Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has a vision. A vision of a 21st-century company, on a mountaintop, in a magical world, turning a kitchen table into a conversation while staring out across an infinite time horizon. Or something like that.
Chesky recently sent a 1,300-word open letter to the Airbnb community in which he opined on the company’s mission and its place in the changing world. He also announced that outgoing American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault would be joining its board of directors.
With many expecting Airbnb to IPO this year, Chesky’s letter could be an interesting insight into the company’s future direction. As is typical for Tech Bro Talk, however, we get little in the way of concrete commitments and lots of creative jargon and, um, "innovative" metaphors.
Below, we run some of the stand-out quotes through our Tech Bro Translator.
I am absurdly lucky even to be writing this email.
You say pot-ay-to, I say pot-ah-to. You say tom-ay-to, I say tom-ah-to. You say “absurdly lucky”, I say “absurdly privileged”.
Ten years ago we started Airbnb. Joe[Gebbia, one of Airbnb’s cofounders]and I couldn’t pay rent, so we created the first AirBed & Breakfast and invited three people we’d never met to stay in our home.
Times were tough, guys.
Not quite tough enough for Chesky to, you know, get a regular job with health insurance like his parents wanted or move somewhere other than a San Francisco loft apartment – but at least tougher than being a multi-billionaire.
I was thinking about the next ten years of Airbnb when I received a phone call I’ll never forget. A close advisor told me that now was the time to “institutionalize your intentions so that even as you grow, you can minimize what conflicts with your vision.”
Truly, one of life’s unforgettable moments.
“Institutionalize your intentions” sounds pretty painful.
It made me realize that we should write down what we want to institutionalize before it’s too late. So I asked myself, if Joe, Nate and I were gone tomorrow, what would we want the world to know about Airbnb’s intentions?
Can you imagine how much poorer the world would be if these three wise founders should move on to the Stylish Apartment Great Location in the sky without informing us all of Airbnb’s hopes and dreams? Thank goodness that will never come to pass, thanks to Chesky’s great foresight and magnanimity.
It’s clear that our responsibility isn’t just to our employees, our shareholders, or even to our community – it’s also to the next generation. Companies have a responsibility to improve society, and the problems Airbnb can have a role in solving are so vast that we need to operate on a longer time horizon.
It wouldn’t be a tech bro blog post without some vague allusion to the idea that the company is somehow changing the world for the greater good rather than, you know, just helping people lease their homes to short-term lodgers. Chesky talks a lot in the letter about Airbnb’s responsibility to society, but he doesn’t really elaborate on what problems he thinks the company can solve.
The main societal issue that Airbnb has been implicated in so far is housing, especially in the context of rising rents and housing shortages. But Airbnb is usually charged with being more on the “causing” than “solving” side of this problem, with some countries and cities introducing regulation to restrict how people use the service in order to protect rental markets.
We’ll get to that “longer time horizon” next.
We want to design a company to meet the unique needs of the 21st-century. We want Airbnb to be a 21st-century company with two defining characteristics: \1. We will have an infinite time horizon. \2. We will serve all of our stakeholders.
Infinite. Time. Horizon.
I know that a lot of companies are thinking about being long-term oriented, but an alternative way of thinking about it is being infinite.
Being an infinite company is an idea that my friend, author Simon Sinek, has been discussing with me. Simon explained that a company’s purpose is to advance its vision, and since a vision is a mountaintop you never quite get to, you should have an infinite time horizon.
Simon sounds like he must be fun at parties.
There’s a lot of metaphors to unpack here, but given this whole open letter is about Chesky’s vision for Airbnb, we actually have very little information on what that vision is. What’s on top of the mountain, Brian? And if the time horizon is infinite, how come there’s a mountaintop anyway?
Chesky goes on to explain that what he means by all this is that companies should think long-term rather than focusing on short-term interests. He sees Airbnb as lasting forever, or at least another century, so wants the company to make decisions with that mindset.
As Simon put it, it means that your focus should be on getting to the mountaintop, not the rest stop on the way up the mountain.
Wait, but I thought we never quite get to the mountaintop? It’s all getting a bit Sisyphean.
We are instituting many actions to begin to put this ideal into practice, starting on February 22, where we’ll be announcing the next chapter to empower a host-led world with some substantial improvements to our service that set us up for an infinite time horizon.
Well I for one can’t wait. We’re 600 words into the letter and so far we don’t have any concrete details on how Chesky sees the company evolving over its apparently infinite lifespan, or what he actually plans to change.
Anyone else think that “empower a host-led world” sounds like the mission statement of a sci-fi B-movie baddie?
What is the purpose of a company? I would say its purpose is to realize its vision.
More about that magical vision. This whole sentence is tautologous – the company's vision is to realise its vision?
*But even this is no longer enough. We must realize our vision and ensure our vision is good for society. This means that we must have the best interest of three stakeholders in mind: Airbnb the company (employees and shareholders), Airbnb the community (guests and hosts) and the world outside of Airbnb.
Serving stakeholders means being honest about where we need to improve because we know we are far from perfect. One area we are focused on is making sure that, in markets that are significantly housing constrained, the Airbnb community is helping people stay in their homes and share their communities and not negatively impacting housing.*
This is the first time Chesky mentions a real concrete issue: the housing crisis. Airbnb has been criticised for helping to drive up rents and price out residents in cities such as San Francisco and Berlin, as landlords can be inclined to offer lucrative short-term leases through the Airbnb platform rather than taking on traditional long-term tenants.
There’s no indication in the letter exactly how Airbnb plans to “not negatively impact” housing. We are promised an Annual Stakeholder Report in March that will set out the criteria the company plans to measure itself by.
Part of designing a 21st-century company is designing a Board of Directors that can help us implement our 21st-century vision and institutionalize our intentions. I am proud to announce that we will be adding Ken Chenault to our Board of Directors as our first non-affiliated independent director.
Kenneth Chenault is the outgoing CEO of American Express; he is set to retire in February. Earlier this month, Facebook also announced that Chenault was joining its board, and he will be the first African-American board member of both companies. Airbnb, whose board is entirely male, has promised the next board member will be a woman.
*Ten years after we started Airbnb, I have often thought, how could an idea like millions of strangers sleeping in each other’s homes ever work? The truth is that we, Airbnb the company, did not do most of this. Our hosts, and the broader Airbnb community, created most of this. And they have taught me two things: people are fundamentally good, and we are 99% the same.
If people are good and mostly the same, then we should be able to offer more than people sleeping in one another’s homes. We imagine a world where every one of us can belong anywhere. A world where you can go to any community and someone says, “Welcome home.”*
Airbnb hosts haven’t always been quite so "fundamentally good", or so welcoming or accepting of others. There was that time researchers found African-American guests weren’t accepted as often as white guests. Or that time a California host turned away a guest because she was Asian-American. Or that time a neighbour called the police on a group of black guests because they thought they were robbing the place. Or the many incidents catalogued under the #Airbnbwhileblack hashtag.
Where home isn’t just a house, but anywhere you belong. Where every city is a village, every block a community, and every kitchen table a conversation. In this world, we can be anything we want. This is the magical world of Airbnb.
We are remembering that Airbnb is just an apartment-booking service, right? Forgive me if I’m not entirely convinced in an online marketplace’s ability to transform my very being, magic or no magic.
We will probably never fully realize this vision, but we will die trying.
Well gosh. Just be sure to keep letting the world know Airbnb’s intentions, in case it should come to that.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
