November 2016
THE ORPHEUM THEATER in downtown Los Angeles is packed by the time Chesky takes the stage. He is standing in front of some two thousand hosts, guests, press, and Airbnb employees. In a highly stylized keynote, he walks the audience through the company’s big reveal: a vast menu of five hundred new, bookable experiences, ranging from burlesque dancing to astrophotography to Korean embroidery, all hosted by locals. Chesky unveils a whole suite of bells and whistles: local meetups, restaurant reservations, recommendation tools organized by passion (gluten-free Los Angeles, anyone?), a series of guided audio walks. He teases that car rentals, add-on services, and something involving flights are coming soon. It will all live on the new Trips platform, of which homes will be just one part. “Everything that we do, and everything that we will do, will be powered by people,” he says.
The audience members cheered and rose to their feet. They were a concentrated core of the most engaged members of the Airbnb community: The hosts who made the pilgrimage to LA had sheltered a collective 745,000 guests among them, and over the next three days, they were drenched in all things Airbnb. They heard CMO Jonathan Mildenhall talk about building the “world’s first community superbrand.” They learned about the company’s social good efforts, got interior design tips, and communed with the data science team at the Dashboard & Insights Bar. James Corden had a field day ribbing the Airbnb concept during the Bélo awards, accusing the audience of secretly staying in hotels and insisting that he’d caught the founders trying to make some extra cash by renting out their front-row seats. Later that night, there was even a surprise performance by Lady Gaga.
And yet amid all the festivities, there was an undercurrent of the serious challenges still facing the company. After Chris Lehane’s talk, during which he reported that Airbnb community members had formed more than 100 home-sharing clubs and sent 350,000 emails to elected officials in 2016, a number of hosts lined up at microphones to ask pressing questions: why did New York institute “draconian rules”; what can the company to do to fix it; and, more importantly, can the company fix it? A Superhost from Dallas asked: How we can be great neighbors when regulators’ biggest concern is party houses?
Outside on the last day, members of the local Unite Here hotel workers union staged a loud and angry protest, marching down South Broadway waving signs, banging a drum, honking horns, and shouting through a bullhorn. Moments later, during a fireside chat between Chesky and Ashton Kutcher, a protester crashed the event and made her way onto the stage, decrying the company’s listings in Israeli-occupied settlements in the West Bank. (Kutcher leapt from his chair and defused the protester with a friendly greeting before launching into an impassioned plea for Airbnb: “If we share our homes with one another, we can get to know each other and bring each other together in a peaceful unity that doesn’t have borders!” he shouted as the audience members rose again to their feet. “This company is about bringing people together and about loving one another!”)
But the disruptions were hardly noticed by most attendees. The final session of the last day was a Q&A with the Airbnb founders. The hard work of the new platform launch was behind them and they were finally able to relax and even reminisce a bit about the company’s earliest days. Chesky and Gebbia recalled Blecharczyk’s state of almost constant exasperation with their ideas. They told the story of the investor presentation they put together one night that projected their revenue three years in at $200 million. When Blecharczyk told them that number was ridiculous and investors would see right through it, Chesky and Gebbia agreed to change it to $20 million. But the next day, when the slide appeared during the pitch, it read $2.5 billion. (“I wish we had a picture of Nate’s face as he was sitting in front of a VC with us saying the market size was $2 billion,” Gebbia said. Blecharczyk pointed out the number referred not to market size, but to the company’s revenue: “There’s a big difference.”)
It was a rare moment of nostalgia just at the moment the company was stepping into the future. But the past may always be with this company. As big as Airbnb has become, the odd, strange peculiarity of the original idea—letting strangers sleep in other strangers’ homes—is something that still runs through its DNA. This, too, was reflected in the conversations on stage. “Being an early adopter involves being brave,” Gebbia had told the audience earlier. “It means being OK with being called ‘weird.’” He pointed out that when cars were first invented, regulators forced them to go four miles an hour, and that even the fork was once considered the “tool of the devil.” Lehane, for his part, compared resistance to Airbnb with resistance to the introduction of electric street lights in the late 1800s.
It makes for a fascinating study in the trajectory of a disrupter. Airbnb is one of the largest privately held technology companies ever, in the midst of a major step into new businesses, with many of the biggest names in the corporate world behind it. And yet it’s a company that is, in many ways, part of a fringe counterculture still in search of recognition.
Time will tell whether the new Airbnb businesses are a success. After the Open, it was right back to business as usual—which included, in New York City, beginning to figure out exactly what working with the city on enforcement would look like.
Navigating all of this is precisely the challenge that comes with bold ideas and big change, and it should be no surprise that the challenge only becomes bigger and the stakes higher the larger the disrupter gets. As Gebbia pointed out in his talk, there are “no blueprints” for what the company is doing. “With global hosting, we’re charting new territory,” he said. Nine years in, Airbnb is indeed still doing just that—with all the attendant opportunities and consequences. And for that reason, as colorful and complex and successful and fraught as this company’s history has been so far, the Airbnb story is likely still just beginning.