in his only interview airing less than
30 minutes before the close of the
stock's debut
ceo and co-founder brian chesky joins us
from san francisco
wow i mean brian when you look when you
look at the floor where back in 2007 you
and your roommates decided to rent that
air mattress
what goes through your mind today as you
go public
yeah well i mean i started airbnb
my roommate and i in 2007 actually
couldn't afford to pay rent
and a design conference can come to san
francisco hotels sold out
so we inflated some air beds and we
called it air bed and breakfast
and if you would have told me back then
13 years later that we'd be having this
interview i
probably would have thought you were
crazy
yeah well i mean that's the thing about
founders they
they think to themselves will this ever
work but it actually has and i find it
so fascinating
that as you look at when you look back i
guess the timing of the ipo had to be on
a sliding scale because of the pandemic
why now what made you say you know what
we're not through the pandemic yet
but we're still going to take this
chance yeah well i mean you know we were
planning to go public this year
when we um in january and like kind of
most people's plans 2020 got turned
upside down and we put our ipo on hold
and
it probably was quite unlikely for most
people to fathom
in the spring that airbnb would go
public this year but of course
something happened and what happened was
over the summer people started getting
in cars
and wanting to travel nearby and staying
in homes
and because of that um our business
started recovering
and it started it started coming back
and at that point we
decided you know what you know we're not
you know we're not out of the woods here
but you know we are
feel confident enough that this is the
right time to bring some additional
shareholders onto
um as part of the company and we really
want to make sure that like you
mentioned host hosts can participate
in this company as shareholders and
others as well who really i think
see airbnb for what makes it different
brian i want to go from
that silver lining moment in the summer
that you point out
back a little bit and let's talk about
let's say march and april
when you guys had the pandemic shock the
system
what were those first early days like
almost like you know
the ship is starting to sink you grab
the life vest but let's make sure we can
plug these holes describe those couple
of weeks
well that's exactly what it felt like i
mean i
um very few people run a business that
drops 80
in eight weeks and lives to tell about
it and if that ever happens you have to
act very quickly and i convened our team
i said three things number one um you
know
we have to be incredibly decisive two
we have to act with all of our
stakeholders in mind and three
we better we better ask ourselves how we
want to be remembered
if we are even lucky to be remembered at
all and i think that kind of gravity
makes you
act very quickly and make a lot of what
we hope will be viewed as a lot of the
right decisions and
you know it was just i i i feel like i'm
you know 39 going on 59 or something
because it feels like we had decades
worth of decisions
to make kind of around the clock and it
was really hard and you know you never
you feel your responsibility and it
becomes abundantly clear
when in the trying moments of a crisis
people are depending on you you feel
that
you feel that responsibility as more
than ever
well you have both the employees who
depend on you and of course the host
let's tackle the employees you had to
lay off about
25 of your employees around 1
900 as i understand uh have you hired
back some of them
and when do you foresee bringing all of
them back into the fold
yeah it's a great question so we have
hired some of them back and then just to
um just to go through what happened when
we had to lay off employees one of the
ideas that somebody our team had i
thought was a great idea was let's
create
a directory that people can opt into an
alumni directory
and so we can publish this directory and
if recruiters can then
reach out to them so people know who's
available we did that and we had almost
half a million visits
to the alumni directory so a number of
them got jobs i'm very happy for them i
presume they're happy
but we would welcome uh we would welcome
employees back for sure
now now to be very clear we are not out
of the woods um you know we want to hope
for the best
plan for the worse anyone who like was
in the business of predicting the future
is probably now
like not doing well today and so but
absolutely
we are encouraging people to
absolutely revisit joining airbnb
uh the great jack welch who ran ge for
so long used to say that there are a lot
of good businesses out there but to be a
great business
you have to survive a near-death
experience
where does the pandemic rank i mean it's
i'm hearing from you it sounded like
something along
those lines you know i remember the
depths of the crisis
there were news articles in the news
articles some of the headlines where
will airbnb exist in the future
and is this the end of airbnb but i'm
also just
you know i i this company was born in a
crisis in the crisis of 2008
and you know we couldn't afford to pay
our rent and i think that you know you
have to have optimism
even in your darkest days you have to
believe that things will eventually get
better
that these are moments in time and some
people their fortune comes faster than
others
but you know i i think there was a real
lesson here of
just kind of persevering being
optimistic
but also i know that we're only here
because of those who helped us
those who believed in us and we are
incredibly lucky to be here that's not
lost to me how lucky we are
you have a very motivated audience uh
cheering on your luck because they're
thinking about buying the stock
right now as they watch the climbing
countdown you know you first became
profitable in the second half of 2016.
by 2018 you were making uh money i mean
200 million profit but then by 2019 you
lost about 322 million
that was before the pandemic what do you
think
you'll have to do to get yourself up to
profitability once again
well i mean i think we made a lot of the
key decisions to get this company into a
very
very good kind of uh kind of disciplined
place
i mean we are more focused than we've
ever been and we are focused on a
problem that we think is a huge one
which is
allowing people to feel like they can be
insiders and locals when they travel and
be able to do that
those who make that possible are our
hosts we're trying to unlock
as many people as possible becoming
hosts millions of hosts
we also in the middle of the pandemic
shut off marketing very few people can
turn off the equivalent of nearly a
billion dollars of marketing and see
and see what happens what we did and
what we found is that
our traffic levels came back almost at
2019 levels and the reason why
is because there's i think quite uh
quite a quite
quite a lot of recognition and love for
the brand it's used as a noun
verb around the world and so i think
there were a lot of things this crisis
revealed the real
how adaptable our model is it revealed
how strong our brand is
and it also made us more disciplined and
more focused we were already in a path
to
becoming more focused and disciplined
but this took like years of progress and
pulled that up forward and i think we're
a better company
because of a lot of the changes we've
made
and you're benefiting now from the work
from home movement
obviously because some people say work
from anywhere
so they're thinking well if i'm not
going to be in the office let me go from
a yurt
in who knows where so these are real
opportunities that have
suddenly begun to present themselves
tell us
about what you're seeing as far as the
work from home
movement oh yeah i mean it is huge so
what we're basically seeing is a world
where everyone's on zoom or a lot of
people are on zoom is a world of
flexibility
and you're right a number of people are
saying well if i don't have to go into
work right now if i'm going to work from
home
i don't know if i work from this home i
might go to another home and so we're
seeing a lot of people
working not just from home but working
from airbnbs and what that means is that
like length of stay is obviously
something we're closely monitoring but
you know most people don't realize that
14 of our nights booked last year were
for longer than 28 days
so most i don't think most people
realize like we have a very robust
monthly uh you know monthly stay
business as well we're also seeing other
kind of really interesting
use cases like college kids who can't go
back on campus but don't want to live
with mom and dads or staying in airbnbs
or people that are visiting family they
just don't want to live with their
families they're getting an airbnb
nearby
there's so many use cases occurring i
don't i can't quite tell you
which of these will are temporary and
which of these
are permanent although i'm pretty sure
that we're going to be living in a world
of flexibility and more people are going
to be working from other homes that
seems
like not a huge leap of faith but more
importantly if you can't predict the
future maybe the best thing to do is be
able to adapt to it and i think our
model has proven that we're quite
adaptable
well you have to adapt because this
pandemic is a moving target
yesterday the united states marked its
worst
numbers of deaths since the pandemic
began
more than 3 000 that's more than the
people who died on 9 11.
are you seeing any cancellations and i'm
interested to know particularly in
california which is suffering not to
mention let's say
idaho which has the highest rate
yeah we are we are we see cancellations
i mean just to give you a point of
reference
um when the pandemic initially broke out
and the world was sheltering in place
we had more than one billion dollars of
cancellations that were put through the
system
um that yeah and so i mean you know we
try to be as flexible as possible with
our community
and it's always a tough balance because
you'll have hosts
who are really depending upon this
income but the way we try to do this is
we try to work with local regulators in
cities
and countries all over the world we're
in 220 countries and regions actually
run a hundred thousand cities and so
it's definitely not one size fits all
but we try to do
our very best to work with regulators
and health professionals to make sure
that people are putting themselves in
harm's way
one of the health professionals we
actually hired is the former surgeon
general united states under president
obama dr rebecca murthy
by the way dr murthy is now he was named
by president-elect biden
to be the co-chair of the kova task
force and we actually hired him before
that over the summer
to implement a um enhanced cleaning
protocol to make sure
that our airbnbs met the standard that
he could
you know he could really stand by and
more than one million hosts have met our
enhanced cleaning guidelines
the airlines are suffering severe cash
crunch
how dependent is airbnb on the health of
the airlines who are dying for more
government money
i mean you know airbnb like you know
half our business last year
uh around was cross-border travel
obviously people going from one country
to another and
most of cro a lot quite a lot across
border travel um
requires you got an airplane so we are
very
uh much you know dependent as the rest
of the travel industry is on people's
ability to fly
i do think the difference between airbnb
though and maybe other travel companies
is we are just more adaptable
because we have millions of hosts who
have spaces all over the world you can
use them for many different use cases
and what people are basically doing
right now is they're getting in their
cars
and they're drowning dr driving a few
towns over up to 300 miles away
and so we've been able to adapt by be
able to serve that use case
but when people do get on planes and
when they do cross borders
that will obviously be a huge benefit to
our host
what is the most important goal that you
now have as a ceo and how do you avoid
you know the first day of trade great
but how do you avoid being that ceo who
lives and dies by the stock price and is
constantly checking it
well there's an old saying um by um an
economist who said
um that in the short run a
stock price is a voting machine but in
the long run it's a weighing machine
and so you know i think the way you
think about it is to just
focus on this game over a very long
period of time i mean listen
i'm 39 years old i started this company
with my two friends i was 26 so i've
been doing this
for 13 years which is quite a long time
but i intend to do this for a very long
time to come
and of course this price will go up it
will go down
but i tell our company to focus on the
things we can control and we can't
control the stock price
so trying to focus on something that you
can't control
is not super productive but what we can
control is to make sure that like when
people come to
me they have an amazing experience and
so i want our company
just completely focused on that problem
making sure we take care of our
stakeholders
we're doing our first airbnb this
christmas so we we shall see yeah i've
taken the dive brian thank you so much
for joining us and good luck and
you've got to come back once again
please do absolutely love to thank you
for the invitation