Airbnb, Inc. (ABNB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

March 6, 2023

NASDAQ US Consumer Discretionary Hotels, Restaurants and Leisure conference_presentation 32 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Brian Nowak

analyst
#1

Good afternoon. We're thrilled for our next fireside chat keynote with Brian Chesky, the CEO and Co-Founder of Airbnb. Brian, good to see you again.

Brian Chesky

executive
#2

Yes, it's good to be back.

Brian Nowak

analyst
#3

Yes. Great to see you live. Before we get started, let me do all the disclosures, I love those. Please note all the -- it's the easiest part for me. Please note all the important disclosures, including personal holdings disclosures and Morgan Stanley disclosures appear on the Morgan Stanley public website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures, and they're also at the registration desk. Some of the statements made today about Airbnb may be considered forward-looking. These statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could actual results to differ materially. Any forward-looking statements made today by the company are based on assumptions as of today, and Airbnb undertakes no obligation to update them. Please refer to Airbnb's Form 10-K for a discussion of the risk factors that may impact actual results. So there's always a lot of things going on in the macro environment, the macro travel environment, and from a micro perspective Airbnb.

Brian Chesky

executive
#4

Micro?

Brian Nowak

analyst
#5

Micro, yes. As we're sitting here now versus a year ago, maybe talk to us about some of the things that have changed the most from a macro perspective and a micro perspective that have you excited about Airbnb going forward.

Brian Chesky

executive
#6

Yes, yes. Wow. Well, maybe I can give a like kind of sense -- it's been evolving since the pandemic. So I'll give you a sense. So before the pandemic, we were primarily a budget travel site. It was like $100, $110 a night. 80% of our business was either urban or cross-border. And we didn't have as much penetration of vacation rentals. We didn't have as much penetration at the higher end, and it was more short stays. And then, of course, the pandemic occurs. Probably the biggest change of travel since World War II or maybe the great depression. And I think that travel has changed forever because of the changes during the pandemic. And what's happened, I think a lot of things have changed. But I think the biggest thing that's changed is suddenly, people have realized they can do their entire job from a laptop. And just because I think more financially or to a company, people are still going back to the office. But there is an unmistakable trend is that people are permanently more flexible. And if you can do more of your job from a laptop, that means you can take that laptop anywhere. And that means an entire generation of people have had newfound flexibility. I kind of wonder if I was 23, what I live in 1 city, or when I start to hop around and be more flexible. And what we saw was suddenly when borders closed, cities were closed down, people weren't traded for business. People were locked in their homes, and they figured I need to get out of the house. And what they did is people started traveling nearby to destinations about a car drive away. What this did is it expose people to travel in nonurban areas, vacation on rental destinations, nonurban areas, even remote places off to be in path. That's the first thing happened. The second thing that happened is we used to be a business for basically solo travelers and couples. It was basically a way for like people in the 20s and 30s to like travel to Europe, by yourself or you're maybe a partner. But suddenly, a lot of people wanted to actually get together their friends, and so they started booking bigger homes, and that was the second thing that happened. And the third thing that happened is because people didn't all have to be back to an office, they start going away longer. And then during the pandemic, now about 1/5 of our nights booked are longer stays. All of those trends, as long as you believe that Zoom is here to stay, then you believe that these trends are here to stay. And I always like to look at young companies and young people to predict the future, and young companies are providing more flexibility. Older companies are holding people back to the office, but younger companies are embracing the flexibility. And the reason younger companies are placing flexibility is they're realizing that the best talent is everywhere. And so long as limiting people to community radius doesn't provide you a greater talent differential than hiring all over the world, suddenly, you are going to create a world with a lot more flexibility. And even people who do go to office may not go during the summer because they want to go away. And so all of those trends we think are here to stay. But since I last talked to you, when I was here last year, urban travel hadn't yet come back. Cross-border had near come back, and those trends are here to stay. So the whole market has shifted. It's moved to Airbnb. When hotels are closed, a whole bunch of people that said, I'll never stay in Airbnb, thought, "Well, do you want to stay home or stay in another home." And so a lot of people were exposed to Airbnb. And I think what happened at the market level is that the market came to Airbnb a bit. And it was probably an inevitable acceleration of maybe 5 years of growth or an adoption on Airbnb. And that's kind of how the market has changed. And I think that travel has changed forever. Business travel still exists, but leisure travel or a blurring between business and leisure is probably where it's all going. So now let's talk about Airbnb because Airbnb has probably changed even more. Before the pandemic, we were run very differently than we are today. We were a divisional structure. I think that it was Andy Grove that once said that like all companies basically become hybrid organizations. You either become like a business unit organization or a functional organization and almost every large company at some point like they struggle to make decision making. They slow down, right? All these people in the room imagine all of us trying to make a decision. How do you do it? And so the way most companies do it as they divisionalize, they literally divide their company up. And that's what we did. We broke it up into 10 divisions. We had homes and experiences in Lux and transportation. We had a magazine, the China division. We have 10 divisions. And you create divisions, you hire -- they hire people just like them. So they brought people that created their little subdivisions. And then we were spending about $1 billion a year on marketing. The vast majority was performance marketing. And I pushed decision-making down. We are very like data-driven, and we did a lot of like experiments. And that's kind of the way the company is run. I remember late 2019, though, I had a realization. Costs are rising, growth was slowing, we're spending a lot of money on performance marketing, which is basically selling our product as a commodity. Our product was looking less different than our competitors every single year. It was getting really hard to get work done. It was bureaucratic, it was political. Basically, we were suffering from big company syndrome. And I was wondering, is this the fate of Airbnb? I remember going on to [indiscernible] Bellina California, my co-founders and I said, I feel like I went on the stream where I came back to the company, I don't even recognize anymore. But I don't know how to change it, we were about to go public. Then the pandemic occurred. We lose 8% of our business a weeks. We have to rebuild the company from the ground up. And I thought this is a moment for us to build a different kind of company. I studied companies before me who had a crisis. Probably the biggest like reckoning I've ever seen in tech with Apple, 1997, they were 90 days from bankruptcy. It was now April 2020, people predicting is this the end of Airbnb. Well, Airbnb exists. It was really scary. And at that point, we basically did a number of things. We shut down all marketing. I got to do the 1 experiment every CMO one at a do. What happens if you shut off all your marketing? And the answer was hardly anything. That was really interesting. And that's when I realized performance marketing is the drug. And you've got to be careful about that drug, and you've got to get that needle out of your company. And that's -- that was the first thing we've got the needle out because it is a drug. And the second thing that happened is we didn't have money for all the divisions. So shut every division down. We went back to a functional organization like a start-up. We had a marketing department and a design department and an engineering department. And what happened was, we got all the very best people. We put them in 1 room, made 1 type of -- like centralized all decision-making and I got involved in every decision again, which is counterintuitive, would seem like it would slow things down. And something remarkable happened. Our business came back to almost the same levels before without the marketing because we had no money to market, I became like a one-man press machine. I did 100 interviews. We got hundreds of thousands of articles about Airbnb. We started focusing obsessively with the experience and something crazy happened. Since the pandemic we own from a company that was basically losing $250 million in EBITDA, we had like 7,000, 8,000 employees. And now we have 75% more revenue with 5% fewer employees. We made over 300 upgrades since the beginning of the pandemic. We spend half as much money as a percent of revenue on marketing. Most of our marketing is basically marketing our products. We had 600,000 articles better maybe. And so I guess the last thing I'll say to end this question, is the market's changed? Airbnb has changed, I would never have asked for the pandemic, the amount of suffering that went, but it was the very best thing that ever happened. It was like a near-death experience. We steered the bits. And I think we really understood what truly mattered. And the only thing else I'll say is there are 2 things that haven't changed. People still want to make money. They still want to connect, Travel is one of the best ways to do that. And so that's going to be around so long as Airbnb is around.

Brian Nowak

analyst
#7

Okay. Let me ask you -- let me ask a 2-part AI question. The first one, I'd love to hear sort of examples of how you've been using machine learning and AI for a while. And then also areas where you say, here are ways in which we could still improve our operations by using more AI. Then the second one, I think there was a little bit of a question mark. If you have new types of travel search tools or itinerary planners that maybe come from Google or some other company, is there a risk that you could get a higher portion of your traffic from these other sources? And so maybe the customer acquisition cost goes up. How do you think about those 2 dynamics, internal and then potential external funnel threats.

Brian Chesky

executive
#8

Yes. I mean I think that like machine learning is something that we've and other types have been using for a long time. And we use it for ranking. I mean like if you just take an example like we have a very difficult type of search problem. You go to Google and you type something into Google, usually, the first answer is the best answer. And after the first 5 results, does it really matter? And who really ever goes the second page of Google, right? If you go to Paris, there's more than 50,000 homes in Paris. What's the right home for you? It's almost like a dating site, right? Like you got your price point, you got -- so we're in the business of matching. And so for us, Airbnb is very unique because unlike hotels, we don't have SKUs. We have 6.6 million listings. Everyone is different. And by the way, the inventory changes day to day, this hotel is a SKU. You got to book this hotel and you don't see every room. They show you 1 photo, and it's meant to represent like hundreds of rooms. And so the longer tail of data that you have, I think the more a company would benefit from machine learning because suddenly can do tasks that an individual person can never do. But this brings me to the much larger question of AI. I think that we are -- I mean who knows what's going to happen, but what appears to be true is that we are experiencing a platform shift. That's what we typically call this. And this platform shift is probably larger in the mobile. It's probably akin to the Internet. Some would argue it's larger in the Internet, akin to like the industrial revolution, but let's assume it's no large on the Internet. That's insane. So then let's ask the question, which companies got left behind by the Internet? And which companies kind of rode the Internet? I think the best way to understand AI is actually so simple, it's just culture. The companies that will ride AI are the companies with innovative cultures. And the companies that will have this pass them by are the companies that use AI, the same companies that were talking last year about the crypto and the metaverse. If a company talked about crypto last year and they talk about AI now, they probably don't understand either. They're probably -- I'm sorry, they don't. And so that's what I think. So I think it's really important that you have a really great culture. And I think between the work that Google is doing in OpenAI, I think that they're building an incredibly interesting layer. And I think that we can bring a lot of that technology into Airbnb to basically like come through our 0.5 billion reviews, to be able to summarize them, to do better matching. And I actually have this vision that our app 1 day is less like a store and more like the most powerful travel concierge, you could ever imagine. And why would that help? Because most people are maybe they're not business travelers. They could go anywhere. And so we have to be in the business of inspiration in understanding them.

Brian Nowak

analyst
#9

Okay. You've been making some platform changes to the user experience over the years, I'm flexible button, improving matching, et cetera. What can you sort of tell us about some examples, maybe quantify some of the examples of improvements you've seen around conversion or overall repeat behavior from some of the changes you made in the platform?

Brian Chesky

executive
#10

Yes. I mean, like, here's the thing. You ever noticed like -- here's the fun thing you should do. You should pick up your phone and look at the apps on your phone. And ask yourself a question, how much have they changed in the last year? It's a really good question. And the answer is most of them haven't changed. And I think part of the reason most apps haven't changed is because of the way they're built. The products are decentralized, again, to make decisions. And I'd like to use this analogy. Let's say we try to build a car the way we build software. You got a team and they're designing a tire and they find a perfect tire. And they do a bunch of AB tests of the right tire. And they go to the wheel team, but the tire doesn't fit on the wheel. So they got to make a new wheel. But now they got -- like it doesn't fit the car body, the carbides going to be bigger. But now the car is heavier they need to make new battery with the battery is expensive. I got to capitalize that and you ought to get a go to investors. And so the whole point as all these things are integrated. And so what we decided to do is run the entire company on a single road map. It was so crazy. We had people from Google, Facebook, Amazon, all the other tech companies, and they're like, this is insane. You're going to run the entire company in a single road map. This is going to be a bottleneck. It's going to slow you down. And we found just the opposite. By aligning everyone in a single road map, that we were able to make over 300 upgrades, and I'll talk about just 2. The first is Airbnb categories. So we started noticing that in a world of flexibility, many people are coming to Airbnb and they don't need to have a destination of mind, right? If you travel for business, you came here in your type in [indiscernible] type in to date. That's not most travelers. So we noticed that the Internet search -- travel search hadn't changed since the invention of it, probably with Expedia and basically 1995. And so we thought what if there was a different way to search for travel, what if you categorize travel, not just by location, because we're 100,000 cities who can think to 100,000 cities to type in a search box. It's like a fill in the blank with 100,000 possibilities. What if you could also categorize homes by another vector by the types of homes they have. And so that's what we did. We launched Airbnb Categories. We basically categorized every single home. We use machine learning to scan every single listing. We did computer visioning to pick the right cover photo you see A frames, they're all A frames in homes and categories have now been viewed 0.5 billion times. We don't usually break out every individual feature, but we're seeing that there's a lot more travel, a lot more traffic, a lot more inspiration. People are viewing more page views. And the other thing we're trying to do with Airbnb categories is the Holy Grail on travel is to be an inspiration business. And a lot of people think the way to do that sell flights -- sorry, the Holy Grail travel is to be the like top of the funnel. And a lot of people think that the way to do that sell flights. And we thought the way to do that is actually to inspire people where to travel. Because before you decide how to get there, you have to figure out where to go. And so if we can point demand to where we have supply, that is the Holy Grail, and that's what we're looking towards. The only other thing I'll talk about is AirCover. So obviously, one of the biggest parts of our business is we got to add more supply. And the #1 fear people have is what happened to my home. And we thought, well, what if we could take that mostly off the table. So we traded this product called AirCover. It's $3 million of protection against -- after property image for every home. We verify 100% of identities, and we don't charge a verification. And we have over 100 million identities verified on Airbnb. We do reservation screening technology to prevent parties. And when we rolled this product out, we noticed a 70-point increase in NPS for reimbursement claims. This is actually crazy. If your home is trashed, your NPS is so high, you become a brand promoter. I don't recommend that ever happens, but that was like a completely crazy thing. So these are some of the things that we've been focused on, and we're going to launch a bunch of other upgrades this May. We have the next release.

Brian Nowak

analyst
#11

As a husband of a super host. We thank you. We don't want our house to get trashed.

Brian Chesky

executive
#12

Even 1 million super host.

Brian Nowak

analyst
#13

Yes. So let me ask 1 about forward growth. One of the questions we often get is, how can Airbnb continue to grow room nights, high teens or 20s CAGR. When you think about users or spend per user, what are the KPIs you look at where you say, okay, these are the internal metrics I, Brian Chesky, watch to make sure that we're still compounding at the rates that we could and should be.

Brian Chesky

executive
#14

There's probably like 4 or so growth factors that we look at. The first is segments, guest segments. We -- 62% of our guests are 34 and under. So we are still very, very popular. But Airbnb is a kind of weird phenomenon. It's one of the only Internet platforms where it's cool for kids and their parents to both be on the same platform, right? Usually, the kids fleet want the parents join, but I think that parents are often good host. So we actually are going to really focus on the next-generation travelers. I think Gen Z is a whole new game. The great thing about young people is more every year, so the market keeps growing. And so that's the first thing. The second thing is geography. Every market is above pandemic levels from business, except for APAC. And Asia Pacific is a massive growth opportunity. And you've got, of course, the big 4 of Korea, Japan, India and China, but you also have Southeast Asia, Asia Pacific area. So that's like a very, very big market. LatAm is still continuing to grow, and then Africa is going to be a very important market in the next probably a decade or 2. So geography is the second thing. The third thing is making our service much more reliable. So that all of you in this room want to use us, and you want to use us more and more. And we did this really crazy. If I can go in a quick detour for a second. A decade ago, I was inspired by one of my favorite entrepreneurs, and his name is Walt Disney. And in 1937, he created this movie, Snow White, and was the first feature-length animated film. And he could create this feature length animated film was so long, he had to create this thing that we now call a storyboard because they had to be able to kind of map out the entire journey. And I was reading the story, I thought to myself that most companies are looking at KPIs and defects approved experience. And I thought we're in the business -- most people take trips because they want to have a good time. And so ultimately, the companies will grow the fastest are the companies that create the best experience. We thought the best trip wins. And we thought, well, what if we kick 1 single trip and we did a storyboard of all the different frames end to end. And we've now taken that and we've created this thing we call the community blueprint, where we basically have looked end-to-end every step of the journey, and we obsess over every customer contact, every defect, every policy, every single detail. And our job is to perfect every single detail of this experience, even the details that people never see. And if we do that, then I think people in this room and other people that aren't Gen Z, most of you, are going to continue to use Airbnb more and more. And then the last thing is we want to make hosting much more mainstream. We're going to grow as fast as we have supply. We have 6.6 million listings. But here's the thing. Our brand is mainstream, like Airbnb has been used 1.5 billion times. We're now overused all over the world. But hosting is a little more underground. And the reason hosting is more underground is for years, it was in a legal or regulatory great area, right? We had to basically, like, get the laws on the books, and we had to start to collect them in hotel tax. And when you haven't collect remitted hotel tax and you haven't gotten the laws on the books, it's hard to solicit business in the city. So we had built a demand muscle, but we didn't yet build a supply muscle. Having now collected $6 billion in hotel tax and 90% of our top 20 markets now regulated on Airbnb, we are now ready to promote hosting. And to do that, we just got to do 3 things. The first thing you got to do is make it safe. That's why we have things like AirCover. The second thing you need to do is to make it easy. So we basically -- I thought about like my mom, like I remember when she got like an Apple laptop, she couldn't figure how to use it. And there's a genius bar and they could go and they could help her. And I talk to myself, we need like a genius part for hosting. And that's we created. We have this thing called Airbnb Setup and allows people to get help. And then the last thing is we now need to tell the story of hosting because we kind of we're shy about it for a decade. And so now we have these campaigns promoting hosting. And the net result is we have twice as much traffic to our landing page to learn about hosting. And here's the other thing. There was some really smart analysts. In Q4, they had some questions about whether or not we have enough supply. 900,000 incremental listings later, we realize even smart people can be wrong.

Brian Nowak

analyst
#15

Yes. Yes. Yes, they can be. Yes, they can be. They can be wrong. It's a great number. Very, very good supply.

Brian Chesky

executive
#16

You're usually right.

Brian Nowak

analyst
#17

No, no, no. I think actually -- let me ask [ know it ] on supply, because it was -- you made really good traction on supply. There's 2 aspects to it. So the first thing is adding more and more of the overall listings of the platform, which has been really good growth. What about the idea of increasing the nights available per property? Where are you on that? And where it could go?

Brian Chesky

executive
#18

I'll just give you a simple framework. We started Airbnb, actually, it was called Air Bed and Breakfast, and we launched for the Democratic National Convention in 2008 to provide air beds for conferences. By then, we weren't sure if we were a travel company or a conference company. It was kind of crazy to think. And initially, something remarkable happen, which is people would list for an event to host once, they make a bunch of money, and they kind of forget that they're still listed. And then the next week, they get another $500 reservation. They're like, may well keep hosting. And so the way Airbnb works is a lot of people do it one time, they get a bunch of bookings, now they start hosting. Now the next goal is to add more dates. And then finally, some host grow with us and add more listings. And finally, the other cool thing is then they tell their friends about it. Like if Hilton gets a bunch of bookings, they're not like calling Marriott like it's amazing. You got to get in on this. But regular people are going to tell their friends like, I just got -- 50% of hosts get a booking in 3 days, 75% in 9 days. So it's pretty amazing, though like flywheel. So that's kind of how we grow.

Brian Nowak

analyst
#19

Got it. Okay. Let's talk about take rate. Talk about take rate. So I think the take rate, again, as a happy host, the 3% take rate is incredibly low. Talk to us about sort of how you think about philosophically the idea of increasing or adjusting the take rates either for hosts or for guests over time, either through new products or for just like-for-like.

Brian Chesky

executive
#20

Yes. I mean our 3% take rate hasn't changed in more than 10 years. And so if you think about it, that means in the last 10 years, we offered a lot of 3 things that our competitors don't offer like $3 million of damage protection in AirCover and 24/7 support, and there's a lot of other things that we offer. And so my general principle is I want the moat of everyone to get deeper every year. And that means that every year, we need to give away more value than we're charging. I want the deal to be a host to increase. And I want it to feel cheaper and cheaper and cheaper every year to be a host because they're like, I can't believe we're giving all this. But there's a point where we can also start charging for things. And what I think is there's a huge opportunity for a suite of services. Most will give away for free to get our moat deeper because that's the key, but some we could charge for. And by the way, the other thing that's amazing is there's a whole Airbnb economy that's built. There's a lot of other great startups like the ridesharing start-ups, delivery startups, even other travel companies, where as robust as those platforms are, there aren't really a lot of companies built on top of them. There are literally thousands of companies built on top of Airbnb. You could literally build like an app store for them, and there are billions of dollars flowing through them. So I think if you look at the suite of services that are possible from a guest side and a host side, there is a huge amount of opportunity. And we just did a small thing on the guest side, which is we launched travel insurance. We're pretty good at like making things pretty integrated. I'd like to think that 1 of our core capabilities is we're like the interface layer. We're really -- we're not the best AI company, but we're going to design the best interfaces for AI. We're going to design the best interfaces for marketplace. And so that's where we really excel. And I think that will allow us to offer a lot of services.

Brian Nowak

analyst
#21

Okay. One of the things we talked about over the years a little bit has been the sponsored listing opportunity. Maybe sort of, any update on where you are with that, where you made the most progress? And sort of what are the sort of key hurdles you see to really overcome to roll out that business?

Brian Chesky

executive
#22

There's not a lot of hurdles. I think it's a massive opportunity. I think you could imagine easily adding a few equivalent percentage rates of take rate if you were to scale that over time. I think there's a lot of comparables like Amazon, one of the largest advertising platforms now in the world are Etsy or Alibaba or even Booking.com, this is a big part of their take rate. But I love -- my CFO is from Amazon, and he used to use Jeff Bezos quote, "that you want to focus on the most perishable opportunities first." And the great thing about sponsor listings is not perishable. And the bigger the platform gets actually the more interesting monetization gets. Monetization is great at scale. So you want to get as much scale as possible. So we still feel like we're still in land grab mode. So that is not the #1 most perishable opportunity, but it's absolutely on the horizon. And when we would do it, I would also want to do an ad platform different than anyone else, I'd want it to be much more targeted and really abide by user experience principles and be very, very careful over turning that dial too quickly.

Brian Nowak

analyst
#23

What about loyalty program? Loyalty programs in travel have been around for a long time. There's another online travel company starting to promote a loyalty program that includes alternative accommodations now. How do you think about the importance of Airbnb having a separate loyalty program?

Brian Chesky

executive
#24

It's a great question. When I started Airbnb 14 years ago, I joined this program called YCom that you probably heard. And the first AI commentary to give you this great T-shirt. And in front of the T-shirt, it's got their mantra. And the mantra is, Make Something People Want. It's almost too simple to work, Make Something People Want. And I've always believed that the best loyalty program is people loving your products. And isn't loyalty like when you don't have to pay people, like your friends are loyal because you pay them. That seems like kind of weird. So I kind of feel like a loyalty program isn't actually -- I think that the best programs -- so I think that like that's the way we think about it. Now that being said, I really do love like what Amazon Prime did because I think that's more like a membership program where there's only so much service we could provide for our current take rate. But you could imagine, for example, an elevated tier of service or unique access. But I don't want to pay for loyalty. I think that's in a weird way, feels like an oxymoron, but I do imagine that there's a lot of paid opportunities as service layers. And the last thing I'll just say about this is just to zoom out, I just want to share one last thing. I would zoom out. Look, I think that -- I've been thinking a lot about like what business are we even in? Are we a travel company? Are we a housing company? And what do we do on the horizon? I'm 41, I started this company by 2 friends about 26. I want to feel like the biggest ideas I had weren't in my 20s to 30s. And so we are dreaming over the horizon. But I also want to make sure that whatever we do in the future that we're solving some really important problem in the world. And I think that Airbnb when people see it on the surface, they see homes, they see spaces. But I think if you go back to that first weekend, to the original Airbnb, it's always been about more than just space. It's been about connection. It's about people in the physical world, face-to-face connecting. And I think we are now living in the loneliest time in human history. We hired the former Surgeon General in United States when the pandemic broke out. He's now the Surgeon General again. And he said, do you know what the #1 kill in America is? And I said, I don't know, is it cardiac? Is it like obesity? Is it cancer? Is it cardiac disease? And he said, no, it's loneliness. Loneliness takes 15 years off your life. And I thought, wow, that's pretty bad, but how prevalent is this? And what I realized is that 1 out of 3 Americans are chronically lonely. But it gets worse. Because if you actually dig into the details and if you have teenagers in this room, this might resonate, 2 out of 3 teenagers are chronically depressed or hopeless, defined by a 2-week period in the last year where they just can't function. 1 out of 3 teenagers, 1 out of 3 teenage girls has made a suicide plan. Why is this? I don't -- it's hard to know, but I think modern life is starting to make people lonely. The office is now Zoom, the mall is now Amazon, the theater is now Netflix, and time with friends, time sleeping, time exercising spent on device. And the problem with devices is social networking became social media and your friends became your followers. No one has changed someone else's mind in YouTube comment section. Your Instagram followers aren't coming to your funeral. And it's not to say any of this is bad. I think all of these technologies are great. So long as you remember, they have to be in balance with meaningful connection in the real world. Now how are you going to do that? Well, I'm not saying we're here to solve this problem. No one company is. But I'm quite certain that we need to balance all the time on screens with time in the physical world, with people we care about, either reuniting with friends or meeting other people. And I think that travel is a great way to do that. And so whatever time I have left doing this, and I hope it's a long time. I think there's a much bigger north star for us and then just putting heads in beds. I think there's something about making the world feel a little bit smaller, making people realize the other is not so other, people were 99% the same and to really build products and services that at their heart, bring people together, foster connection because what we have invented, probably more than a marketplace is a system of trust to get stranger to live together. And if they could live together, what else could they do together. And I think that's where this company is probably going in the coming years.

Brian Nowak

analyst
#25

All right. Brian, way to see what happens beyond the horizon. Thank you so much for joining us again.

Brian Chesky

executive
#26

Thank you all. Thank you, Brian.

For developers and AI pipelines

Programmatic access to Airbnb, Inc. earnings transcripts and 32,000+ others is available through the EarningsCalls.dev REST API. Plans from $24.99/month — full transcripts, speaker segments, full-text search, and the recently-added /api/v1/transcripts/recent polling endpoint for ETL pipelines.