David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…100%. I was going to save this for later in the show but I’ve got a diatribe ready about—and I don't need to fully go in it. But the incentives are misaligned between Airbnb in their host for features like smart pricing. I get smart pricing for Airbnb. Airbnb wants to maximize exactly what you're saying—nights booked and total revenue. I, as a host, wouldn't want to take a $30 booking one night, but Airbnb would be like, great. There's higher liquidity. There’s more supply on the platform with more nights available. We got some revenue out of that transaction. But if you basically factored into a labor cost, there's a price at which the hosts are willing to take on the cost and risk associated with that. Airbnb’s smart pricing couldn't care less. Exactly. The point I was going to make is that I care about the price. I want to maximize my revenue as a host. There are these other viable platforms out there. No, they're not as nice to use as Airbnb, Vrbo, HomeAway, and booking.com. On the other hand, they do have traffic. They do have guests. I mostly trust them. I have no reason not to trust them. I think they're viable. They’re not some fly-by-night competitor that’s going to send to crappy guests my way. All markets are supply and demand, so if you want to maximize your price in anything—whether you’re raising around as a company, or you're a host of an apartment listing, then you want to maximize the amount of demand for your listing. It would be dumb not to be on multiple platforms. 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.…

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