Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Interesting. We’re moving at bad ideas, but I’m not sure they made a ton of sense within Airbnb. I think the disconnect is as looking back for me watching that video was I think Brian and the company really believed Airbnb—they talked about it so much in this conference—about belonging, about feeling home when you travel, and about the connections in the community between hosts and guests. Undoubtedly, there are people that use Airbnb that love meeting strangers on the platform. I’m not sure that it’s most of the people who use Airbnb though. I think there’s a recurring theme that seems to happen from this point forward in the business, which is Brian and management feeling very aspirational about why people want to use Airbnb, particularly around the community, particularly on belonging. People—again, generalizing—use it in a much more transactional way than that. They are logically weighing this option to stay here versus other options. I just think that that disconnect becomes more and more apparent over time. Yeah. If you go back to what was one of the original—probably the biggest—why that made Airbnb work was the financial crisis. It was nice to stay in an apartment and whatnot, but I really want to go to San Francisco for $100 a night or $80 a night, not $1000 a night.…

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