01:45:23 · Brian Chesky, John Coogan, S2
[01:45:23] S8: see a lower price anywhere else, we will give you the difference back in Airbnb credit, and we'll give you another 15% towards the next booking of anything on Airbnb. Mhmm. So those are just a few of the things that we announced. Really, the basic idea is just continue to listen to customers, continue to listen to our guests, listen to our hosts, and just keep them expanding and perfecting the service, and trying to make Airbnb a bit of an ecosystem Yeah. Of other developers and other apps. [01:45:46] S0: Yeah. This feels like the fruition coming to reality of, like, a lot of the pitch that you gave last year. What was involved in actually getting to this point? How much of this is predicated on new software development, new product initiatives versus partnerships with existing areas? Like a lot of these feel like they touch the real world. So it's not just an extra line of code or an extra panel or button in the app. [01:46:13] S8: Yeah. I mean, it's a good question, guys. The app that most people see is maybe something like 20% of Airbnb. There's also a host app. But again, most of the work about Airbnb is what happens in the real world. [01:46:25] S2: Mhmm.
01:46:25 · S2, Brian Chesky, John Coogan
[01:46:25] S2: Mhmm. [01:46:25] S8: And I think I said last time that we spend a lot of time imagine like you're living in a one story house and then suddenly a bunch of people want to move into your house and you have to add like a second, third, fourth floor. Yeah. But you didn't build the foundation for a four story building. And so what we had to do over the last few years was kind of rebuild the foundation. It really was only built for homes. It was not built to do other things. Amazon had this problem in the late nineties. They were built on ISBNs for books. And they had to basically take their website and turn it into a bunch of primitives. So we basically already done that work. To give you an example, it took us sixteen years to finally expand beyond homes. It took us two years to develop service experiences. It took us eight months to develop groceries, and it took us only two months to develop luggage storage, airport pickups, and car rentals. So basically, looking at the time to launch from conception to launch, we can now have an idea and put it into a market sometimes within like a couple weeks to a month. And what that should mean is instead of announcing one or two things a year, eventually we can announce dozens of things a year. [01:47:24] S0: Yeah. I
01:47:24 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays
[01:47:24] S0: Yeah. I [01:47:25] S1: Sorry. Cars. Why obviously, a hard thing to do, but I'm sure people have been asking this to for for, you know, a decade now. Yeah. Why did you choose at some point not to maybe listen to your customers? Why are you why are you making those why was, like, why was now the right time? Because it just feels like such such a, you know, such an obvious thing. I'm booking a trip somewhere, you know, give me one click to to add a car. Obviously, there's more that needs to happen on the back end, but why?
01:47:56 · Brian Chesky
[01:47:56] S8: Yeah. Another great question. And I asked myself that, like, why didn't we do certain things sooner? And if I could, I would have. You know, I remember that one of my early investors said starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling the airplane on the way down. Never realized when I started a company that never realized I thought if you hire thousands of people, suddenly you have all these extra people to do all these extra things. Yeah. But when you're when we are in hyper growth, we basically just had most of the people just trying to keep the lights on. And we really struggled in the 2,000 during our hottest moment to really expand beyond our core business. We tried in 2012, didn't really work. Tried in 2016, didn't really work. We finally thought we cracked it in 2019. And then suddenly the pandemic hit. We lost 80% of our business in eight weeks. We said, oh, man. We don't have time to do this right now. We got to go back to our core business. So we've kind of had three different starts. And we tried it before, we just never really were able to stick the landing. I think this time we finally can. So yeah, people have been asking for us for more than a decade, in fact, fifteen years. 2011, we began thinking about it. And now, I hope I'm happy to say that, hopefully, going forward, we won't have to wait fifteen years for another service. So we'll be they'll be coming really fast now.
01:49:09 · Jordi Hays, Brian Chesky, John Coogan
[01:49:09] S1: Yeah. And and how how is it working under the hood? Are you partnering? Like, is this a also kind of like sharing economy play? Are you partnering with car rental services or both? I imagine you want to Yes. [01:49:24] S8: It's going be a mix of things. There's not really a lot of global providers. So we're going to be working with a number of different partners that be able to that can fulfill this. Some of the services like Bounce, like we don't do luggage storage, they have 15,000 locations, almost as many of them are Starbucks. So that's more like an app store integration. And then sometimes we have to build the services first party with their own host because they don't offer it. With car rentals, we're basically able to partner with a bunch of companies. No one company covers every geography in the world. We're in more countries than Coca Cola. So you have to patch a bunch of things together. I think over time [01:49:56] S1: more countries than Coca Cola? [01:49:59] S8: I think that. Like, we were at least last time we checked. [01:50:02] S1: What is what is Coca Cola doing? They're asleep at the wheel. [01:50:06] S8: I know. [01:50:07] S0: Come on. I think we're [01:50:09] S8: in every country but North Korea [01:50:11] S0: Yeah. [01:50:12] S8: Iran [01:50:12] S0: Yeah. [01:50:13] S8: Syria, Russia, Belarus. Maybe there's one other. So we're just about every other country.
01:50:13 · Brian Chesky, Jordi Hays
[01:50:13] S8: Syria, Russia, Belarus. Maybe there's one other. So we're just about every other country. [01:50:17] S1: Yeah. The other thing with cars that and and as I was just like thinking about that, as as kind of Turo came on the map, the one of the and I love cars. So it was always I I I thought very briefly of, maybe I should get a bunch of cars that I like and maybe turn it into a little business. I quickly realized that, like, it's, like, fundamentally a a wildly different business because if I have a property and I put it on Airbnb, even if people are staying in it three hundred and sixty five days a year, if I buy at the right price and in a great market, it will continue to appreciate. Cars are the exact opposite. Mhmm. And it's just like a wildly different financial equation. And so it may that always made sense to me just from that lens where the supply side is like incurring some like heavy heavy costs associated with actually like supplying, you know, providing that supply versus on the Airbnb side, you know, again, you're you you can get a bunch of rental income and not not occur any, you know, significant losses associated with the asset.