Airbnb CEO: Why AI is the best thing to happen to us

Oh, you're welcome. Happy to be here. And I just want to say two off the top. We did not plan to look alike like two Brians, like two fit guys on a box. Like we didn't plan this out beforehand, like, you know, definitely not. But good to see you. This is earnings day. Numbers look to be good. Like what do I what do I need to know?

This is the fastest we've been growing in years. I mean, I think a really simple way to think about it is last year our revenue grew 10%. This quarter alone it was 17%. It's really, really hard for a big company to accelerate growth. It's like gravity. Growth rates want to go down the bigger a company gets. I've learned this the hard way. And so, I just wanted to just just call out our incredible team. It's very, very hard to do what they pulled off. And the way we did it is we have this innovation model that we really kind of built a few years ago that I modeled after the original part of Airbnb where I got these small little elite teams focused on problems and then I kind of we brought it throughout the entire company. The second thing is AI is the best thing that ever happened to Airbnb. You know, I think there's just going to be some winners and losers. I think mostly AI is going to be good for most companies and we are one of those companies that really benefits. We're shipping more things we ever have. We hired a CTO at the beginning of the year, Amod Malviya, who led and created the Llama model. So, he is absolutely on the frontier of AI research and he's become a great CTO for Airbnb. We are putting AI features throughout the product. And I think Airbnb's the kind of company that would really benefit. You know, I do not think it's ChatGPT is the way people are going to book travel. It might be the way to discover destinations. I think we're just getting a lot of great benefits from AI. So, that's what I would say. Great team execution, lot of innovation, AI is leading to acceleration and therefore we believe we're taking market share.

And it's especially hard for marketplaces, right? If you're like a company that uses a product, you can release a hit product. Marketplaces are very very difficult. They kind of have a little bit of a mind of their own. I think I attribute it a few things. Number one, you know like a lot of people thought our core business was mature. Our you know, homes in the United States that we've saturated it. It turns out our US business is accelerating. Our business in Canada, in Australia, UK, France, these really so-called mature markets are not mature. We have a huge amount of room to grow. That's number one. Number two, again this innovation model means that we are shipping nearly twice the features that we were a couple years ago and they're significantly better quality. You know, AI has really really helped us be able to do this so much more effective. Everyone has access to AI but not everyone's using it equally and I think our team is really in the leading edge. I also think there's so many new opportunities we're developing. Hotels, service experiences. Not only are they generating incremental revenue, but they're making our core business stronger. I'll give you an example. You know, we're going pretty big on hotels now. But one of the things that surprised me was when somebody books a hotel on Airbnb 55% of time when they come back to Airbnb they book a home. So, there's a whole bunch of people that are being introduced to Airbnb the first time by hotels. So, we're getting all that business, but then they're also coming we're getting homes. So, it's a bit like a flywheel which is actually how Amazon grew. If Amazon was just a book seller, they would have been a small company. But what Amazon learned in the early days is every time they add something, not only they add more revenue, but it makes the other categories stronger. So, you might call it a flywheel, and I think that's what's happening.

There's two things happening. You're totally right. The first thing happening is that, you know, older customers are starting to flock to Airbnb, and I think, you know, that you might call them late adopters, right? Not early adopters. The early adopters were the young people, the later adopters were wealthier, a little bit further along, used to staying in hotels, and I think that is one of the dynamics. And I think part of that's adding hotels, part of that's just a product getting higher quality, you know, part of it is just late adopters finally trying Airbnb. Part of it is a lot of families are realizing a home is much better than a hotel when you want to travel the entire family, you want to sit around a kitchen, and you don't want to all stay in one bedroom, and have to go to bed the same time. So, I think that's one of the things. The other thing, and this is almost kind of funny, it's so obvious, but the great thing about young people is more of them every year. And so, when you are in a business of really having young demographics, every year, like you entire new cohort comes on. So, like let's just take me. I was 26 I started Airbnb. I was a young person, and like I created it with my two friends for people like me, meaning other 26-year-olds. Those 26-year-olds are now 44-year-olds, and many of them have families, have more money. So, a lot of the young people are becoming older, they're having more money, they're getting their parents to use us, but then we're also getting the new cohorts. And so, there's not like this Facebook versus Snap or TikTok where like we're the old cohort, but we're losing the new cohort. We're still getting the young audiences. So, it's really both sides. We're growing on Gen X, we're growing baby boomers, but also Gen Z.

I feel it's crazy. I'm like I used to be the youngest person every room and now I'm the middle-aged guy in every room and have me on a few years I'm going to be the oldest guy in every room.

Oh my that's such a good question. I would answer the question by just telling you the chapters I think that existed. I think the first chapter was having this crazy idea and it working. I think we went on this crazy rocket ship and I'd say that was chapter one. Product market fit hyper growth. I think chapter two was the pandemic, staring into the abyss, losing 80% of our business, having to rebuild the company from the ground up, going public, realizing oh my god we're like a 90 100 billion dollar company we have to grow into that valuation, rebuilding the foundation, and beginning to really be a grown-up company. That was chapter two. I think this is the third chapter and I think this is us reinventing ourselves. I think we're reinventing ourselves by becoming a marketplace for short-term rentals. Really a one-hit wonder to much more of a community. A global community that's built on trust where you can travel and live anywhere. Meaning there's homes, there's hotels, there's services, there's experiences, and there's so many more line expansions. And I think that's the new chapter we're in. Essentially the chapter of reinvention. It might be similar to when Amazon went from books to everything or adding AWS or when Apple went from the Mac to the iPod. You know, that next wave of growth. And I think that's the new chapter we're in. And I think that explains the re-acceleration that we're now investing in growth.

No, we're just getting started. We haven't achieved it. And I think we're a year or two out from achieving it if it's even achievable. First of all, it's unclear if a super app in the United States is possible. They exist in China, WeChat most notably. Maybe the App Store, Apple's App Store is the super app. And the question is, can there be another? But I do think that we're about a year or two away from, you know, probably a year to 18 months if I put a timeline away from Airbnb becoming a fundamentally bigger service area, you know, like and I don't know if it ever deserves the title super app. That's a very, very tall mountain, and I don't know if it's ever happened in the United States. But I think that like a year, year and a half from now, we're going to say, 'Wow, remember when Airbnb was, you know, providing mostly just homes and then we had this little services and experiences business.' I hope that's what we say, you know, in the next 12 to 18 months because I think you're going to see some really, really big things happening over the next 18 months. You know, we're literally just getting started. For every business you see, there's two, three, four businesses being incubated that we haven't talked about that are launching.

I think there's two things, two ways to answer the question. The first is what are all the things that a guest or a customer can get on Airbnb. And, you know, there's short-term rentals that people know us for. There's the experiences we launched. There's some of the services we've announced, but there's about 50 to 100 things. And it doesn't mean we're going to do all 50 to 100, I'm not going to sit here and list them all, but there's a lot of things. Now, what they all have in common is traveling and living. You know, we're not going to go into broad e-commerce. We have no intention necessarily of doing that. But within traveling or living, there's so many things that we can offer. So, that's kind of one way to answer the question. The other is just to think about capabilities. We're going to go way deeper on identity. We have more than 200 million verified identities on the internet. In the age of AI, you're going to want to know if people are real or not on the internet. That's a solvable problem and a useful solution. We're going to get much deeper with preferences, understanding people's preferences. I think people now with AI, with chatbots, are used to the chatbot remembering things about them. Well, we can also remember things about them. That technology is not proprietary. So, having preferences stored, more robust profiles, having we built the payments platform before Stripe existed. There are so many more things we can strategically do with payments. What all these capabilities have in common is Airbnb becoming more of a platform, not just being a platform for short-term rentals, but more of an extensible platform where you can do a lot more. And so, I think that's what these things have in common. Are you a big believer in AI agents?

Um yeah, I am. I mean, I think there's a lot of nuance and I am a huge believer in the agents. I want to caveat by saying I'm not a huge believer that chatbots in their current construction or even coding agents are the solution for everything. I think that we are in like listen, if you were to double something 10 for 10 years, it's a thousand X, right? So, that's a good metaphor. I think we're in the beginning of a thousand year journey with AI so to speak. Does that make sense? So I think like Claude code's amazing. Most people are working in terminal. I think chat GPT is like very useful, but it's kind of still being used for most people as an interactive search product. And I think we've barely scratched the surface for what's possible with AI. And as I spend more time with AI, I've been shocked that everything people say about AI is an understatement about its possibility. Because I think everything we're saying with AI is limited to the current form factors of large language models and coding agents. We've made very little progress on video. We've made very little progress in photo in people's daily life. We've made very little progress on completely new native AI interfaces. We've made very little progress with voice command. Most people talk and yet they're entirely typing on their computer. So I still think this is really early. Maybe a simple way of saying it is we're getting really really deep on enterprise, but there's been very little progress on consumer AI. I think chat GPT is about what we've seen and I think that's the beginning. So I'm a huge proponent in agents, but I think the current construction of agents has been pretty limited and I think that's why daily life hasn't really changed, right? Like as big as AI is, very few people's lives are that different than when chat GPT launched. So the real question is the internet has changed our daily life. The iPhone has changed our daily life. When does AI change our daily life? And I can't say for sure because we're not going to be necessarily the ones to do that. We'll participate, but my prediction is the next two three years you're going to see a renaissance around consumer AI that is going to begin to change daily life. That's my prediction. And so that's my answer to agents, which is they have to be useful to consumers to do regular daily things.