Brian Chesky started a multinational company from a couple of air beds in San Francisco - and he's sick of telling people about it. "If I only told this story three times a day for a year that's about a thousand times," he says wearily. Call it the curse of the successful founder. But lately, the 35-year-old Airbnb CEO and co-founder has been revisiting its origins, as he decides where his company goes next.
Even by startup standards, Airbnb's growth has been rapid. Founded in 2008, the accommodation booking service has more than two million listings and more beds than any traditional hotel chain. In August 2015, it raised $850 million (£691m) at a valuation of $30 billion, making it the third most valuable privately owned company in the world. But with success has come conflict over housing shortages and discrimination on the platform. And although the company continues to grow - on August 13, 2016, 1.8 million people slept in an Airbnb bed, more than on any night in its history - it still only does one thing. Chesky saw the need for a rethink. That meant going back to first principles.
Unusually in Silicon Valley, Chesky is a designer rather than an engineer. Born in New York to social worker parents, he studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he met co-founder Joe Gebbia. (The third co-founder, chief technology officer Nathan Blecharczyk, joined the company shortly after it was founded.) "It's really different," says Joe Zadeh, the company's vice president of product and its longest-serving employee. "In my past life I was doing high-performance algorithms… That's where my mind was, on the technology. What [Chesky] taught me is to start with things that don't scale."
In 2014, Airbnb employees went down to Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco - a crowded tourist trap in the north of the city - looking for holidaymakers to observe. Eventually they enlisted a volunteer: a 26-year-old London financier named Ricardo. "We told him to do what he was going to do and we'll document it," Chesky explains. The Airbnb team saw two things: first, Ricardo was alone. Second, he didn't know where to go.
"He wanted to get a great photo of the Golden Gate Bridge. He didn't know that you don't take a photo in the morning because of the San Francisco fog. As a tourist you're often doing things that locals would never do." Instead of giving travellers more options, internet travel had simply brought more people to the same spots. For Airbnb, Ricardo's problem was an opportunity for a company looking for its next move.
Read more: Airbnb has taken on hotels, now it's gunning for the whole travel industry with Trips
The result is Airbnb's biggest launch since its foundation: Trips. Currently, Airbnb only handles your accommodation. With the launch of Trips, it will attempt to take care of every stage of the journey, with city hosts, experiences, guidebooks, events and travel basics added to a completely relaunched app. Activities range from truffle hunting in Florence to surfing in Los Angeles or adventure photography in Nairobi. There will be 500 hand-picked trips covering 12 cities, from Havana to Seoul.
More than a product, Trips marks the relaunch of Airbnb as a company. "We studied Amazon and how they went from books to everything," says Chesky. "We studied Disney's ecosystem between the theme parks and the movies." The conclusion? "The more you can design this as a single system, typically, the better these things work." Chesky is striving to make Airbnb the go-to service for almost anything you could want to do on holiday: days out, dinners, gigs, even mobile-data plans. "I think there's a really big opportunity to grow the business," he says.
Everything about Chesky feels prepared and well-ordered: dressed all in black, his hair neatly arranged, his muscular arms often locked by his side, pressing down against the chair as he speaks quickly but calmly. His personality is echoed throughout Airbnb's offices in San Francisco's SoMa district, a church that venerates the community on which it relies. Giant portraits of the first three Airbnb guests smile calmly from the wall of one corridor; meeting rooms are designed to match Airbnb listings. One is even modelled on the room where Airbnb all began, Chesky's living room on nearby Rausch Street.
Chesky's obsession with Airbnb's hosts, or "partners" as he calls them, is based on a simple idiom: treat others as you would want to be treated yourself. "If you've ever encountered a host who's very transactional, you notice it's not as good an experience," he says. "If a host cares about welcoming people and cares about being part of something, it's because, typically, we've done a good job and we've bought the right people on board."
But not all Airbnb hosts are following Chesky's rules. In London alone, more than 7,000 properties - almost one third of the Airbnbs listed in the city - were from hosts with two or more listings. The implication? Scores of people are renting out empty properties on Airbnb and turning a huge profit. "I don't think you can assume that if somebody has more than one listing that they're therefore taking a unit off the market," says Chesky, defensively.
Cities authorities disagree: in January 2016, apartments across Paris were raided in an effort to shut down commercially run Airbnbs, and in May, Berlin's Senate banned tourists from renting entire apartments through the service. The threat of new legislation to curb commercial Airbnb rentals is never far away.
But the company is starting to get a grip on the issue. In the last quarter of 2015, Airbnb handed over nearly €1.2 million (£1m) to Paris authorities from a new 83-cent-per-night tourist tax. In San Francisco, Airbnb has announced it will limit hosts to one property listing at a time to curb illegal operators. "When you try to build a 100-million-person community it's very limited in how you can protect how the whole thing manifests," admits Chesky.
In December 2015, that lack of protection was laid bare. Researchers at Harvard Business School found that renters with names that sounded African American had a harder time booking reservations on Airbnb than those with white-sounding names. The study, which focused on five US cities, found that white guests got a "yes" from hosts 50 per cent of the time, versus 42 per cent for black guests.
Nine months later, in an open letter to the Airbnb community, Chesky conceded the firm had been "slow" to tackle discrimination. For a company that prides itself on its community, it was a blow. "You feel responsible" he says. "These kinds of things transcend your other challenges - when are you going public, what your valuation is, how fast you're growing. Fifty years from now, I'm not going to remember those things, or care. They'll feel like grades I had in high school."
But why was Chesky slow to notice discrimination on his platform? "When you're starting a company and you're in hyper-growth, everything seems like a crisis," he explains. "In 2011, we were also slow and we underestimated the damage somebody could do to someone's home. A woman's home was trashed and so we became incredibly focused on trust and safety. That focus created a blind spot for the other side of trust and safety: when you try to confirm and verify people's identity, there's a negative consequence to that." In other words: Chesky was slow to react because he's a white man. "Joe, Nate and I were three white guys who haven't experienced the kind of discrimination that people in the [Airbnb] community had."
Work is underway to remedy that shortcoming. All the trips being added to Airbnb can be booked instantly, removing any possibility of discrimination. In March 2016, David King III, who previously held diversity and outreach roles at the US State Department and Peace Corps, was hired as Airbnb's first director of diversity and belonging. "A lot of great design comes from empathy," says Chesky. "And if you haven't gone through that experience, you haven't consulted people - you have a blind spot."
For Chesky, it all comes down to design: designing the perfect trip, the perfect company, the perfect community. "Airbnb should become what we hope the world looks like in the future, at least in a small kind of way."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
