Brian Chesky - Scaling Airbnb, Founder Mode, and What’s Next for Travel | Prof G Conversations

We had 500,000 people stay in an Airbnb for the Paris Olympics. That's equivalent of like eight Olympic stadiums where the people and 50,000 new homes were listed on Airbnb just for that reason. When Taylor Swift came and she did her international tour, you can literally predict her tour by looking at the rising occupancy of Airbnbs. And it was like a massive phenomenon. And her tour generated a bigger business lift than some giant international events that would be in these cities. Okay. Here with Brian Chesky, just a upfront disclosure, Airbnb, I am a shareholder. It's one of my biggest holdings. I'm a big fan of the company. Anyways, enough of that shit. Brian, where does this podcast find you? I'm actually in New York though. I usually live in San Francisco. I'm in Airbnb's office here in New York. Got it. I've always thought, I mean, we'll come back, we'll talk specifically about Airbnb, but I've always said you guys are a great forward looking indicator of where the economy is headed and travel trends and consumer spending and what people are spending money on. What can you provide insight into in terms of the economy and travel trends as evidenced by what's happening on your platform? One of the things that I think is so notable in the last year was this, the year of events on Airbnb, you know, you saw the Paris Olympics. We had 500,000 people stay in Airbnb for the Paris Olympics. That's equivalent of like eight Olympic stadiums where the people and 50,000 new homes were listed on Airbnb just for that reason. When Taylor Swift came and she did her international tour, you can literally predict her tour by looking at the rising occupancy of Airbnb's. And it was like a massive phenomenon. And sure tour generated a bigger business lift in some giant international events that would be in these cities. So we're starting to see like a lot of more people want to gather for events. And why are they doing that? I think people are desiring connection. They want to get out of the house. They want to have a shared experience. They want to have the experience of other people. This often involves traveling more and more people are not living in the same city as people they grow up with. And so they have to travel to see them. They do more of these annual trips together. We're seeing a huge boom in ski destinations. That's like really popular. It's like the Austrian Alps, Italian Alps, the French Alps this winter, seeing a lot more people go to Southeast Asia. So basically the summary is that travel is going strong. I think that it's just the very beginning. You know, I think as emerging middle classes form, the form of the first things people want to do is travel. And as the economy is strong, more people will travel. So that's what we're seeing. I've heard there was sort of this revenge travel trend after, after COVID and that I've actually talked to some hotel operators saying that actually travel has started to wane a little bit because people kind of got there at it scratched. And now it's starting to come back a little bit. Are you seeing the same trends we're seeing is like what I would describe as like probably the, the post pandemic kind of equilibrium. So during the pandemic there was like basically three things didn't happen. People didn't go to cities, they didn't cross borders and they didn't travel for business. And so you had this different type of travel that we benefited from that hotels didn't, which is people getting in cars and staying in big homes and more rural or like less urban destinations. Then you had this huge boom, which I think was a little bit of a natural amount of pent up demand. I think the pent up demand is now subsided and now we're in the new world. The new world though is quite a lot of travel and I think it's going to continue to grow, but it's definitely not like the pent up demand era of like 2021 2022 now we still grow because we grow through all that. Any trends in terms of demographics around who's traveling more, who's traveling less and what it says about the health of our economy. There's a lot more people are traveling in groups. You know, before the pandemic it was a lot of like solo travelers and couples. Now it's families. And um, I think there's a couple of explanations for why. I mean one obvious demographic shift is like, Scott, I mean, I started coming out as 26 I'm like a millennial and um, and most 26 year olds don't have families, but like essentially there was a big question when people are in their thirties and forties, do they age at Airbnb or do they keep using Airbnb? Well, luckily for us, the answer is they kept using Airbnb and a lot of those people now have families. So there's a whole generation of people that started as single people. Then they used Airbnb for like couples travels and now they're using a family travel. Additionally, I just think a lot of families are now realizing Airbnb is a better solution for a lot of travel than hotels. We have this big advertising campaign. It's kind of a almost like a references the Mac versus PC campaign. It's kind of like Airbnb versus hotels. We kind of show that for family travel for group travel, like people being able to stay in a house, be able to cook together, not be separate in different rooms is really compelling. So that's probably the big one. The other one we're seeing, we're seeing a couple others. People are staying longer. The length of stay is going up. And I think maybe the answer to that explanation is people more flexibility, right? The fact is like 10 years ago, it would be unthinkable for you and I do an interview unless we were in the same city together. And now with zoom and this technology, we can be able to do that. So I think there's a lot more flexibility. And then I think people are just shopping to more locations, right? I think, you know, before everyone went to Rome, everyone to Paris, everyone to Vegas, everyone to Miami, they're still going to all those places, but they're also going to a lot of smaller towns and cities and different destinations. I think social media drives that because there's a lot of new destination discovery on Instagram, Tik TOK and others. So I follow you and I read your earnings releases and you talked about a new feature you guys are working on called the cohost network. Can you say more about that? You know, Airbnb, we're only as good as the homes we have. And you know, one of the keys to Airbnb is we want to make sure everybody's affordable. Well, let's take a city. If a city doesn't build housing, what happens to the price of housing? It typically goes up. If we don't have enough Airbnbs, then the price of Airbnb goes up. So we need to add a lot more supply, literally millions and millions more homes we want to add in the coming years. The number one reason people don't list their home on Airbnb is because they perceive it as being too much work. And it is for some people. And let's say like you live in New York and you have a summer home in Florida, or maybe you may be using it in the winter actually. And you want to put it on Airbnb, but you're not physically there. So either you can't host or you go on Google and you type like, you know, Airbnb property manager and a third party property management company that has nothing to do with Airbnb could take over custody of your property. But why that is a problem is the average five star rating for third party property management Airbnb is only like 4.62, which is not nearly as high a rating as individual hosts. So we thought what if we like took a marketplace approach to this? What if we paired homeowners, people with homes that don't have time that want to make extra money with people that have time, they're really great hosts in Airbnb and they would like to expand, but they don't have access to property themselves. And so that's exactly what we've done. We built a network of 10,000 co-hosts. These are the best local hosts. The average rating is 4.85. So these are like great hosts and we'll match you with them. And the other thing is not only do we match you, Scott, but we built this really elegant in a software integration. I think when you, if you can't get your hands on it, you'll, you'll hopefully agree that it's a really beautiful, seamless integration. So they can manage everything about your Airbnb or just the bookings or just the cleaning or just the checking in of guests. You negotiate the rate with them. And so, you know, it's pretty turnkey. Let's break down the economics. I own a place in Soho and I decided, all right, I want to monetize it or I'm going to get some return on it. And let's just say I can rent it out for 500 bucks a night. I rent it out for five bucks, 500 bucks a night. How much would I typically end up paying to Airbnb and how much, if I totally wanted to outsource it of that 500 bucks would go to a co-host. I'm trying to figure out the net to the owner. We have a blended take rate of 15%. So now, now if you, if you rent it out for $500 a night, you actually get 97% of it because we withhold 3% and then we add an additional about 12% additional guest fee. But let's just keep the math really simple. And let's assume that you're saying $500 a night is what the guest pays, right? Just to keep it as simple. So it's 500 times, uh, you know, 0.15, you know, and that's 75 bucks. Yeah. So that's $75. And then, you know, with a co-host, you'll probably negotiate between 10, 20, 30% take rate. And it's basically what you negotiate and how much they take home. So I think it's very reasonable even with a co-host that you could take 60, 70% home. We'll be right back. You strike me as sort of ground zero for a company that could potentially leverage AI. I want to understand how you're using AI, where you've seen real ROI, where it may have been overhyped. I'm just curious as a, as a business owner that I imagine is being pitched by, you know, I imagine you and Sam have had a lot of conversations and that there's a lot of AI companies that would love to put out a press release saying we're the exclusive AI partner, and maybe you've already done this with Airbnb, but I would like to get one, how you're using AI and two, just as a business person who has real insight into technology, where you think AI is under hyped or overhyped. I think AI's long-term impact on society is perhaps underhyped. I think that, you know, anyone that has a child today, the world they're going to grow up in is going to be so fundamentally different than they can imagine because of what happens when computers can essentially think. And I think it's going to change society. But I remember in like, I don't know, mid 2010s, there was the self-driving car craze and people were saying in 2014, 2015, that there would be very few people that would be driving cars, that driving a car would be anachronistic like riding a horse and you'd only do it if you enjoyed it. And while that's probably the long-term truth, we're almost 10 years post the self-driving car craze. And it's still very rare to see a self-driving car on the road. And so I think the lesson here is that this technology is going to have a much bigger impact on society than probably think, but it's, what's that old saying? You overestimate what you can done in a year and you underestimate what's possible in 10 years. I think we in Silicon Valley do that all the time. We invent a technology and we think society is just going to adopt it and it's going to take a lot longer. And so I think that all of us were way too Pollyannish when Chachabit launched. And I think we all thought all of our businesses were going to change in three or four years. And honestly, like if I just like, I don't know, here's a good test. I opened my phone, I look at the apps on my home screen and I ask how many of these apps have fundamentally changed because of generative AI. And I really can't say very many have, maybe the algorithms are marginally different. There's some interesting kind of on the margins filters that are possible because of AI, but their experience is not that different than a pre-AI startup. So I would say, if you think about the stack, you've got the model, um, sorry, you got the chips. There's a lot of development there, mostly just NVIDIA. Now there's a huge amount of development at the model level. Obviously open AI was the kind of, was the frontier model, but there's so many others, but there's been very little innovation on the app front. And I think all of us are trying to basically figure out like what is the application interface paradigm, um, in a like AI world. One of the comments that Johnny Ive made, he's a designer that I work very closely with. He designed, you know, almost all the products between iMac and, you know, iPad, beyond as he noticed that there was a user interface paradigm of the graphical user interface formed in the 1970s, popularized in 1980s, basically a mouse and a point and click. And then you had multi-touch introduced in 2007 with the iPhone. So a lot of startups are starting to work on these new layers, but, um, you know, mostly what these startups are doing is scraping data, the kind of same data that open AI would scrape or the data that, um, Google would scrape. And they're just trying to do marginally different interfaces by doing these kind of pseudo, you know, assistance, but the systems are very Chapa. And I think a chat bot is just, you know, you know why I don't think a chat bot's the right interface for the same reason that like I have a messaging app, but I don't want to use that to do the calculate like to, to, to do a computation. I want to open a calculator and I have a different interface for the calculator. So in other words, I think every job wants a different interface. And I don't think we can revert to that, like the universal Chapa interface to be able to handle all these different tasks. It actually is very inefficient for things like travel. I don't think a chat bot is the way to book travel. So that's like my general commentary. Now let's take Airbnb. Um, I think the thing that will first get revolutionized through AI via Airbnb is customer service. Um, just to give you a sense, we have a very Scott, very difficult customer service challenge. We get more than 10 million calls and chats a year. Um, they come from people in every country in the world. And a lot of the calls are urgent, like I'm locked out, there's a problem. And we often have to adjudicate disputes between a guest and a host that don't even speak the same language. And you know, because we're travel, we have a lot of seasonal workers, right? Like, and so the seasonal workers is a lot of turnover. And, um, so you often call a customer service agent that is seasonal and a lot of them are new and they're trying to handle like adjudication between guests and hosts. And there's like a hundred different policies and the policies can be like a hundred pages of documentation. And so AI can be the frontline. It can basically speak like speak every language. It can be 24 seven. It can be the corpus of all your policies. It can also look at the last million times something happened and say, based on that, this is the best predicted resolution. And of course, it can be a tool for customer service agents to provide better service. So I think customer service is the first thing that's going to be reinvented at least in the e-commerce space because of AI. And then I think the question is, can you bring that customer service paradigm to search? In other words, can search be not a chat bot, but a slightly more conversational experience where it's not like the Amazon paradigm where it's a search box and filters, but it's a little bit more of this app that's getting to know you, understanding you, it's more personalized. And that would probably be phase two. I've sort of, and I might have this wrong, but I was really just fascinated by the meta earnings call. I think it was turning calls ago where he said, and I've never seen this before. We've increased our revenues 23% year on year while decreasing our head count 20%. And what I've generally found the analogy I would use is that AI is a little bit like corporate ozempic and that it is, it turns off the signal we have as managers, CEOs, and directors that just because we're growing doesn't need, we need to eat more or in this case, we don't need to hire more. Have you thought, and I realize this is a difficult conversation for CEOs to have, but has AI given you the sense to maybe rethink if you need more employees and to see how technology can make you more efficient and what's happened to your employee head count over the last 12 months? I went through one of the first big layoffs in Silicon Valley, you know, since the pandemic, we were like a well-known layoff. It was made up of 25% employees, but actually we lost like almost half the employees cause we also had to cut 10% of contingent workers. And then when you're a travel company, a pandemic, like people tend to leave you for other hotter fields or other industries. So we ran the experiment of having significantly fewer employees against our will. We weren't looking to do this and something remarkable happened. The remarkable thing happened is that we actually started getting more work done with fewer people. And it was partly because there was a massive communication tax and that like people are in meetings all day and they're in meetings all day cause people create meetings and you can try to impose things. But it was just, it turned out we had too many people probably. And we never would have realized that until we kind of ran the experiment of having fewer people and we actually started getting a lot more done. So then I mentioned this to Mark Zuckerberg and I'm close to him. And I think he kind of realized that there were a lot of efficiencies to be gained. And obviously he made his decisions with this year of efficiency. I think he found that there was a huge communication tax and that they probably had way too many people. Now it's hard for a CEO because you don't want to always be on the side against hiring people. I'll say this. I think that most startups raise too much money. They hire too many people. I don't think that has to be against workers. I think that they can just be redistributed to other companies that we should fund more companies. There should be more startups built, but that startups should probably not hire so many people. I think that's a general view I have. AI I think is making people marginally more efficient, but I've not seen yet a massive displacement of workers because of AI. Whether it's customer service, we still have mostly agents doing it. And then software engineering, it can make software developers a lot more efficient, but it is not reducing our workforce. And actually the way this would probably work is we'd probably, if AI made everyone more efficient instead of downscaling the employee base, we'd probably try to get more revenue per employee. So we wouldn't be eliminating jobs. We would hope that the revenue per employee would increase so they have more leverage. And we're starting to see this. We're starting to see that what we're seeing is our headcount is only growing in low single digit percentages year over year. And our revenue is growing faster than our headcount. And I'd like that to continue. And so a metric of revenue per employee or free cash flow per employee hopefully will massively increase. We won't have fewer employees. We'll just do more revenue. So you had a bit of a viral moment. You probably weren't planning this. And I just want to say, I thought your comments were sort of taken out of context around founder mode. Talk a little bit about what you meant. And yeah, it kind of, it kind of went wild. Everyone, my favorite meme was I'm going to go founder mode on this breakfast burrito. Founder mode question mark. Let me say this. I'm not sure anyone really knows that founder mode is because Paul Gurren would essay about it, but never described exactly what it was. So let me just give a little bit of backstory. I was asked to go to see a Y to Y comedy or alumni event. It was the first time they got basically a hundred startups that are, you know, like around a billion dollar market cap or higher later stage companies. They did a basically like a, like a, the quote of a conference, they had different speakers. I joined last minute. It was off the record. I remember they'd tell you like, you're going to do this talk and no one's ever going to know you did this talk. It's off the record. There'll be no knowledge of it. So I do this talk off the record and I basically described my experience from 2009 to 2019 going through hyper growth. But the problem was I was told a certain philosophy of leadership, which is you hire, you know, hire great people and entrust them and empower them to do their job. And that sounds great, but there was a big missing piece of the puzzle, which was being in the details and being close. And I had let go and I've noticed this paradox that the more I let go, the more dysfunctional company got, the more people thought it was leadership meddling. And so the further I got from the details of the company and I would hire these people and I thought they were doing a good job and I would find out years later they weren't doing the job I thought they were doing because I wasn't close enough to the job. So I think Paul Graham wrote this essay. It was a very compelling essay. I think the theory is a really great way he framed it, that there's this orientation that is germane to founders, which is being in the details, having real ownership of your company, which is different than a classic manager mode. But to be clear, I never said this was something exclusive to founders. Basically the general principle is being in the details and being very, very hands on. And it's this basic idea that great leadership is not absence. Great leadership is presence. And then the counterpoint is, well, what about like, isn't this sound like micromanagement? Isn't this micromanagement? And no one wants to work for a micromanager. And here are my two thoughts on micromanagement. Number one, I actually think like a lot of people are afraid to get into the details because they'll be accused of being a micromanager. And I actually think a lot more leaders would benefit from being in the details and model more hands on leadership. But the other thing is what Steve Jobs said, because what I took from founder mode, a lot of it was what I learned observing Steve Jobs. And Steve Jobs said he didn't believe it was a man, a founder, a micromanager because he said that what I do is I'm in the details, but I'm partnering with the people. And if you ask Johnny Ive, I don't think Johnny Ive thought like Steve Jobs was a micromanager, but Steve Jobs visits the design studio every single day. They had lunch every single day together. They were talking. Steve was steeped in every detail of the design of the iPhone, but he wasn't telling Johnny what to do. They were having discussions. They were partnering. And I think that's the key. I remember one time I had an employee and they asked me, is this your decision or is this my decision? And I said, that's exactly the problem. Every decision should be our decision. This notion of this black and white decision-making authority between owner and worker, manager and employee is, I think the problem that you're kind of partnering with people in the details, working with them. And so that was probably the single most important philosophy that as a founder or as a leader, you set the pace of the organization. You set the standards of equality. You set the standard of how much you care. You identify excellence that you work with the leaders on the ground and you don't defer to them, but you don't tell them what to do. You're constantly partnering with them. And the one reason you shouldn't defer to your leaders is because oftentimes you'll have different leaders come from different functions with different interests and they'll conflict. And you're the only leader, or maybe if you're a general manager, you're one of the ones that can actually consolidate and have the most global view and make the most macro decision based on all the different inputs. So let's talk a little bit about the company and the stock and your public company CEO. So you can plead the fifth on anything here, or just say you can't comment, but your revenue is two and three quarter billion most recent quarter. That's up double digits. That's up 11% year on year net income, over half a billion, 555 million, representing a net income margin of 20%, which is very healthy. Adjusted EBITDA of about 894 million up 9% year on year and represented an adjusted EBITDA margin of 33%. These are solid numbers. Airbnb generated a billion of free cashflow in Q2 and 4.3 billion of free cashflow over the trailing 12 months, which is I think the most you've ever done. Now the bad news, since the company went public, it's first trade to retail investors. And I figured we went public four or five years ago. It's effectively flat. If you purchase a stock, you're effectively flat. I mean, there's been some bumps and some, some ups and downs, but is this a case of where quite frankly, you went public in a market. It was very frothy and the company is growing into that valuation. You know, at some point investors are going to get, or shareholders are going to get restless and say, this is a great company that's growing. How come it's not reflected in the stock price? What is it? Is a CEO, is it you're going to continue to block and tackle and just continue to stay the course? Do you think it might involve acquisitions moving forward? But what would you say to a shareholder who's been in the stock the last four years? And quite frankly, it's underperformed the rest of the market. I think there's a couple of things going on. I think that beginning of 2020, we had a private market valuation of 30 billion and the pandemic hit and we raised debt and the warrants were priced at 18 billion. So that might be the best proxy for evaluation in May of April, 2020, we were 18 billion. Then we, our goal in the summer was to go public at 30 billion. Like we don't want the last round investors to be underwater. So we would like to clear 30 billion. And then by the time we priced the stock, we priced it at 50 billion. And then the first day of closing went to a hundred billion and that was crazy. And it was not what we expected. I did not think the stock would pop a double. If I did, I probably would have increased the issue price. And we probably at that point had a valuation that was a little ahead of our numbers. We were not generating a huge amount of free cashflow. We were not profitable on an EBITDA basis in 2020, the market was super frothy. So now, you know, there's this old saying, you know, you're never as good as they seem. You're never as bad as they seem. We're really as good as they seem in 2020. I don't know. Maybe we've got a little frothy, but we're certainly not as bad as people say now. You know, those that are, that are a little bit cynical of the company. I mean, you know, you know, you mentioned we did like over four billion free cashflow. We have one of the highest free cashflow margins in all of Silicon Valley. You know, we put out a little bit softer guidance for a quarter and that like, really made it, had a huge impact on the stock price because investors they'll like kind of forecast a subtle change in growth rate over the next five or 10 years. And it massively changed your valuation. What I would just say is the following. I'm 43. I intend to, you know, continue to run this company for the coming decades. I want to build one of the great defining generational companies and I've spending a lot of energy taking Airbnb, which was basically a noun and a verb. That's one vertical and trying to do what Amazon did in the late nineties, which was take a platform, e-commerce platform that's designed for books and bring it to everything. And I think that there's going to be a massive amount of category expansion for Airbnb beyond short-term rentals. So you're going to start to see that next year. We have some really exciting ideas that we're working on. But beyond that, there's a huge amount of growth in our core business. And I would just point to a few things. Number one, quality control. We are now bumping up against the growth rate of what Airbnb can kind of grow, but it's growth rate without better quality control because we are now an alternative to hotels. A lot of hotel travelers comparing Airbnbs, and they want the similar level of consistency and quality for every person who stays in Airbnb, nine people stay in hotel. If we can get one of those people to stay in Airbnb, we double the size of our business. And then you've got international markets. You know, most of our business is in like six or seven countries. So we're in 220 countries, but most of our businesses in US, Canada, Australia, UK, France. So there's so many opportunities in Asia. I mean, there's many countries in Europe, Latin America, where there's huge growth expansion. So that's the next frontier. Okay. So without revealing your corporate plans, I think of Airbnb loosely as you're great at monetizing fellow assets and creating community. And that might be the wrong description, but that's how I think of it. So what are the most monetizable assets? People's homes. You're kind of in that. Next would be commercial real estate. I could see, I don't like apparel. People have tried that. It isn't working. I could see private jets. I could see, you know, this, what am I missing? What are in your view without giving? Oh, you're, you're missing the biggest one of all people's time. So like Skillshare, tell us what you mean by that. Well, what do I say without saying it? There's a lot of services that are available that we could go into. So imagine Amazon, they had books, but they went initially into DVDs and CDs when those existed. And then all these different retail categories. So we're looking at, let me just break it down for you. So you have short-term rentals, which are corporate, you have long-term rentals, long-term rentals would be defined as 30 days or longer. So that's the same asset, but for longer stays and seasonal, that's huge. Then yes, you do have like car rentals and boats and other large assets. They're not as big as your house, but those are your next biggest assets, your life. But again, the biggest asset are people's time. So services and experiences would be a big opportunity for us. But as far as like going down the list of those categories, there are dozens and dozens of categories, but I'll kind of start to accidentally talk and reveal our new product if I do that. But just to double click on that, I'm outstanding at installing energy efficient HVAC and I'm in Delray beach. And I'm very good at installing solar panels or installing soapstone kitchen counters in homes that need this. My problem is new business. Can I see an environment where I put my services and pictures and photos similar to the way you would advertise an apartment on your platform and you bring them a bunch of business and assure a certain level of quality and exchange for that 15% fee, everybody wins. Is that, is that a logical extension? That's a logical extension. It wouldn't be the first extension. We would probably start with things a little more adjacent to travel and to hosting an Airbnb, but down the road, almost any type of service. I mean, not, I don't want to say almost any type of service, but many services including building maintenance, cleaning, interior design, you know, upkeep your property. We, you know, we built the COAS platform. That's COAS network we built. We took lessons from Amazon and the lesson from Amazon is don't build a book marketplace based on ISBNs, build an abstracted marketplace where you can sell diapers and books and a number of things on the same platform. So that's what we've done. We basically rearchitected the entire platform. And so there's many services that could use the COAS network. And then on the demand side there were, you know, I'll probably stop there because there's, you know, but you'll see, there'll be more things coming. And when you're thinking is kind of 2025, the year where you start rolling out testing. Every year I made a statement on the earnings call. I, I believe I can stick with it, which is every year from now on, we're going to launch two to three new businesses or verticals that we believe will one day generate an incremental billion dollars of revenue or more. So you're going to start to see those next year. And will you do this organically or will you make small tuck in acquisitions to give you a headstart? Primarily organically. And the reason why is because similar to Apple, when Steve ran it, we're a functional organization. And so it's kind of difficult organization to plug in like businesses because then they become divisions. But you know, if they're small positions or it's extremely compelling, we'll always take a look at it. And I mean, I would just say like a lot of entrepreneurs really want to work with Airbnb. They're very motivated. I think we have a very entrepreneurial culture, especially for an S&P 500 company. So it is a very appealing place for an acquisition candidate. Well, let me just ask you this. You've got a $85 billion market cap, sorry, 84, $85 billion market cap. Lyft the number two has a $6 billion market cap. So you'd have to pay a premium of 8 billion or 10% dilution. Why wouldn't you take a flyer and become the number two? And then maybe the number one in terms of sharing or monetizing people's cars. I mean, these are like, and there's, I think there's a lot of opportunities. One of the, one of the frameworks that Jeff Bezos had, I think, is this idea of perishable, non-perishable opportunities. And I think doing an acquisition, most of his acquisitions are not perishable. I mean, maybe someone else could take them out, but we generally think that we want to get a little more momentum in the core business, get to a little bit larger scale before we tried to absorb large companies and large acquisitions. So that's kind of why we've tried to build our muscle. Having done acquisitions in the past, they're very, very time consuming. I think acquisitions benefit larger corporations because they can absorb the acquisition, right? I think of smaller company struggles with just the administrative. You think of yourself as a small, you're $84 billion market cap. You're by far and away the largest hotel company in the world by number of rooms, growth. You have solid EBITDA. It's just funny that you think that way. I would think that. Compared to what we're going to become. And by the way, we only have 7,000 employees or so. I think Uber has like 30,000. So yeah, maybe today they're double the market cap, but they also have like four to five times the number of employees. So we're actually a smaller company from an employee base and people realize we tried to build like this, not a Navy, but like the Navy SEALs, this lean elite group. But I think this is just the very beginning. Like I got to tell you, Scott, I'm 43, but I have more energy, more motivation and more passion than I was when I was 26 and I was running this company. But I just see endless opportunity for this company. I think we've done a lot of the hard work to rebuild our company from the ground up to be prepared for this next phase where we can take Airbnb and bring it to more business models around the world. So I mean, yeah, it's just, maybe it's a mindset, you know, Jeff, like Steve, Steve Jobs said, Apple's the world's biggest startup. And he, you know, I think you know what he means by that. Jeff Bezos had his version. He called it day one. It's all basically is the road in front of you longer than the road behind you. And for us it is. So I pitched you on this idea privately 18 months ago and the statute of limitations are over so I can pitch it to you publicly, but Airbnb plus or whatever we call it. And I pay 50 bucks a month and it does a few things. One, when I'm in a city, I have access to cool gyms like an Equinox or whatever. I have access to concierge services, but more than anything, it's a thinly veiled aspirational community slash dating site. And that is I travel so much. And when I'm in a town, I'm almost always alone. And I find myself at five or six or 7pm thinking, I don't know what to do. And if there were other entrepreneurs, if there were other academics, if there were other people from New York or just locals, what about some sort of Airbnb plus community offering? I think it's incredibly compelling. I think you've sold me. I'm in, listen, 18 months ago I was in when you told me, and the only reason we haven't done it is because we had really foundational things. People were complaining about Airbnbs aren't affordable. They were complaining about our customer service. They were complaining about like there were a lot of things. There were a lot of complaints. And so I felt like, well, we got, we got to get our house in order. We still have to grow into this valuation. We have to generate a real consistent profit on a pre-casual basis. And we have to address a lot of these issues that customers are brought up. And over the last two years we made 430 upgrades and improvements. So yes, we are now looking for this expansion. I've always believed that there was some type of Airbnb membership model, not necessarily a points program, but where you get access. And I, I guess my only question back to you is, are you available as an advisor? Oh, Jesus Christ, Brian. You're so full of shit. I'm always available. I love this company. We're going to talk privately after this, but I think it's a great idea. And I generally do see Airbnb as a community. I mean like in, in, you know, Berlin tonight, there are tens of thousands of Airbnb people that are staying there. We can match them together. They can do variety of things. Those local businesses would love to have specific travelers and they could tell us which travelers they want. And we could target just those travelers. I think there's a social overlay here. And that is, I think that there's a crisis or an epidemic and loneliness. A hundred percent and young people aren't connecting in a safe environment where they, they want to know each other and want to want to establish professional and personal relationships. There's a lack of third spaces. You know, people aren't going into work. They aren't going to church. They aren't participating in organized athletics as much. And I think that you guys are in a position to provide third spaces on a, on a pretty big scale. Look, I, now I'm going to sound like your mother here. Last time you were on the show, you spoke about feeling like a 61 year old and you were 41 there. So 43 year old's body working 18 hours a day, essentially living like a monk during the pandemic to scale Airbnb from 18 to 85 billion. So over a year later, have you been able to make strides in reconnecting with your personal side of your life? Do you found as if you found more balance or is this still kind of an ongoing journey? No, I it's been a major change for me. I'm kind of three changes. The first change is I've gotten much healthier. I was always into exercise, but I've, I think a lot of entrepreneurs, we glamorize sleep deprivation. And I think until recently, no one was talking about the benefits of sleep. But I think only like five last five or 10 years. But when I started, like it was a badge of honor to never sleep. And I do that for years. And you know, we didn't really like, we weren't that healthy and I'm much more healthy now I'm sleeping more exercising. And I think, I think that's a good trend in Silicon Valley that like people seem to be much more mindful of health and fitness. That's the first thing. Um, second thing is I'm spending a lot more time with friends. And I, one of the things I do with friends is I travel, you and I talked about like one of the great ways to have a shared experience is to travel with people. And like, that's a great form of memories. And I do that. And then I've started to, um, the third category is like I'm single and I'm 43 and then I waited longer than ever thought I would to meet someone and have a family, but I do desire to have a family. And so I've been dating a little bit and hopefully I meet someone. And you also said on the professional front, you talked about your desire for Airbnb to have a next act, your Disneyland, your AWS, your iPhone moment. Yes. Give me a moonshot crazy idea that you wouldn't, people wouldn't expect from Airbnb or Brian Chesky. There's so many, but I'll just pick one based on the conversation we've had. Loneliness. People are lonely. I think there's a massive way that we can facilitate people meeting one another. So I'll give you an example. If you travel by yourself, you ever go to a restaurant, you got to eat at the bar by yourself. And sometimes all the time. Okay. It's literally one of my favorite things and it's pathetic. Yeah. Yeah. And it, I do it too, actually. Um, you know, I do go to the bar and sometimes by myself get food and I like it, but I have no alternative. Like if I'm traveling by myself, that's the only choice. So what if we could basically pair and meet travelers together at restaurants, prebook reservations and bring travelers together. Taylor Swift, um, number two, she like, um, obviously had this incredibly unprecedentedly successful concert tour. And we noticed in Europe where her concert was, we saw this massive rise in Airbnb bookings. And what if you can pair, what if you could sell concert tickets on Airbnb, but not just sell concert tickets, but you could actually pair people together to go to the concerts. They can meet one another. Um, and we could go down the list of other types of things like pickup sports. So there are kind of things you might not think of as Airbnb, but if we're talking about, um, difficulty meeting one another, there's a lot of ways we can pair people together. So I think the most not obvious biggest idea would be Airbnb becoming like a social network in the physical world, not an online social network, but essentially a physical social network where we're matching people together in real life around events and shared experiences. God, I just thought of it. You should take on live nation. Um, by the way, I love the idea of you sitting alone at a bar and everybody being like, isn't that Brian Chesky? By the way, you know what I call it when I see, I'm not young nor a billionaire and not as good looking as you. You know what I call eye contact at a bar when I'm meeting alone, a prostitute. Anyways, there you go. All right, Brian. Brian's literally turning red. Great way to land this interview. This is great. He's literally turning be red here. Brian Chesky is the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb. Since launching in 2007, the firm has grown to a community of over 5 million hosts who have welcomed more than 2 billion guests in almost every country across the globe. He joins us from New York. Brian, you know, I'm an enormous fan of you. I think you're, you're not only a baller professionally in the world of tech, but I think you're just generally speaking, a good person to think about the Commonwealth and what's good for society. And we don't always have that peanut butter and chocolate combination. So thanks for your time. Oh, thank you so much, Scott.