Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…On our LP show, Rahul talked about his fundraising philosophy and all that. He did that a lot of ways with interstitial rounds and some innovations. He's positioning the rounds that he's raising relative to the next rounds. I have one, it's a mix of two here. It’s a little bit of a playbook that's been run that I think will ultimately have pretty negative outcomes for the company. All that direct traffic that they’ve been able to harness is a gift and a curse. We talked a lot about the gift. The curse is that they don't develop the performance marketing muscle. When you have always experimented and had a questionable return on direct marketing spend compared to your competitors who are laser-focused on it. I get worried especially when you combine that with the fact that their guest cohort retention drops like a rock after the first year and never really comes back anywhere close to the first year of spend. It's a very leaky bucket funnel. There's a very reasonable rationale for this where most people go on one vacation a year. Unless Airbnb is getting 100% of your spending, you're not going to be able to do that. You look at DoorDash, which we covered yesterday where every cohort spends 50% more than the year before as time goes on. Net of churn, the revenue of that cohort goes up 50%. Airbnb, in year two, drops to 30% something. Hopefully, they are able to get back up to 50%. But at least so far from the data we've seen, their cohorts do not get more valuable over time. It makes it so that you have a lot less of a cushion when you decide to deploy performance marketing dollars to grow when that's the case. My next one is about reviews. They’ve gotten very far. We've extolled the system over and over again to build this trust-based network, but they still have a crazy amount of host consistency and quality issues. I think it's a thing that's holding the marketplace back. You have to hunt through a listing like crazy through several listings to find somewhere decent. You have to scroll deep into each listing to do it. I don't actually look forward to browsing Airbnb to find somewhere to stay because it's becoming more and more of a chore. They've tried it with Plus, but Plus ended up being pretty meaningless just like Superhost, which I think is the Airbnb equivalent of winning the participation award. Yay, you're Superhost. You held two people that didn’t give you terrible reviews. Congratulations. I just think that the company relied heavily on reviews will save us for everything, but it hasn't been a silver bullet in making it easy and enjoyable. Most reviews are meaningless. There are some that are helpful.…

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