I think some of that will undo, but the genie is out of the bottle and there is going to be a permanent redistribution of travel to thousands of small towns. Airbnb used to be dominated by big cities, but in Q1 more people visited Cornwall than London and more people visited the Catskills than New York City. The second thing is people are travelling everywhere. So we've put out this “flexible dates” feature and it's been used more than 100 million times. The first thing is that people are more flexible about when they can travel because more people are working remotely. So the prediction business is not as good a business as it used to be, but we have a lot of data and it seems like three things seem to be true. That's basically your vision for post-pandemic tourism, isn’t it? More rural travel with a greater spread of destinations. A friend tried to book a post-wedding trip to Cornwall, couldn’t find a property and ended up finding a place she's super happy with in Margate. So now people can travel again, but it has changed. I think this was, like, early March before the world is in lockdown, right? He said, “I don't think you're gonna be doing that.” What he really meant was, “It's going to be worse than you think.” A week or two later I remember saying, “Yep. I remember early in the crisis I told him I was going to do a keynote in an auditorium. We had a transportation offering, we had a magazine and a bunch of other things, but I had to make the decision that one thing was more important than everything else. His advice to me was “The only way out of this is focus.” The thing that we have to prioritise is the core of our host community, the everyday people, the individual hosts that we started this for. They had to get really, really focused on who they were and what they were about. I started talking to Jony Ive, who was the former head of design at Apple, and he told me a lot of stories of how Steve came back to Apple in 1997 and they were 90 days from bankruptcy. What was the best piece of advice you got at that time from outside the company? I imagine you're basically working from dawn until dusk at that point? And more than half of them got rehired in the last year, as far as I know. We created this alumni directory that employees could opt into if they were laid off, for recruiters to contact them. ![]() It was a shitty situation, but I tried to do it in the most humane way possible by not just taking the corporate layoff letter and filling in my name. It was 1,900 employees, but if you include contractors, it was almost a third of the employee base. The layoff was the hardest thing I've ever had to do. ![]() And so what is the basis for all your decisions? We had to simplify Airbnb and play to win the 2021 travel season, even though we were basically incinerating cash. I also learned that you have to write down your principles, because you’ll make, like, ten times the decisions you usually would in one tenth of the time. It’s kind of like you're driving a car and deciding whether to get off at the exit or not: the worst thing you can do is not decide and drive into the intersection. The first thing you need to do in a crisis is act really, really quickly. ![]() I honestly didn't do a lot of thinking it was pretty instinctual. ![]() On a personal level, how did you go about making those decisions? One of my board members, Ken Chenault, who was the CEO of American Express during 9/11 told me, “This is going to be your defining moment as a leader.” I mean, there’s no better way to psych you out.Īt the height of the pandemic you had to raise some emergency cash and cut about a quarter of your staff. I think it was a Sunday and we had called an emergency board meeting. The reckoning was actually the Ides of March.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |