I'm very honored to welcome our CEO and cofounder Brian Chesky.
Thank you.
Thank you everyone.
Thank you.
Thank you everyone, how's everyone doing today?
You guys feeling good?
It's pretty crazy to be here in front of so many hosts.
I actually remember the first time
Joe and I had a meet up here in Paris.
We had about thirty hosts here and it was almost all of our hosts.
We could fit in a small back room of a bar.
So it's pretty amazing to be here today
and I wanted to thank everyone for coming.
Thank you so much.
You know, being a host,
I think a lot of times we're misunderstood.
Not only are we sometimes misunderstood,
I think sometimes beyond misunderstood,
sometimes we are even attacked.
A lot of people say
I don't want to have strangers in my building.
I don't want have Airbnb in my neighborhood.
And when people say that,
I think what they're saying is that they don't understand
what we do as a host.
One of our core values at Airbnb,
it may very well be the most important core value at Airbnb,
is to be a host.
And what I wanted to talk about today
is what it means to be a host at Airbnb.
When people see hosts on Airbnb and they don't understand us,
I think a lot of times the reason why is they are looking at us
and they see spaces and they see houses.
I don't blame them.
You come to Airbnb.com you come to the app
and you see our homes and you see spaces,
and what they miss it is not about our spaces.
It's actually about you. It's about me.
It's about the host themselves.
What airbnb is about, it's not just about a house.
It's about a home.
And there's a difference between a house and a home.
You see a house is a space. But a home is place
where you accept people as if they're family.
Being a host is about caring for somebody else.
Being a host means that you make someone else
feel like they belong.
And I hope that people, when they see Airbnb,
they understand that single point that it's not about a space
but it's about a host and a host makes you feel
like you belong.
Now this is something that we realized
in the really, really early days.
That very first weekend. October 2007.
Joe and I, we decided to rent our apartment.
We couldn't make rent.
So we created the Air Bed and Breakfast.
Now here's the funny thing.
Our tagline at the time was "Air Bed and Breakfast:
A cheap, affordable Alternative to a hotel".
That was the tagline. Because why else would you stay
with two guys and a few airbeds
unless you were so broke and so desperate
that you could never afford to stay in a hotel.
I mean that was kind of where our heads were at.
We ended up building this website and we had three people stay with us.
We had Catherine.
Catherine was a 35-year-old woman from Boston.
We had Michael.
Michael was a 45-year-old father of five
from Utah who slept in an Airbed in our kitchen.
And then we had Amol. Who's actually originally from India.
We did all the typical hospitality things.
We picked them up from the airport, we provided them OJ.
I got poptarts.
And we gave them a map to the city.
But something much deeper happened than that.
We spent a week with them.
And when you spend a week with somebody.
Well let me put it to you this way.
Imagine you were to meet somebody out on the street
and then you get to know them. How long will it take before
you get to know them well enough that you're friends
and you invite them over to your house for dinner.
It might take like a year. Could take longer.
And what hosting does, is it takes that year long friendship
and it compresses it
into a matter of just a few days.
And so what ended up Happening for us
was that Michael, Catherine and Amol.
They actually came to our house as strangers
but they left as friends.
And I think that we've all had this moment
switch on in our heads, in our hearts
and this is the kind of interesting thing to happen.
A couple weeks after Catherine, Michael and Amol left,
Joe and I get an email. It's from Catherine.
Now Catherine's originally from Boston and Catherine emails us
and says "Guess what guys, I had such a good time
visiting San Francisco, I'm moving there".
Well it gets better. Because not long after that,
we got an actual letter in the mail. And this wasn't a little letter.
This was a big envelope.
And we opened this large envelope and it was a wedding invitation
to Amol's wedding.
And I wondered how many hotels would have gotten
that wedding invitation.
And I think for us, that was the moment that, you know
this light switch turns on for you and you start to realize
this is about something so much more.
I've been able to travel the world and go to dozens of cities on Airbnb.
Here's the really cool thing, when you travel on Airbnb,
you experience a city through its people,
through its host.
You don't experience a city through its monuments.
You don't experience a city
through its landmarks.
Those aren't culture. You know what culture is?
It's people. People that are alive,
in their homes. And that's what we do.
This is an idea that's been around for a long time.
We didn't invent the idea of hosting.
In fact, I think the idea of hosting
has been around as long as there’s been people.
It would've happened thousands of years ago around a warm fire
with some strangers and some friendly faces.
And the modern idea of hosting has been around before Airbnb.
But what didn't happened before us was I don't think we all knew
that everyone of us was out there. We couldn't see each other.
And so when the platform came online, we connected together.
And not only has this been Around for a long time.
I think hosting will be around forever.
Hosting is not going anywhere.
In Silicon Valley, like where we come from in San Francisco,
there's a lot of talk about technology companies
disrupting the way people work and the way people live.
But I'm going to tell you one thing right now,
technology is never going to disrupt hosting.
Tom Friedman is an author and he says there's three types of jobs:
Jobs with the hand, jobs with the head,
and jobs with the heart.
Technology first typically disrupts jobs with the hand.
For example,
100 years ago almost everyone was a farmer.
Today there's not a lot of farmers.
Machines have automated a lot of farming.
Technology then, eventually disrupts jobs of the head.
But what technology can never do,
technology can never disrupt jobs with the heart.
And hospitality is service with heart.
Machines cannot create belonging.
Only people can do that.
Only a host can do that.
So while robots are disrupting people all over the world,
actually it turns out that you are disrupting robots
in all the mass produced hospitality around the world
that would otherwise permeate.
We are a community that knows no boundaries
of culture and country.
I know we have hosts today from Spain, right?
We have hosts today from Brazil.
We have hosts today from Japan.
I know we have a lot hosts today from here in France, right?
But we also have a lot of hosts today
from far reaching places in the world.
We have a host today, as we saw, from Greenland.
We have a host today from Uzbekistan.
We have a host today from Kazakhstan.
We have hosts from Sri Lanka.
We even today, have hosts from Cuba.
This past January, President Barack Obama
lifted the travel restrictions
for United States travelers to be able to go to Cuba.
And that really enabled us
to be able to allow Cuban hosts in Airbnb.
Now Cubans been hosting
for a lot longer than Airbnb has been around.
This has been going on for a generation.
And today we have 2,500 homes in Cuba on Airbnb.
Thank you guys so much.
We're a community
that knows no boundaries of culture or country.
But not only that,
I think we're also a community
that knows no boundaries of generation.
In a lot of technology platforms,
kids and young people are the first people to adopt a technology.
And they start using it. Then it gets really, really popular.
Then eventually their parents start using it.
And the moment their parents start using it,
the kids run away.
They go somewhere else, it's no longer cool.
Our community is different.
On our community, the kids, the parents and even the grandparents,
all use it and all live together and it's cool to do that.
Now why is this? Why is this community different?
I think to understand the community
is to understand the power of belonging anywhere.
You see, when you belong, you don't exclude other people.
Belonging means a culture of inclusion.
And that's what this really means to us.
You know hosting has changed so many lives.
And it's even had an impact on my life.
It really taught me for the first time
how to care for a stranger.
And I think when you learn how to care for a stranger
you become kinder and more generous person.
And growing up in our house, my sister and my parents,
we never had strangers in our home.
It was kind of a crazy idea but I'm so glad that we discovered it.
So today many people don't actually understand us.
But that's going to change.
Because they are going to see not just our house,
but who we are in our hearts.
And part of that is I want to make sure
is one of the gifts that we can give to you
is to make sure that people actually do understand
who you are and what you stand for as a host.
That's one of the greatest gifts that we can give to you.
And to be able to do that,
one of the most important groups that should understand you
are the cities that you live in.
How can you succeed as a host
if you don't even feel like you belong in your own city?
And so it's very important for us that we communicate to cities
who we are and what we stand for.
And what we stand for in cities, is a just very basic idea.
And that is that we exist to enrich and strengthen the cities
and the neighborhoods that we serve.
As part of this, there's really 3 commitments that we are making
to the cities that we are in and that we serve.
The first commitment is something we've been doing
for a while but we want to make it clear to cities.
That we will always collect remit hotel tax.
And we're going to continue doing that going forward.
And we want cities to know
that is an ongoing commitment at Airbnb.
The second commitment is about sharing our information.
The less cities know about us, well there's a saying,
“the absence of information is sometimes filled
with the worst of assumptions.”
And so that we want to make sure,
not that cities get the private information of host,
but they understand the type of hosting activity
that happens in their city.
And I really think that when cities actually see the kind of hosting
that is happening in their city,
they're going to learn a couple of things.
They are going to learn that there's people
that would not have been able to afford to go to their city
that are now going to their city. They are staying longer.
They are staying in the local neighborhoods
and they are spending their money on the local businesses.
And this is great for cities. And it's great for neighborhoods.
And we just need to make sure we get out the word
of what we're actually doing in cities.
And our final commitment is about affordable housing.
This is something that's been in the news a lot lately.
Affordable housing is in the roots of our company,
in the sense that Joe and I had a house that we couldn't afford,
so we started Air Bed and Breakfast.
We don't want to be part of the problem.
We think we are and will continue to be
part of the solution.
And we're going to partner with cities and we're going to partner with you
to make sure we are part of the solution.
With these three commitments,
it's my true belief that we are going to strengthen
and empower and enrich the cities that we serve.
And by doing all of that,
while today some may not understand us
or think that what we do is limited to the space we provide.
I'm quite sure that tomorrow people are going to understand
that our mission is your house, it's you the host.
It's us and it's what we provide.
One day a child may ask their parents what it means to be home.
And today that home is where the family lives,
but tomorrow that home is limited to just where you belong.
And where you belong will be anywhere.
And maybe that will remind us
of a principle that you've all taught me.
It's a very simple idea.
It's a good reminder that hosts teach us,
that is that people are, in the end, fundamentally good.
So thank you so much.
Thank you guys. Thank you.