CEO, and this model is going to be a huge bottleneck and everything's going to be slower and you're not going to ship as much. What I would say is what we found is we've shipped more than we ever have. We've shipped, by last count, over 300, 350 upgrades and new features since we moved to this model. The velocity is somewhere between 2 and 5x greater than it was before.

44:17It might even be greater. The quality of the product is better. And it's just like, I think that people think like when a CEO reviews work, it slows it down. In the end, it actually speeds it up. The more review work, the faster people work. Because if people are blocked or there's a bottleneck, if you're reviewing work frequently, you will be able to, I see those bottlenecks. We never, we've, I've not encountered in the last two years, a situation where some person in one department refused to collaborate with someone in some other part of the department, or they like didn't prioritize their work.

44:51That happens all the time at big companies at Airbnb, if that were to happen, a project would be stalled. I'd see it in a review and I'd be like, what's going on? Why is this blocked? And then we'd immediately elevate the situation. So I think this really enforces the right kind of pace. I didn't invent this model. Walt Disney did things this way. Steve Jobs did things this way. And Elon in his own way, although it's a little less, like it's a little more maybe chaotic. Yeah, a little bit, but he, He does it in a certain way. Now, what most of them have in common is they involve hardware or production.

45:24So what's new is most people haven't applied this to software. The basic idea is we have ubiquitous data. Just give people a mission. Don't tell them what to do. Don't tell them how to do it. And make them free of constraints and give them autonomy. And that's the classic conventional wisdom of software development. And what I found is giving lots of autonomy seems good in the short run, but it's very stifling to empowerment in the long run. Because what ends up happening is you have like 10 teams going in 10 different directions. None of them have enough resources. So they now advocate during budgeting season to get many more resources.

46:02They get more and more controlled. They're always underutilized. They never have the way to the company behind them. There's uneven standards across the divisions. They're using different technology stacks. They're putting out different messages. And they're often inadvertently sometimes working the same projects, conflicting each other. What ends up happening is you end up getting bureaucracy. You sometimes get politics and you often get basically chaos. And out of all those things, sometimes comes complacency, right? If a CEO doesn't know what's going on, how could he hold anyone accountable?

46:35And when everything is integrated in one system, then you suddenly have a lot more information about, and you have more accountability. People want accountability. Accountability can sound stifling, but actually do you want to work at a company where people don't know the difference between who's doing a good job and bad job? That's horrible. So someone can just do like nothing or be toxic and no one knows the difference. Somebody can be a high performer and it doesn't matter. That would be a world where you become completely nihilistic. Nothing would matter. And so we want to be the opposite of complacent and nihilistic where great people are noticed and rewarded and held onto.

47:10And attrition is down, productivity is up. The downside is we are not able to do lots of disparate things, very, very disparate things. Doesn't mean we can't do a lot of things, but we can't do things that are disconnected. So if some opportunity were to emerge that has nothing to do with travel or Airbnb, it might be a great business and we won't go into it because it may compromise our model because it would require another division and that tax is not worth it for the way you run the company. So everything you do has a pro and a con. We've decided to optimize for integration. Optimized integration is good so long as you don't want to do lots of disintegrated things.

47:48We have a few minutes left. I want to talk to you about something that you've been talking about a lot, which is loneliness and how you're trying to connect people and Airbnb can be a solution for some of the loneliness we see in the world. I just want to present the other argument and see what you think about it. So, you know, we've been moving to more and more lonely society, a less engaged society. And a lot of that is due to the dissolution of our civic society where we need stronger, where we've lost what really were strong neighborhoods and strong communities. Now, I was looking at your tweet asking for ideas for the product.

48:22And here's one from a woman named Desi Ivanova. It's not really an idea. It's more of a complaint. I'm sure you're sick of the complaints anymore but i want to pose it to you and see what you think so she says airbnb is ruining ruining the communal feel of the neighborhood i live in which is a very residential area tourists come in for a couple of days and leave so personally i think a top priority should be a policy that restricts the number of of airbnbs i mean basically it is that the the core of the argument is it creates more of a morality in communities as opposed to roots what do you think about that and how does that fit into your well i would just tell i would loneliness loneliness?

48:58Okay, there's a couple of things going on here. Let's start with the neighborhood and let's then zoom out to loneliness. I think they're just distinct topics. Okay. So on the neighborhood topic, we want to strengthen the communities we're in. We don't want to detract from the communities. I do not think communities should be totally transient. And I think it really depends on the nature of every community. The way we've tried to solve this is not for us to impose caps on cities, but work with cities and let them impose their own restrictions. So many cities, so if you take the top 200 markets in the world, 80 % of them have a law on the book in our jurisdictions.

49:34There's some regulation in place. The regulations they usually put in place have a registration system. The registration system will often provide a nice cap. You're allowed to host six months a year, 120 days a year. You need to get this license, registration. And what we've learned is that a one size fits all imposition that we use on every city doesn't work because some cities live and die by tourism. They need it. Some cities have too many tourists. And so what we think is number one principle is treat every city personally, comply with local laws, regulations, and really make sure that cities have the right solution for them.

50:11The second thing is, there is this concept of over-tourism. And over-tourism is a very real thing. But over-tourism isn't too many people in the world traveling. Over-tourism, I believe, is too many people going to the same place at the same time. I remember a number of years ago, I went to Paris and I met with the minister, I think, of tourism. And he said to me something like, there's too many people visiting Paris, but there's not a lot of people visiting places in France outside of Paris. And I thought, I was thinking to myself, well, a lot of people visit Paris because they've seen a movie of Paris.

50:44They probably couldn't name you a French town outside of Paris. A lot of Americans couldn't name, like they couldn't name as or Provence or something, but they can tell you Paris. And so we all tend to gravitate, just like we gravitate celebrities, we gravitate to iconic destinations. One of the things I'd love to do with Airbnb is redistribute travel. Instead of having everyone go to the same cities in the same districts, spread people out as many places as possible. So one of the things we're seeing is that we're seeing a lot of what we call travel redistribution, people traveling to more locations than flooding the same zones.

51:19And New York City here, well, New York City is a unique example. Let's get to that in a second, but let me fully answer this. Everyone in New York City pretty much stays, 85 % of people I think stay in a hotel district. So not staying in different neighborhoods, they're staying in one crowded hotel district. And then they're patroning multinational corporations and restaurants in that hotel district. I think the best model would be to diffuse travel across as many destinations as possible and to get people to stay longer. Airbnb, nearly half our business, people stay for longer than a week and a fifth of our business is longer than a month.

51:52So this is really what we're trying to do. I guess I'll just recap by saying we try to comply with the local laws and regulations. Every city wants to be treated differently. The way cities generally solve this is by having registration systems. They can govern the amount of activity in their system by setting up systems that we will comply with. We want to diffuse travel. We want people to stay longer. But yes, you're right. I'm going to be self-critical. We do not want to create a museumification of cities. This is often why we've worked with cities to try to find sensible regulation to work for them.

52:25At the same time, a city that has no outsiders is not healthy either. A completely insular society where no one from outside comes in is generally not good for the economy. I'm not even sure it's good socially to never have an outside in your community. Those are typically closed off communities. So we think the best societies are the ones that have the right mix of locals and travelers. And generally there's always more locals and travelers, but there's this really good mix. Now we'll just do quick loneliness and we can talk about New York. I think that loneliness, first of all, is much bigger than Airbnb.

52:56Loneliness has been rising since I think like real war two. There's certainly... I'm not blaming it. Yeah. And well, well, I mean, we're much more part of the solution to the problem. Let's just start with that. But let's go into why. Loneliness has been rising certainly in the last few decades. There's a bunch of reasons potentially why. There is an erosion of physical communities, but it's mostly people aren't going to as many physical places. They're not going. The mall is now Amazon. The theater is now Netflix. The office for many people is now Zoom. And the bank is now like online banking and not as many people go to church and fewer people live with their families or their extended family.

53:34And they're not going to as many physical community spaces. None of these individual things is bad. Like I think there's been a generally increase in standard of living that's been really, really great. But the aggregate is I think we're designing a system where modern life is starting to make us a little bit lonely. And I've identified with this. I do think that like, there's a lot of great things about society, but we have to be very careful that technology often wants to find the shortest point between A and B. And human connection is often very inefficient. So if we're not careful, we can design solutions that remove people from the equation.

54:10And each thing seems like a step forward for humanity. But when you take a larger step back, it's almost like we're on the path to recreating Wally, where we're in these like self-driving pods, we're staring at screens all day, and we're a little bit disconnected from those around us. So what is the solution? There's probably going to be a lot of solutions. I think one of the big solutions is just get people to spend time in the physical world, not just digitally, but in the physical world with others. I don't think social media is per se good or bad. If social media is a destination for your social interaction, it's probably not good for loneliness.

54:44If social media is a way station to connect you to people that you eventually develop real world relationships is probably good. The same thing with Airbnb. Are we a gateway to physical interactions? And one of the things that could help is getting more people to travel with their friends and family. So for example, I have college friends. We live in different parts of the country. I don't see them except for a couple, once or twice a year, we do an annual trip and we stay in Airbnbs because we choose to stay in Airbnbs because if we stay in, I mean, beyond the fact that I'm a founder, if we stay in a hotel, we'd have to be in four different rooms.

55:17Instead, we can be in one house, sit around the pool, hang out. And the reason we travel is because we all live in different places. Instead of all of us going to one person's house and then that person, the burden of hosting all of us, we can all go one place. That's just one small example. So I would love for Airbnb to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. And I think the main way we can be part of the solution is we can encourage more people to travel with their friends, their family, their loved ones. And we also can use Airbnb as a way to match people in the physical world, both for travel experiences and maybe beyond travel experiences.

55:49And I think that's something we can really do. We also, by the way, when they do travel, we would like people to feel less transient, like they have a context in the community, a context in the neighborhood that they're hosted, that the host gives them the context of the type of place they are in, and that we can connect them to the local spots so they can feel like they can participate in the daily life of locals. And that plays into the New York question. So let me just tee it up because this is going to be the last question. We're running out of time. I think some of the backlash has been that people stop seeing Airbnb as like you go, you rent a room, you're part of a community.

56:22And that person kind of tells you about the neighborhood and shows you around. And more like people see this as a good investment opportunity. They buy seven apartments, they rent them out whenever they can. And they sort of hog some of the neighborhood real estate. And that's what Airbnb has become to a lot of people. And hence this crackdown in New York, there's something like 77 % of the short-term rentals have been taken off the market since New York had had this clamped down. We're right. I mean, I started in New York City government right down the block from the old office that I used to work at, at New York City's Economic Development Corporation.

56:50We were always pro-tech. We wanted more tech to come into the city. So it's kind of interesting to be sitting here with you now, but I'm kind of curious in this context. So I am curious what you think about, about the back, like the, the background that sort of led to this and what's happening in New York right now. I think it's hugely disappointing. It's a cautionary tale for New York, and it's a very bad decision. And I think they're going to come to regret it, and it's not popular. Let's talk about why. First of all, the statement you said that 77 % of housing stay off the market is not true.

57:19You don't know that. The vast majority is that people see entire homes on Airbnb. No, no, no. That's the Airbnb short-term rentals. No, no. I'm saying— I'm not talking about apartment rentals. I'm talking about Airbnb. Since this, it's according to Skift. Okay. You're talking about been delisted? Your inventory, Airbnb inventory has been delisted since the regulations in New York. Okay. Sorry. So yeah, a lot of it's going to be affected. It's going through a whole process where properties have to be registered. But the big challenge here is that a lot of our hosts were everyday people. I think there was this point of this thought that a lot of people were professional real estate prospectors.

58:07The way other cities have dealt with this, and every city's chosen to be a little bit different, is that they could have set up a registration system. Set up a registration system that has a night's cap. You're allowed to host X amount of nights a year. You can prove ownership or residency in that area. We will collect or admit hotel tax. And I think that what ended up happening was these were laws that were passed. I mean, there was an original law passed in 2010. There was another like registration law that was passed under the Duplassio administration. And it's just, you know, at this point, we're at this point where obviously tens of thousands of hosts won't be able to travel or be able to host.

58:47And then another consequence is this going to be that like if people are now going to travel to New York City, there will obviously be fewer Airbnbs. They're not going to build enough corresponding hotel rooms in the near term. And so what's going to happen is you're going to have more demand, less supply, and probably prices will go up. So I do think this was, this could have been a win-win. There was, I really wish there was a way we could have worked together where we could have found a system that could have worked for everyone. We could have collected remitted hotel tax. We could have had a, like a registration system that worked for everyone.

59:17I mean, we ultimately want to exist in cities in a way that works for them. And if, and, but we don't want to do business if we're not welcome. And so obviously, you know, that this is how it's played out. But I think that, you know, the thing about Airbnb is we're a hundred thousand cities. So you get to see like a hundred thousand different applications of how Airbnb works. And I think there's probably some better examples of Airbnb and other cities, but we'll play it by year. I'm optimistic in the long run. I'm optimistic that at some point in the future, we may be all be able to come back to the table and people will realize, wait, I can use Airbnb in most other cities in the world.

59:59There's got to be a workable solution for Airbnb. And maybe the question shouldn't be, should Airbnb exist? But maybe the question should be, how should Airbnb exist? Well, how should it exist in a way that helps your city? And right now, the way we exist is for stays of longer than 30 days. And the way we exist in New York is to book an Airbnb experience. We have these like three-hour walking tours or cooking classes or music experiences. But I'm optimistic that at some point down the road, there will be a way to work together, but probably not anytime soon. This has been a long, drawn-out process.

1:00:37I really do feel for the host who, obviously, a lot of them told us that they need this income to be able to pay their rent or their mortgage. and obviously they're going to have to find some other supplementary income to be able to do this. So, but, you know, we were always willing to, you know, kind of try to find a workable solution with cities. You know, Brian, one of the questions that people had for me that they wanted me to ask you is, you know, you're one of the few CEOs who's been around more than decades still running the company and they wanted to know why you're still doing it and how long you're going to stay.

1:01:12But I don't even need to ask that to you because hearing you speak about this business and hearing you speak about the company is makes it eminently clear. So I appreciate you coming here. Thank you. I'm passionate about the business, engaging with the community, engaging with our audience. And, you know, not everybody does that. And you're out there talking about what Airbnb is about and where it's going. I appreciate you doing it. Appreciate you being here. I hope we can do it again soon. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you, Brian. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Thank you, Nate Guatney, for handling the audio.

1:01:37LinkedIn for having me as part of your podcast network and all of you for listening. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

1:01:49We'll be right back.