Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…There are some really nice hotels. Maybe we’re just going to stay in a hotel. Right. I think the thing that becomes true is people consider Airbnb one of their options. Yup. Totally. Not that we stopped doing it at all. For group trips, getting the family together, going to a place where there isn’t great hotel inventory—a fantastic use case. But you fast forward to today, we’ve talked about Experiences, Places is gone, the Trips concept is gone. It’s now refocused much more on Stays. The next year, in 2017, the company tells investors that they’re planning to IPO within 12 months. But then, at the beginning of 2018, they had hired back in 2015 a big name CFO, Laurence Tosi, who had been the CFO of Blackstone and the COO of Merrill Lynch before coming out to San Francisco and joining Airbnb. He leaves the company. That puts the IPO in jeopardy. Brian publishes a blogpost when he leaves saying that Airbnb has an infinite time horizon and is focused on being a 22nd Century company.…

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