Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yup, indeed. That starts off a whole cycle of speculation in the press internally, externally about when is Airbnb going public, will they go public, at what valuation, what is happening? Because, of course, they had raised all of this money from Sequoia and others, and it’s hard to have an infinite time horizon when you have investors with fund life cycles. I texted David a month and a half ago. I was like, dude, I think Airbnb is going to IPO before the end of the year. And you’re like, okay. I’ll believe it when I see it. Heard this story before. We’ve heard it before, but they actually do. We’ll get into the story of this happening and why it’s happening now. The reality that we’ve talked about—this 3x [...] so many of our stories. The first act here of Airbnb, this crazy thing, almost didn’t happen, but it was a great idea, gets into YC, grows and grows and grows. We’ve now gone through the second act of the growth is still happening, but some buzzling decisions are happening. But okay. The thing is though, after all this starting in 2017, the growth no longer keeps going. Which we’ve alluded to in our own deed of use and usage of the platform here over the last couple of years. 2017, booking growth slows to 50% from over 70% the year before. Still really good. You’re at a huge base, going 50% year over year—that’s great. And totally IPO.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.