Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Brian, how are you doing? Good. How are you guys doing? We're doing great. Welcome back. Yeah.
Chapter 2: What updates does Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky share about the company's growth?
Why don't we kick it off with just, you know, an update on how 2026 is going, how the business is going? What's new in your world?
Yeah, I mean, things are really good. We've accelerated growth for the first time since the pandemic. We grew 10% last year in revenue. And this quarter, we announced the revenue was 18%. So from 10% to 18%, which is a pretty big acceleration. And marketplaces are really, really hard, right? It's kind of like gravity. Once a marketplace at our size doing around $100 billion in gross bookings,
a year started to come down. It's really hard to tip that curve. So this has been a pretty big feat for the team to be able to do it.
So how'd you do it?
Um, you know, it's kind of funny. Um, a number of years ago we, so I noticed that, you know, as we got bigger, we started losing a little bit startup intensity, that startup energy. And I asked myself like, how can we get that energy back? And we basically took a very small team, um, We named the team Project Hawaii. The name doesn't really matter.
But basically, I took a very small team of people and we said, we're going to focus on a very, very small service area. And we decided to focus on conversion rate, the guest journey. And I basically tried to work with a team like as if we're at Rouse Street. Rouse Street was the apartment that Jonay and I started. And I said, we're going to act like a startup.
And the team just grinded really, really hard. We weren't working like a big company. We were a very small team, grinding really hard, focusing on obsessing over the customer experience, really looking at the data. And we really got a lot of points on the board.
And then we really started taking these pods and we really started working with the teams, trying to coach them how we worked in the early days. And I just think the pace increased, the intensity increased. We really tried to bring in world-class people onto the team. They got very, very focused. We tried to get all the management and bureaucracy out of their way. And it's been a couple years.
And in fact, we were doing this last year, but one of the things is, as you know, financial results are lagging indicators, especially when you're a big company. So it takes sometimes a while to get the financial numbers to reflect what's happening inside the company.
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Chapter 3: How is Airbnb bringing back startup intensity in its leadership?
But I feel like we're a startup again, more than ever. We're like... where we feel much younger and smaller than earlier. And I think with AI, that would be the other thing, is 60% of our code is now written by AI, which is twice our benchmark of our competitors and peers. And it's really, really helping us. AI, I think, is a huge boon to us.
I don't know if it's helped the OTAs, but it's helped us with customer service. The cost per customer service tickets down 10%. 40% people who contact me, the AI solves the problem for them. We brought it through the entire journey, so everything is really accelerating.
On the special team that went in to optimize conversion rate, I imagine you have folks internally whose job was basically the customer journey already. Then you bring in your special team, and is there some sort of culture clash there? How do you set...
people up for success to not get too political in that environment, actually see it as an opportunity for a win, some fresh eyes, some fresh ideas. What is required to actually have success? Because I think a lot of big companies that bring in McKinsey and they put together a big deck and everyone freaks out and thinks they're getting fired and maybe some of the good ideas
surfaced, but it never really goes through. So what do you have to communicate to the team that is receiving information from this new QI team?
Yeah. So it's a great thing. I mean, really what I'm talking about has played out over like really five years and the term founder mode, what it really meant that Paul Graham wrote was about me like skipping layers of management and going into the details with teams. And instead of trying, I mean, here's my advice. If you're a CEO or a leader of a company, that's big.
Don't try to change the whole company. Try to change a corner of the company. It's kind of like, don't renovate the whole house, pick like one room and make it perfect and then go room to room. So I really told teams like, hey, I actually didn't replace the team. I took the team that was already working.
I handpicked some people on the team, but I really just taught them the pace, and I would review work very regularly. So I'd sometimes review the work weekly or even daily, to just teach them a level of intensity, a level of perfection, and it was unfamiliar and uncomfortable.
And I will tell you that not everyone liked it, and some people didn't stick around the company because they didn't like that way of working, but those who stuck around, and the vast majority did, they realized, wow, actually, when the CEO is involved, it's actually easier. There's less bureaucracy. I try to make the work better. And I try to clear all obstacles.
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Chapter 4: In what ways is Airbnb utilizing AI in its operations?
You have to type every single prompt, which is fine for a conversation, but you can't add filters, you can't cook around. The third problem is it's hard to compare. A lot of e-commerce and travel is comparison shopping. If you have thousands of options, the AI has to know exactly what you want to be able to show you one or two things, but you usually want to see more choices and you get lost.
And most AI is single player. It's not collaborative. Let alone the fact that Airbnb, it requires people to have an account, that 85% of people send a message.
So what I'm trying to do is imagine... Sorry to push back there, but I'm... Yeah, go for it. My wife's planning a vacation and there's like...
three-ish hotels that we're looking at, and we're looking for specific dates, and she theoretically, I'm not saying the products are there yet, but theoretically you could ask a chat bot, I'm interested in staying in this location, I'm interested in these hotels, I have X, Y, Z number of people, and it could go, and the agent could go and pull together
like relevant sort of like listings or room types, et cetera, pricing, show me pictures, and then actually do an analysis of the trade-offs based on all the information available, as well as information in other parts of the internet and pull it together. and then she could share that chat with me, and we could both review it together.
Yes, I agree. That's the future, and that's not a chatbot we described. That's not a chatbot. It's going to be a completely different interface. It's going to be, well, I guess you'll have to wait and see, but I think the future are not apps. The future are agents, but I don't think they're going to be text forward. I think they're going to be really rich user interface.
And so I think the current chatbot paradigm, what you're describing, it can do it. I just don't think it's the best way to do what you just described. I think there's a much more immersive way to do that.
Yeah. As you think back, I mean, it feels like at various points, clearly there's been like, oh, is all of this going to move to chatbots? Or is all of is are there going to be a million competitors that are all vibe coding exactly what you have? And so is software remote? The stock has not been beaten down during the SaaS apocalypse. But have you had to process those with investors?
Have you had to walk people through Airbnb strengths again?
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Chapter 5: What does Brian Chesky believe about the future of AI interfaces?
Well said. Looking out into the future, you've ridden the growth of the short-term rental market. You dominate it now. Is the biggest opportunity to just continue to make the best products in the category, ride the continued growth of it, or do you think there's another STR size market for Airbnb?
I think the biggest opportunity for Airbnb is to go beyond our core business. I do think our core business does close to $100 billion in gross sales if you net out all the other businesses, gross booking value, the total amount of reservations going through the site. I think that could probably double one day. I don't know how long that one day is,
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 200 billion. I think there's a market much larger than Airbnb, which is hotels. Again, hotels about eight or nine times the size of Airbnb. I don't think we'll ever be a hotel dominant site, but we are going more aggressive into hotels.
A fun thing is that about half the hotels in the world are independents and boutiques. They're not chain hotels. And they're not really happy listing on the OTAs because they pay a higher commission to chains. A lot of these independent hotels are being forced or they feel like their hand is being forced to franchise to Marriott, to Hilton or other brands because they have loyalty programs.
They can negotiate lower commissions. So we think we can be a distribution channel for these boutiques independents. That is a multi-billion dollar market. I think another one would be services. There's no Amazon for services. And think about like you can hit a button and a car can pick you up.
you can hit a button and food can be delivered to you but what about hitting a button having 80 other things possible you know i don't know if any one market is large but if you add up the 80 different service verticals that to me is another pretty big market and then maybe the last one is like living stays longer than 30 days more and more people have a job via laptop more people are nomadic more people are moving around
That's another really big market. So I think for Airbnb, we're looking at really expanding to a lot of different categories. And I think that's where most of the growth is going to be in the future.
Do billboards in San Francisco work on you? Going back to marketing, it's one of these old things where, yes, I completely agree with you. The CMO who did the first billboard campaign back in the 50s, probably printed legend, books written about them.
The billboard campaign that worked over the last couple of years was just buy so many billboards that people are like, wait, how did this company buy so many billboards?
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