Airbnb CEO on Why AI Will Create a New Era of Consumer Products

Brian, how are you doing?

Good. How are you guys doing?

We're doing fantastic. Welcome back.

It's been too long.

Yeah. 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 that revenue was 18%. So from 10 to 18%, which is a pretty big acceleration.

Yeah. Thank you.

And marketplaces are really, really hard, right? Like, it's kind of like gravity. Once a marketplace at our size doing around $100 billion in gross bookings a year starts 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?

You know, it's kind of funny. 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? Mm-hmm. And we basically took a very small team. Um, we, we named the team Project Why. The name doesn't really matter, but it basically, I took a very small team of people and we said, we're gonna 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 were at Rouse Street. Rouse Street was the apartment that Jordi Hays and I started. And I said, we're gonna 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 like tried to bring in like world-class people onto the team. Mm-hmm. They got very, very focused. We tried to get all the management and bureaucracy out of the way, and it's been a couple of years. Yeah, 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, the financial numbers to reflect what's happening inside the company. But I feel like we're a startup again, like more than ever before. Like 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.

Yeah.

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 ticket's down 10%, 40% people who contact Airbnb, the AI solves the problem for them. And, um, 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? Like, 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? Like, what is required to actually have success? Because I think a lot of big companies 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 are surfaced, but it never really goes through. So what, like, what, what, what, what do you have to communicate to the team that is receiving information from this new, this new quiet team?

Yeah, so it's a great thing. I mean, really what I'm talking about has played out over like really 5 years. Yeah. 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.

Sure.

So I really told teams like, hey, like I actually, I actually didn't replace the team. I took the team that was already working. I like 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. And so I basically did that group by group. And the great thing is, like, I was in massive number of details reviewing everything for years, but eventually it's like muscle memory. It's like, I don't know, an instructor or a coach. You have to teach them, but once they learn that and they have the muscle memory, like a golf swing, you can step back and now it's muscle memory. So now I don't have to be in all these details, all these teams. But I would just say a couple things, people listening, like great leadership is presence, not absence. I think a generation of management consulting or management school, management teaching taught us that CEOs should trust their people and get out of the way. And I don't think trust and getting out of the way are the same thing. Again, I think leadership is presence. And if you, if you, you should actually be partnering with your people. You should be on the field with them. If you're a, if you're a cavalry general, you should be on a horse. You should be on the battlefield. You're not like, you're not overseas somewhere else just writing out blueprints. You got to be on the field with them and you got to be leading from example. I think leadership from the front, not from the back. And so these are just some of the things we do. And I think AI is going to create like the equivalent of an AI founder mode, which is now you got to be even more hands-on. And I don't think in the era of AI there should be any pure people managers because you're so close to the details, to the data that everyone has the opportunity to be hands-on, and it's hard to imagine only managing people and not agents. So I think this hands-on approach is for everyone inside of a company.

How did Jordi Hays—

do you think a lot about what you would do if you were you from 10 or 15 years ago and you were trying to disrupt Airbnb? Like, is that— is that a helpful exercise?

And yeah, and it's slightly— and it's slightly scary because I think the I've told— I had a meeting with our team recently. I said the 26-year-old me and Joe and Nate could, could fuck us up if we wanted to. And so I told them this is what I would do.

That's because— but that's because you understand this market better than anyone else. You know, you know the key drivers. Like, I don't think any 26-year-old off the street—

hey, I'm paranoid. I think that if Airbnb sits still, I think a different group of 20 or 30-year-olds could also disrupt us. And I think that's true of every one of us. And maybe, by the way, maybe that's not true and maybe that's not reassuring because we do have a brand that's a noun and a verb. We've got a global network effect. Yeah, I think it's actually hard to build a network that may not be possible, but the software and the app— I told our team, like, we can't sit still. Like, our app is beautiful. It's really nice. Yeah, but we got to be in a world of AI native. And here's a key point I would make. I do not think a chatbot is the right interface for travel or e-commerce. That might be a radical statement. ChatGPT launched third-party apps last year in March. They shut them down. I don't think a chatbot's the right interface. It's got 4 or 5 problems. The first problem is it's text-based. You know, photos are an afterthought. The second is there's no direct manipulation. You have to type every single prompt, which is fine for a conversation, but you can't like 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. 85% of people send a message. So what I'm trying to do is—

sorry, sorry to push back there, but I'm— yeah, my wife's planning a vacation. And there's like 3-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 chatbot, I'm interested in staying in this location. I'm interested in these hotels. I have XYZ number of people and it could go and the agent could go and pull together like relevant sort of like listings or, 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 what you described. Yeah. That's not a chatbot. It's gonna be a completely different interface. It's going to be— well, I guess you'll have to wait and see. But yeah, 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.

Okay.

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 gonna move to chatbots? Or is all of, are there gonna 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-pocalypse, but have you had to process those with investors? Have you had to walk people through Airbnb strengths again?

I'm sure you did after the 2028 intelligence crisis, right?

Those are true.

Thankfully they picked DoorDash instead of you guys, Very good.

I really appreciate them picking on someone else for once. But yeah, no, absolutely. I think like there were entire— like actually when ChatGPT launched third-party apps, their stock probably went down like 7%. And by the way, I thought it was a really good idea for them to do third-party apps. I think it could have been successful, sure, but they would have needed a richer SDK for it to work and it would have like, like the App Store. Apple's App Store was good for Airbnb and was good for every company because they had a really rich user interface. Maybe this is the point I'm making. Yeah, that imagine using iMessage on your iPhone to do everything. When in fact, like, every other app has a unique interface. So what I think is e-commerce, you want a very rich user interface. It would be agentic. You could be able to have a conversation with it. You can talk to it. It could talk back to it. But I think the point is it has to be more visual. I think a text-based interface is for some solutions and a chatbot that's visual. Yeah, that would work. I'm just saying today's chatbots aren't the right solution. But the answer to your question, I had a couple of new employees, like one of our, one of our new team members is a name, a guy named Ahmed, who is the CTO of Airbnb now. He led the Llama models at Meta. And one of the comments he made to me was he said, wow, yeah, Airbnb is so much more than the app. And in fact, the app that you see is like 20% of Airbnb. I mean, we have typically 4 or 5 million people staying in an Airbnb every night in more than 100 countries around the world. So there's a lot more to do around payments, around customer service. Adjudicating everything. We have to, you know, we have a $3 million guarantee against theft or property damage for 1 million homes a night. That's $3 trillion. You know, there's just so many types of things around managing 5.5 million hosts. We have a host app. So there's a lot of things that are beyond the guest app. I actually think the guest app would be pretty easy to copy. And I think in the age of AI, you can make a better app than ours. And we want to make that app before anyone else does. And we want to be agentic. But I think the key is most of Airbnb is not the app that you use. It's mostly the offline experience. It's the operation.

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, the iMessage example is good. It's even maybe even going deeper into like old SMS because iMessage has hydrated so many things with the reactions and you paste a link and it hydrates it and it's becoming more of a visual tool. But it is a long road.

Question for you.

Yeah. Well, before you say it, one of the things is the last time I was on, I did make a comment and I'll make it again. Almost every AI company is an enterprise company. And the last stat I think I said on TVPM was like 3 months ago and the stats haven't changed. I think it was 175 companies in a YC batch and I think 16 were consumer. That trend hasn't changed. Almost everyone is going into coding. Almost everyone's going to enterprise. I think that's great. My whole point though is that the consumer experience hasn't fundamentally changed that much beyond a chatbot. And I think the consumer is a massive opportunity for AI, and I think it's going to need to be a richer user interface. I think people that want to do more things, they want it to be— I mean, the modern AI today is text, photos, and buttons. Yep. Mostly in some videos. And I think there's a more breakthrough visual paradigm that can be much more immersive. And with the new image and video generation models, you could do something so much more immersive. So the exact example you gave of trying to book a hotel, yeah, you can do it on chatbot. But there's probably some more breakthrough way to imagine that, to visualize it, to see the neighborhood, to see the map, to be able to talk to it, to understand where it is, to be able to compare photos, different hotels. There's something, I think, richer on the horizon.

Yeah, that was— I was surprised at the push into browsers last year from some different AI companies, specifically because I always— I already felt like an LLM, like the chatbots were helping me browse around the internet. It was like just double down on that and helping me find information all over the internet. I like that it's brought together in a standardized way, right? If I like the example, you know, of comparing like different hotels, right? It's nice to have it just like formatted the same way. So I'm looking at it. I'm not being like influenced. I want to be influenced by the images and like the property, but not necessarily the design of the website, right? Because that they can be disconnected. I wanted to ask if you think LLMs will impact travel in the world in the way that social media did and travel trends specifically because Instagram nowadays, like a place like Marfa in like Texas, right? It's like it's random town or, you know, artistic type town in Texas and then it just becomes a cool place because of Instagram and then, and then, and then the entire kind of, town evolves because of that. I can imagine like people researching like places to go with LLMs could ultimately drive some of that and then ultimately reinforce each other. But, but what do you think?

Yeah, maybe the simple framework is think about a travel journey. Step 1 is destination discovery. Where should I travel? Step 2 is flights. How do I get there? Step 3 is where do I stay? Airbnb or hotel? Step 4 is like, what do I do when I get there? Restaurants, activities. And Step 5 is typically like logistics, car rental services. And then Step 6 is you're in the city and then you might want to do things that time spontaneously. I think LLMs, or let's call it the LLM technology applied to, I'm arguing, a slightly richer user interface than typical chatbot will be revolutionary for Step 1, Step 2, for destination discovery and flights. Also because flights are not very hard to build. There's just 3 global distribution systems. Anyone can pipe in an API and have a flight booking app pretty, pretty quickly. And so I think the LLMs are really, really good at destination discovery. If you want to say like, hey, I want to go somewhere that's like Paris, but it's a little more affordable, it's good to go in August, I like opera, like it's going to give you like a very rich, like, suggestion of places to go. Now, I think the current chatbot doesn't have really rich maps. I think it could do a lot more visually. I think eventually chatbots or this new interface could be very video-based. So imagine a chatbot that was actually video-based or very, very photo-based rather than a little less text-based. I think that would probably be what you'd want for travel. I think what I'm describing would disrupt travel more than the current chatbots, which are more acting like Google sending referral traffic. And they actually— the referral traffic from these chatbots are converting higher than Google. And so actually the chatbots are actually additive to travel companies. To disremediate travel company, you would really want to disremediate the travel journey. It would have to be much richer.

Yeah, I feel like— do you remember that company Hipmunk? I think it was founded by some XTC founders, right?

Yeah, actually the CEO of Reddit.

That's right. Steve Huffman, right?

Wait, are you talking about Hipcamp?

No.

Hipmunk.

Hipmunk was a really cool flight booking— It was a really cool flight booking dashboard. And it would rank the flights by pain. Like a pain index. So it would say, well, you're not going to face financial pain because it's a really cheap flight, but you do have a stopover, or you do have to get to the airport super early. And so it would blend all these things together. And it's something that it feels like could be vibe coded over a weekend now.

Totally.

And yet it is weird that when I open up the App Store charts, I see ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and then it's just AI chat apps and we haven't had that breakout moment. Demis was on stage at YC actually talking about the fact that it feels weird that we have this super intelligence in the enterprise and vibe coding and 60% of Airbnb's code is written by AI now. And yet we don't have like a new AAA game or a new video game that everyone's playing. And I'm wondering, like, is that a lack of creativity? Is it a lack of, of risk-taking that there's just too much money? It's too— it's too it's too obvious to be able— if you're, if you're good in AI, just go into enterprise because you'll just raise a bunch of money, get a bunch of customers. It's really easy to make money and it's more risk-on in consumer. Like, what do you think needs to happen? Or is it just the intelligence isn't quite there and maybe the next model is the one that unlocks it?

Well, this is such a good question. I think there's like 3 or 4 factors going on. The first factor is I saw a tweet recently that I think there's like 60 new Neo Labs being formed.

Yeah.

And I've met a number of these researchers and a lot of them are interested in doing the same things.

Yeah.

And I think what I'm noticing is most of these teams are purely AI people.

Yeah.

They don't have product people or designers on their team. They're picking things like science, they're picking things like coding, they're picking things like we want to create a different type of model. This is great, but I don't know if all 60 companies should be doing the same problem. And so what you're seeing is you don't see a big focus on people wanting to do consumer. I think some people think that the AGI can just figure out consumer. I think that's maybe simple, overly simplistic thinking. I do think you have to have a point of view about consumer. So I think that's the first point. I think the second point is, you know, Silicon Valley's become more vibe and trend-based than when I came to Silicon Valley 2007, although it was back then. And one of the things I think when people see enterprise companies doing well, they go into it. And I think there's this like natural flywheel. The other thing is I know in Y Combinator, for example, we teach the Y Combinator companies to use the other companies as their customers. Now, back in the day, we would get them to use our product as consumers. But I think everyone's figured out actually it's way more efficient to get them to become customers.

It's like 5 code, 5 code gen startups all being like, you code with me.

Yes, exactly. Yeah. And so I think enterprise makes a lot of sense until everyone does enterprise. And then suddenly, like everyone's saying, consumer's hard. But you know what's also hard? Like competing with 10 other companies in enterprise doing your idea too. That's also hard. Yeah, I think additionally the image and video generation models are having a— I think Image 2 is almost like a Claude Code breakthrough. It is so good now in the SeeDance video models that I think we're about to enter this new era where suddenly going beyond text is possible. I think you're going to even be able to see real-time AI-generated interface in the next year or two. So my prediction is this has been the era of enterprise. Even ChatGPT's breakout success, I would predict that most of the revenue is going to be going to Codex. That's my— I might be wrong, but just given how much money is going to Claude, and I think in the next 2 years you're going to see a massive revolution in consumer. And I think you're going to need a couple of companies to lead the way. I think we need reference points. I mean, even me saying the chatbots, not the interface, people are asking, well, what is? And someone needs to be the one to do that. I mean, we're going to try to do our part. I'm not sure Airbnb will be the company to blaze the trail, but I think someone has to. I think in another era it would have been Apple, like the Steve Jobs era. Apple would have done that. Maybe Apple will do that, but they would have been typically the company that would have done that.

Yeah.

Are you worried that everyone is working on the exact same thing? And when I say exact same thing, I mean agents that can do things on your computer and/or, well, you know, look at the iPhone App Store chart or look at the early-stage startup market, right? A lot of companies, you know, the full spectrum of companies from hyperscalers to labs to Neo Labs to—

I'm not too worried. I might be a little worried for the entrepreneurs if they're like the 10th company doing something. I mean, like Peter Thiel was one of our earliest investors and he used to— he wrote this book Zero to One that a lot of people listening probably read. He has a saying, competition's for losers, and you want to kind of try to do something that no one else is doing. Back in the day, that was enterprise because everyone was making an app. And now I just had to be careful about being the 10th company doing something unless you're going to be a lot better decisively. It's just really, really hard in a crowded market. So you want to kind of zig when everyone else is zagging. So I'm not too worried, but maybe a little bit. And I would just encourage entrepreneurs to try to claim a space for their own. And by the way, Airbnb was that. It was kind of accidental, but like, like in 2007, everyone wanted to do like a social networking something. And we were like, it was tempting for us to try to be a social networking something something as well. It was accidental that we inflated 3 air beds one weekend and created airbed and breakfast, and people thought it was the worst idea ever. I guess it became like the worst idea that ever worked. But we carved our own space, as did Uber, and we weren't trying to be anything else. And so I kind of— and by the way, OpenAI wasn't trying to be anyone else either. Maybe they were a little bit like DeepMind, but AI was not the thing when OpenAI and Anthropic got started. So I do think there is something about not chasing trends. I think once the trend, it can be a little crowded. And to try to claim out your own space. And I would say there's so much of the US economy that AI hasn't yet touched. Yeah.

On that note, how are you talking to, or how would you talk to designers or RISD students about applying non-technical skill sets or non-AI disciplines, non-computer science backgrounds to consumer? The reason I ask it is I feel like there's a lot of pushback against AI in design communities, in colleges right now broadly. AI is not particularly popular, and there's a lot of fear of job loss. But at the same time, I'm sure the tools have changed throughout the history. And I feel like you believe that there's incredible opportunity. But I'm worried that some people are not jumping on that opportunity because they have hesitations about various, oh, well, does this displace this tool? Or how was this made? Or is this the right tool for the job? Should I even be using this?

Yeah, I'm really worried that an entire generation of designers, artists, and creative people are going to decide to sit out AI. And I think it's the biggest opportunity for creative people in my lifetime. By the way, this is not the first time designers were late. We creatives and designers were really late to the internet and web. So going back 30, 35 years, most of the prestigious designers did not get into so-called web design. Web design was considered a lower-tier, lower-status design, and they stayed with print, all the established people. And so they did not really chase design. What ended up happening was because you had a lot of these really excellent designers that did not go into web design, I think what happened was a lot of— there were a lot of good people that became web designers, but I think there became a gap between web design and engineering. You had people that, you know, maybe didn't have the full, full design skill set. And what happened was this function emerged called product management. Product management, I'm not arguing against. We have product managers, very important. But in industrial design, there's no product managers for the most part. They're industrial designers. In architecture, the architect is the product product manager. And so I think what ended up happening in web design, designers were very, very narrow. There was a void. Product managers filled that void. I'm not arguing against that model, but I think if designers sit out, what you're going to see is engineers and product managers designing for them. And I think the counterpoint is designers can be engineers and product people for all intents and purposes. Said differently, if I were starting Airbnb today, I'd be vibe coding and cloud code. And I'm trying to do it now. I'm doing it for fun. I'm not really going to be doing anything productive. Airbnb But if I was 26, I would have thought of myself as a technical person. I think all designers should think of themselves as product people and as, you know, front-end engineers, if anything. And so I think this is a boon. I don't think that the future of the internet has to be all text-based. I think it can be very visual. I think the photo and video generation models allow you to design incredibly rich interfaces. And this is, I think, the best time in the world for designers and creative people to get involved. I think they're just a little bit afraid, and whatever we can do to enlist them to just get their hands dirty— many designers are, I just think more should get involved and not be— in getting out of typical wireframes, just start coding.

Do you think— so assuming we solve this problem of not enough, you know, creative people working in consumer, we build, you know, we as a society build cool new consumer products and experiences and apps. There's something that deserves to be at the top of the App Store. Has distribution and the acquisition of customers and users changed structurally? I, you know, you were very good at SEO and Google, and there was a referral program. Do those patterns still work? Are they broken? Is there a new playbook that needs to be rolled out for anyone who has something that's great, but they need to get in the hands of consumers broadly?

I think, I think we need new patterns. This is a funny saying. I think the highest turnover job of any executive in Silicon Valley might be the CMO. I don't know for sure, but like, you know, you don't see a lot of turnover CFOs. You don't see a lot of turnover CTOs. Yeah, but like Amazon was famously— and I don't know if part of my theory is that like what works in marketing changes every few years and you have to be adaptable in your old playbook. Gets outdated. So marketing is unfortunately one of the hardest functions. I have a huge amount of respect for people in marketing cuz once something works, it almost becomes stale because then everyone does it.

Yep.

And so like influencer marketing was really successful until everyone did it.

Yeah.

And then people kind of tune it out. It's this thing called banner blindness. Banner blindness is after you see something over and over, you tend to be blind to it.

Mm-hmm.

And so you need a new tactic. So I think that a couple thoughts. Number one, I think that just like we need new interface design, new creative experiential approaches, we also need new types of marketing. I don't know off the top of my head what that is. It's probably something we haven't done before. I mean, Joe and I, we did like bizarre things, like we sold collectible cereal boxes and we like when social media was new, we were all over social media. And when, when there were newspapers, we would hunt down reporters and like try to get them to write about us. But people ask me, how do I get users? I'm like, all the tactics from 2008 aren't relevant anymore. So you got to be relevant and you got to find new tactics. The second thing I'd say, though, is you're right. The distribution is mature. When we started Airbnb, the App Store was young. In fact, the internet was still young. I mean, we could just— you could launch a website and just ride the growth of the internet. And it's hard. The internet is not growing like it did before. In other words, people were coming on the internet and hundreds of millions a year new users. So I do think distribution for consumers mature. At the same time, the top apps in the App Store are new apps. They're mostly chatbots. So what that tells you, if you do something truly breakthrough and revolutionary, consumers will still probably find it. And so that's— I think, yeah, I think the two principles are do something so revolutionary consumers will find you. And number two, you're going to have to find your own new tactics. And, you know, anything that is standard is probably stale.

Well said.

I have one more.

Yeah. 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 product 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 me is to go beyond our core business. I do think, you know, 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, but for every person who stays in Airbnb, 8 or 9 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 8 or 9 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 than the 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, other brands because they have loyalty programs. They can, you know, 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, you know, 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 and 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 of 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, like, yes, I completely agree with you. Like, the CMO who did the first billboard campaign back in the '50s probably printed legend, books written about them.

Well, 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?

And so I'm wondering, is your thesis on marketing that these things go in cycles and yes, we might be out of the influencer marketing meta right now, but it's gonna come back in 5, 10 years, who knows?

That's possible.

Or is it rise and fall and then never again?

I think these channels though, they don't go away. They just stop being like, if you do this thing, you're gonna grow like crazy. You still need to do that thing, but it's no longer an art.

Okay, yeah, what do you think?

You guys are, okay, so one thing I have to acknowledge is I think all of us, advertising works better on us than we admit. I honestly, we spend a lot on like, all these ads and I kind of think to myself, does— do these really influence people? Yeah, like, and if they do and if they didn't, we wouldn't be spending like $1 billion a year on advertising. So I want to admit that advertising does influence us more than we realize. There's, I think, a lot of studies that show like, oh, that doesn't change my mind. But you see something 7 times and it probably— even if you don't want to believe it, you might start believing it.

Yep.

So clearly it works.

Yeah.

I do think, though, the ROI of new ideas works a lot better. Just for example, we spend a lot on advertising. But the most popular marketing we've ever done is like when the Barbie movie came out, we took a house in Malibu, we turned them Barbie Malibu Dreamhouse, and it was like new and the whole internet talked about it. And the ROI of that was better than any ad we've ever done. Right. We've done things like that. So I do think doing kind of crazy, slightly unhinged things that people notice, like, I mean, you guys are successful because you're different, right? I think.

Yeah.

I think being different is the key to marketing. And so if you have a billboard, people are probably influenced, but if you— if it looks different than another billboard, it's going to work. So I think the key to marketing is to be different because you got to stand out.

Yeah, yeah. Uh, the, the, the Red Bull, uh, Baumgartner, the, the skydive from space is, I think, like a 1,000x ROI. I think they spent less than a million dollars on that, and it would— it— I think it has a billion views or something.

Something like that.

Great example of that.

Space.

Airbnb.

But if like 10 people did that, then the 10th one wouldn't work as well. Yeah. And that's probably why they didn't do a sequel and then another one and another one. They went and found something else. Let's put a plane through a tunnel or fly a, you know, a hot air balloon upside down or something.

Get a blimp. Get a blimp on Airbnb that I can go on a sky cruise.

Sleeping in a blimp.

Yeah. So that would be, that would be a, that would be a very good idea. Maybe we can talk about it.

I'd love that.

Ship it. Podcast.

Yeah, I don't know how long it takes to get to— Yeah, LA to San Francisco. If it takes me 2 days, 3 days, but I have a beautiful view.

Would you guys do that?

I would 100% do that.

It'd be good advertising for us and you.

So we say things like this all the time where we're like, oh yeah, like we'll definitely like do something. And oftentimes it's hard to schedule, but we have been talking about blimps for like over a year.

We know we can broadcast something to happen with a blimp. We've been having guests call in from their jets with Starlink and the connection is perfect. So much so that people in our chat sometimes don't know that the person's on a plane.

Okay, you've heard it here first. Airbnb and TBPn are going to work together on a blimp partnership. You guys are going to broadcast across the country on a blimp. I love it. And Airbnb's going to be a part of that. I want to make this work.

Let's figure it out.

We'll talk.

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great weekend and we'll talk to you soon.

You're the man.

Bye, guys.