David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Especially as Airbnb tries to be more scalable and more capital efficient. It's not as enjoyable to be a host on the platform as it once was, and it carries a risk to only single-list. If Airbnb decides something falls under this policy. Sorry, you can’t actually talk to anyone because we're trying to limit the number of people you can interact with. Unfortunately, because we perceive you violated this policy, your listing is banned. We’re blocking a week. For people who are using this as their livelihood, imagine if you only listed on the app store and you did all this on Google play, and then Apple found something they didn't like about your app, and then you're up a creek. I think now that this market is maturing we're going to see more and more people not willing to take the single provider risk. One thing that I think has changed over the past couple of years is there now are viable good third-party software tools to do this. Whether it's Beyond or Guestly, you can pretty frictionlessly—as a host—have your property listed across all of these platforms and not worry about keeping it in sync and having costs associated with that. Yeah. I do think one credit we should give Airbnb, we need to caveat every time we’re negative with. I'm negative on this being currently valued at $100 billion. There are other things I'm negative about, but the sum total of innovation they've created is unbelievable. They're one of the few companies that actually did create an ecosystem around them. There’s, obviously, the ecosystem that has yet to be proven with the professionally managed Airbnbs or the people that are [...] blocks of Airbnbs, that sort of thing. Something that's totally been proven as a successful smaller business is all these different software plays that can help you be a more effective host. Now, is it a little silly that Airbnb hasn't done any of those themselves and relies on you to go find it on your own? Yeah, massively dropping the ball, but you got to credit them for enabling an innovation ecosystem. One more bear case.…

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