Jiaona Zhang: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, that's my impression. Exactly. And it was more just like if you understood... Again, this is what my point around unit economics, there are things where I think you have magical thinking around unit economics. You're like, "When we get to the scale of X, it's all going to work out. We can make these things happen." I think you actually need to really make sure that unit economics work quite at the beginning. That is definitely one lesson. And I think the other thing is, and going back to spirit of what are you trying to achieve. If you're trying to achieve this idea of really knowing the quality of the place, and for a platform like Airbnb, the right way to go about doing is through our reviews, through our guest reviews, which are essentially free as opposed to literally sending out inspectors. And I think that the other things are if you can get signal on what are the things around quality that people care about, is it cleaning? Is it, "Hey, I'm locked out"? And I think that there are other solutions besides inspection that then get at that. So for example, it is actually cheaper to go send everyone a lockbox than to deploy an inspector and go look at your property. It is actually cheaper to maybe do a partnership with a bunch of cleaners in different local areas and then get that as part of the fee, as opposed to doing the inspection. So again, it's really about what are you really trying to achieve? What is the user problem in each of these areas and can you target that problem with the particular listing that you're looking at? And so I personally don't believe the unit economics ever would've really worked out. I think we should have known that or we should have dug into that more at the very beginning and then to get very tailored instead of one blunt instrument to solve it all, "Hey, we're going to go inspect. " It's like what is the problem for this listing and what's the best solution to fix that problem? There's a couple things that I think are important product leadership lessons here. One is Airbnb and Brian and many great leaders are famous for imagining the ideal situation, imagining the great end result and then working backwards. And often that leads to great results when you're being really ambitious and "I don't know how we're going to get there, we're just going to shoot big and hopefully we figure it out." Sometimes it works out. In this case it didn't work out. And what you're finding, maybe you even knew this early on, is just like there's no possible world where this could have worked in this approach. Is there anything you've learned about just when to think big and not even like "Forget it. We're going to figure it out. I know this seems impossible, but we're just going to try it anyway"? Do you have any kind of framework of when to think big, then just go for it? Versus, "Oh, let's just work out the math today," is this ever possible?…

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