Good afternoon. We're thrilled for our next fireside chat keynote with Brian Chesky, the CEO and co-founder of Airbnb. Brian, it's good to see you again. Thank you.
Yeah, it's good to be back.
Yeah, great to, great to see you live. Before we get started, let me do all the disclosures.
Yeah, love those.
It's the easiest part for me. Please note all the important disclosures, including personal holdings disclosures and Morgan Stanley disclosures appear on the Morgan Stanley public website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. They're also at the registration desk. Some of the statements made today by Airbnb may be considered forward-looking. These statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could actual results to differ materially. Any forward-looking statements made today by the company are based on assumptions as of today. Airbnb undertakes no obligation to update them. Please refer to Airbnb's Form 10-K for a discussion of the risk factors that may impact actual results. There's always a lot of things going on in the macro environment, the macro travel environment. From a micro perspective, Airbnb.
Micro.
Micro, yes. As we're sitting here now versus a year ago, maybe talk to us about some of the things that have changed most from a macro perspective?
Yeah.
and a micro perspective that have you excited about
Yeah.
Airbnb going forward.
Yeah, yeah. Wow. It's been evolving since the pandemic.
Mm-hmm.
I'll give you a sense. Before the pandemic, you know, we were primarily a budget travel site. You know, it was like $100-$110 a night. 80% of our business was either urban or cross-border, and we, you know, we didn't have as much penetration of vacation rentals, we didn't have as much penetration at the higher end, and it was more short stays.
Mm-hmm.
Of course, the pandemic occurs. Probably the biggest change to travel since World War II, or maybe the Great Depression, and I think that travel has changed forever because of the changes during the pandemic. What has happened, I think a lot of things have changed, but I think the biggest thing that's changed is suddenly people have realized they can do their entire job from a laptop.
Mm-hmm.
Just because, like, I think more financial or tech companies, people are still going back to the office, but there's an unmistakable trend is that people are permanently more flexible, and if you can do more of your job from a laptop, that means you can take that laptop anywhere, and that means an entire generation of people have had newfound flexibility. I kinda wonder, if I was 2023, would I live in one city or would I start to hop around and be more flexible? What we saw was suddenly when borders closed, cities were closed down, people weren't traveling for business, people were locked in their homes, and they figured, "I need to get out of the house." What they did is people started traveling nearby to destinations about a car drive away.
What this did is it exposed people to travel in non-urban areas, vacation rental destinations, non-urban areas, even remote places off the beaten path. That's the first thing that happened. The second thing that happened is we used to be a business for basically solo travelers and couples.
Yep.
It was basically a way for, like, people in their 20s and 30s to, like, travel to Europe by yourself or your, maybe your partner. Suddenly, a lot of people wanted to actually get together with their friends. So they started booking bigger homes, and that was the second thing to happen. The third thing that happened is because people didn't all have to be back to an office, they started going away longer.
Mm-hmm.
During the pandemic, now about a fifth of our nights booked are longer stays. All of those trends, as long as you believe that Zoom is here to stay, then you believe that these trends are here to stay. I always like to look at young companies and young people to predict the future, and young companies are providing more flexibility. You know older companies are hauling people back to the office, but younger peak companies are embracing the flexibility. The reason younger companies are embracing flexibility is they're realizing that the best talent is everywhere. Long as limiting people to commuting radius doesn't provide you a greater talent differential than hiring all over the world, suddenly you are gonna create a world with a lot more flexibility.
Even people who do go to office may not go during the summer because they wanna go away. All of those trends we think are here to stay. Since I last talked to you when I was here last year, urban travel hadn't yet come back.
Right.
Cross-border hadn't yet come back. Those trends are here to stay. The whole market has shifted. It's moved to Airbnb. When hotels were closed, a whole bunch of people that said, "I'll never stay in Airbnb," thought, "Well, do you wanna stay home or stay in another home?" A lot of people were exposed to Airbnb, and I think what happened at the market level is that the market came to Airbnb a bit, and it was probably an inevitable acceleration of maybe five years of growth or an adoption on Airbnb. That's kind of how the market has changed, and I think that travel is changed forever. Business travel still exists, but leisure travel or a blurring between business and leisure is probably where it's all going. Now let's talk about Airbnb, because Airbnb's probably changed even more.
Mm-hmm.
Before the pandemic, you know, we were run very differently than we are today. We were a divisional structure. You know, I think that it was Andy Grove that once said that, like, all companies basically become hybrid organizations. You either become, like, a business unit organization or a functional organization. In almost every large company, at some point, like, they struggle to make decision-making. They slow down, right? All these people in a room, imagine all of us trying to make a decision. How do you do it? The way most companies do it is they divisionalize. They literally divide their company up, and that's what we did. We broke it up into 10 divisions. We had homes and experiences and Luxe and transportation. We had a magazine, a China division. We had 10 divisions. You create divisions, you hire...
They hire people just like them. They brought people that created their little subdivisions. We were spending about $1 billion a year on marketing. The vast majority was performance marketing, and I pushed decision-making down. We were very, like, data-driven, and we did a lot of, like, experiments, and that's kind of the way the company is run. I remember late 2019, though, I had a realization. Costs are rising, growth was slowing. We were spending a lot of money on performance marketing, which is basically selling our product as a commodity. Our product was looking less different than our competitors every single year. It was getting really hard to get work done. It was bureaucratic. It was political. Basically, we were suffering from big company syndrome. I was wondering, Is this the fate of Airbnb?
I remember going on this hike in Bolinas, California, my co-founders, and I said, "I feel like I went on this dream where I came back to the company, I don't even recognize it anymore." I didn't know how to change it. We were about to go public.
Mm-hmm.
The pandemic occurred. We lose 80% of our business, eight weeks. We have to rebuild the company from the ground up. I thought, "This is a moment for us to build a different kind of company." I studied companies before me who had a crisis. Probably the biggest, like, reckoning I ever seen in tech was Apple. 1997, they were 90 days from bankruptcy. It was now April 2020. People were predicting, "Is this the end of Airbnb? Will Airbnb exist?" You know, it was really scary.
Mm-hmm.
At that point, we basically did a number of things. We shut down all marketing. I got to do the one experiment every CMO wanted to do. What happens if you shut off all your marketing?
Yeah.
The answer was hardly anything. That was really interesting.
Right.
That's when I realized performance marketing is a drug, and you've got to be careful about that drug, and you gotta get that needle out of your company. That's what That was the first thing, we got the needle out, 'cause it is a drug.
Yeah.
The second thing that happened is we didn't have money for all the divisions, so we shut every division down. We went back to a functional organization like a startup. We had a marketing department and a design department and engineering department. What happened was we got all the very best people, we put them in one room, made one type of like, centralized all decision-making, and I got involved in every decision again, which is counterintuitive. It would seem like it would slow things down.
Mm-hmm.
Something remarkable happened. Our business came back to almost the same levels before, without the marketing. We had no money to market, I became like a one-man press machine. I did 100 interviews. We got hundreds of thousands of articles about Airbnb. We started focusing obsessively with the experience, something crazy happened. Since the pandemic, we went from a company that was basically losing $250 million in EBITDA. We had, like, 7,000-8,000 employees, now we have 75% more revenue with 5% fewer employees. We made over 300 upgrades since the beginning of the pandemic.
Mm-hmm.
We spend half as much money as a % of revenue on marketing.
Yep.
Most of our marketing is basically marketing our products. We had 600,000 articles about Airbnb. I guess the last thing I'll say to end this question is the market's changed, Airbnb's changed. I would never have asked for the pandemic, the amount of suffering that went, but it was the very best thing that ever happened. It was like a near-death experience. We stared in the abyss, and I think we really understood what truly mattered. The only thing else I'll say is there are two things that haven't changed. People still wanna make money. They still wanna connect. Travel is one of the best ways to do that. That's gonna be around so long as Airbnb's around.
Okay. Let me ask a 2-part AI question.
Yes.
The first one, you know, love to hear sort of examples of how you've been using machine learning and AI for a while, and also areas where you say, "Here are ways in which we could still improve, our operations by using more AI." The second one, I think there's a little bit of a question mark of if you have new types of travel search tools or itinerary planners that maybe come from Google or some other company, is there a risk that you could get a higher portion of your traffic from these other sources, and so maybe the customer acquisition cost goes up? How do you think about those two dynamics, internal and potential external funnel threats?
Yeah, I mean, I think that, like, machine learning is something that we've and other companies have been using for a long time, and we use it for ranking. I mean, like, if you just take an example, like we have a very difficult type of search problem. You go to Google, and you type something into Google, usually the first answer is the best answer. After the first five results, does it really matter? Who really ever goes to the second page of Google?
Right.
If you go to Paris, there's more than 50,000 homes in Paris. What's the right home for you? It's almost like a dating site, right? Like, you got your price point. We're in the business of matching. For us, Airbnb is very unique because unlike hotels, we don't have SKUs. We have 6.6 million listings. Every one is different. By the way, the inventory changes day to day. This hotel is a SKU. You go to book this hotel, and you don't see every room. They show you one photo, and it's meant to represent, like, hundreds of rooms.
Mm-hmm.
The longer tail of data that you have, I think the more a company would benefit from machine learning because suddenly it can do tasks that an individual person can never do.
Yep.
This brings me to the much larger question of AI. I think that we are, I mean, who knows what's gonna happen, but what appears to be true is we are experiencing a platform shift. That's what we typically would call this. This platform shift is probably larger than mobile. It's probably akin to the internet. Some would argue it's larger than the internet. It's akin to, like, the Industrial Revolution. Let's assume it's no larger than the internet. That's insane.
Mm-hmm.
Let's ask the question, which companies got left behind by the internet, and which companies kind of rode the internet? I think the best way to understand AI is actually so simple. It's just culture. The companies that will ride AI are the companies with innovative cultures, and the companies that will have this pass them by are the companies that use AI, the same companies that were talking last year about crypto and the metaverse. If a company talked about crypto last year and they talk about AI now, they probably don't understand either. They're probably I'm sorry, they don't. That's, that's what I think. I think that it's really important that you have a really great culture.
You know, you know, I think between the work that Google is doing and OpenAI, I think that they're building incredibly interesting layer, and I think that we can bring a lot of that technology into Airbnb to basically, like, comb through our half a billion reviews, to be able to summarize them, to do better matching. I actually have this vision that our app one day is less like a store and more like the most powerful travel concierge you could ever imagine. Why would that help? Because, you know, most people at Airbnb, they're not business travelers. They could go anywhere.
Mm-hmm.
We have to be in the business of inspiration and understanding them.
Yeah. Okay. You've been making some platform changes to the user experience over the years, the I'm flexible button-
Yeah
... you know, improving matching, et cetera. What can you sort of tell us about some examples, maybe quantify some examples of improvements you've seen around conversion-?
Yeah
... or overall repeat behavior from some of the changes you've made to the platform?
Yeah, I mean, like, here's the thing. Like, here's a fun thing you should do. You should pick up your phone and look at the apps on your phone, and ask yourself a question, how much have they changed in the last year? It's a really good question. The answer is, most of them haven't changed. I think part of the reason most apps haven't changed is because of the way they're built, that products are decentralized, again, to make decisions. I like to use this analogy. Let's say we try to build a car the way we build software. You got a team, and they're designing a tire, and they find the perfect tire, and they do a bunch of A/B tests of the right tire.
They go to the wheel team, but the tire doesn't fit on the wheel, so they gotta make a new wheel. Now they gotta like, it doesn't fit the car body. The car body's gonna be bigger, but now the car's heavier, so you need to make a new battery. The battery is expensive, so now you gotta capitalize that, but you gotta go to investors. The whole point is all these things are integrated. What we decided to do is run the entire company on a single roadmap. It was so crazy. We had people from Google, Facebook, Amazon, all the other tech companies, and they're like, "This is insane. You're gonna run the entire company on a single roadmap? This is gonna be a bottleneck. It's gonna slow you down." We found just the opposite.
By aligning everyone on a single roadmap that we were able to make over 300 upgrades, and I'll talk about just two. The first is Airbnb Categories. We started noticing that in a world of flexibility, many people are coming to Airbnb, and they don't even have a destination in mind, right? If you're traveling for business, you came here, and you type in San Francisco, you type in the dates.
Mm-hmm.
That's not most travelers. We noticed that the internet search, travel search hadn't changed since the invention of it, probably with Expedia-
Mm-hmm
... in basically 1995. We thought, "What if there was a different way to search for travel? What if you categorize travel not just by location?" Because we're 100,000 cities. Who can think to 100,000 cities to type in a search box? It's like a fill-in-the-blank with 100,000 possibilities. What if you could also categorize homes by another vector, by the types of homes they have? That's what we did. We launched Airbnb Categories. We basically categorized every single home. We used machine learning to scan every single listing. We did computer visioning to pick the right cover photo, so you see A-frames, they're all A-frames. Homes in Categories have now been viewed 0.5 billion times .
You know, we don't usually break out every individual feature, but we're seeing that there's a lot more travel, a lot more traffic, a lot more inspiration. People are viewing more page views. The other thing we're trying to do with Airbnb Categories is the holy grail in travel is to be an inspiration business. A lot of people think the way to do that is to sell flights. Sorry, the holy grail of travel is to be the, like, top of the funnel.
Mm-hmm.
A lot of people think that the way to do that is to sell flights. We thought the way to do that is actually to inspire people where to travel. Because before you decide how to get there, you have to figure out where to go. If we can point demand to where we have supply, that is the holy grail, and that's what we're working towards. The only other thing I'll talk about is AirCover.
Mm-hmm.
Obviously, one of the biggest parts of our business is we gotta add more supply. The number one fear people have is, "What happens to my home?" We thought, "Well, what if we could take that mostly off the table?" We created this product called AirCover. It's $3 million of protection against theft or property damage for every home. We verify 100% of identities, and we don't charge for verification. We have over 100 million identities verified on Airbnb. We do reservation screening technology to prevent parties. When we rolled this product out, we noticed a 70-point increase in NPS for reimbursement claims. This is actually crazy. If your home is trashed, your NPS is so high you become a brand promoter. I don't recommend that ever happen.
Right.
That was, like, a completely crazy thing. These are some of the things that we've been focused on. You know, we're gonna launch a bunch of other upgrades this May. We have the next release.
As the husband of a Superhost, we thank you.
Nice.
We don't want our house to get trashed.
We have 1 million Superhosts.
Yeah. Let me ask one about forward growth. You know, one of the questions we often get is how can Airbnb continue to grow room nights, high teens or a 20s CAGR when you think about users or spend per user? What are the KPIs you look at where you say, "Okay, these are the internal metrics I, Brian Chesky, watch to make sure that we're still compounding at the rates that we could and should be?
There's probably, like, four or so growth vectors that we look at. The first is segments, guest segments. you know, we, 62% of our guests are 34 and under. We are still very, very popular. Airbnb's a kinda weird phenomenon. It's one of the only internet platforms where it's cool for kids and their parents to both be on the same platform. Right? Usually the kids flee once the parents join, but I think that, you know, you know, parents are often good hosts.
Right.
We actually are gonna really focus on the next generation of travelers. I think Gen Z is a whole new game. The great thing about young people is more of them every year, so the market keeps growing. That's the first thing. The second thing is geography. Every market is above pandemic levels from business except for APAC. Asia-Pacific is a massive growth opportunity. You've got, of course, the big four of Korea, Japan, India, and China, but you also have Southeast Asia-Pacific area. That's like a very, very big market. LatAm is still continuing to grow, and then Africa is gonna be a very important market in the next probably decade or two. Geography is the second thing. The third thing is making our service much more reliable.
Mm-hmm.
That all of you in this room wanna use us, and you wanna use us more and more. We did this really crazy. If I can go on a quick detour for a second. A decade ago, I was inspired by one of my favorite entrepreneurs, and his name is Walt Disney. In 1937, he created this movie, Snow White, and it was the first feature-length animated film. To create this feature-length animated film, it was so long he had to create this thing that we now call a storyboard because they had to be able to kinda map out the entire journey. As I was reading the story, I thought to myself that most companies are looking at KPIs and defects to improve the experience.
I thought, "You know, Most people take trips 'cause they wanna have a good time.
Mm-hmm.
Ultimately, the companies that will grow the fastest are the companies that create the best experience. We thought the best trip wins. We thought, "Well, what if we took one single trip, and we did a storyboard of all the different frames end to end?" We've now taken that, and we've created this thing we call the Community Blueprint, where we basically have looked end to end every step of the journey, and we obsess over every customer contact, every defect, every policy, every single detail. Our job is to perfect every single detail of this experience, even the details that people never see. If we do that, then I think people in this room and other people that aren't Gen Z, most of you, are gonna continue to use Airbnb more and more.
The last thing is we wanna make hosting much more mainstream. You know, we're gonna grow as fast as we have supply. We have 6.6 million listings. Here's the thing: our brand is mainstream. Like, Airbnb's been used 1.5 billion times. We're a noun and a verb used all over the world. Hosting is a little more underground. The reason hosting is more underground is for years it was in a legal or regulatory gray area.
Mm-hmm.
Right? We had to basically, like, get the laws on the books, we had to start to collect room and hotel tax. When you haven't collected room and hotel tax, and you haven't gotten the laws on the books, it's hard to solicit business in the city. We had built a demand muscle, but we didn't yet build a supply muscle. Having now collected $6 billion in hotel tax and 90% of our top 200 markets now regulated on Airbnb, we are now ready to promote hosting. To do that, you just gotta do three things. The first thing you gotta do is make it safe. That's why we have things like AirCover. The second thing you need to do is make it easy.
I thought about, like, my mom, like, I remember when she got, like, a Apple laptop, she couldn't figure out how to use it, and there's a Genius Bar, and they could go, and they could help her. I thought to myself, "We need, like, a Genius Bar for hosting." That's what we created. We have this thing called Airbnb Setup. It allows people to get help. Then the last thing is we now need to tell the story of hosting because we kinda were shy about it for a decade. Now we have these campaigns promoting hosting, and the net result is we have twice as much traffic to our landing page to learn about hosting. Here's the other thing.
There was some really smart analyst in Q4 that had some questions about whether or not we'd have enough supply. 900,000 incremental listings later, we realized even smart people can be wrong.
Yes, yes. Yes, they can be. Yes, they can be. They can be wrong. It's a great number. You know, very, very good supply.
You're usually right.
No, no. It's. I think actually. You made really good traction on supply. There's two aspects to it. The first thing is adding more and more of the overall listings to the platform, which has been.
Yeah
... really good growth. What about the idea of increasing the nights available per property?
Totally. Yeah, yeah.
Where are you on that, and where could that go?
Oh, yeah. I'll just give you a simple framework. We started Airbnb. Actually, it was called AirBed & Breakfast, we launched for the Democratic National Convention in 2008 to provide airbeds for conferences. By then, we weren't sure if we were a travel company or a conference company. It was kind of crazy to think. Initially, something remarkable happened, which is people would list for an event to host once, they'd make a bunch of money, they'd kind of forget that they're still listed, then the next week they'd get another $500 reservation. They were like, "Maybe I'll keep hosting.
Right.
The way Airbnb works is a lot of people do it one time. They get a bunch of bookings. Now they start hosting. Now the next goal is to add more dates. Finally, some hosts grow with us and add more listings. Finally, the other cool thing is then they tell their friends about it. Like, if Hilton gets a bunch of bookings, they're not, like, calling Marriott like, "It's amazing. You gotta get in on this.
Right.
Regular people are gonna tell their friends, like, "I just got a..." You know, 50% of hosts get a booking in three days, 75% in nine days. It's pretty amazing, the, like, flywheel. That's kinda how we grow.
Got it. Okay. Let's talk about take rate. Fine. Let's talk about take rate. You know, I think the take rate, again, as a happy host, the 3% take rate is incredibly low. Talk to us about sort of how you think about philosophically the idea of increasing or adjusting the take rates, either for hosts or for guests over time, either through new products or for just like for like.
Yeah, I mean, our 3% take rate hasn't changed in more than 10 years. If you think about it, that means in the last 10 years, we offered a lot of free things that our competitors don't offer, like $3 million of damage protection and AirCover and 24/7 support, and there's a lot of other things that we offer. My general principle is I want the moat of Airbnb to get deeper every year, and that means that every year we need to give away more value than we're charging. I want the deal to be a host to increase. In other words, I want it to feel cheaper and cheaper and cheaper every year to be a host 'cause you're like, "I can't believe we're giving all this." There's a point where we can also start charging for things.
What I think is there's a huge opportunity for a suite of services. Most we'll give away for free to get our moat deeper, 'cause that's the key, but some we could charge for. By the way, the other thing that's amazing is there's a whole Airbnb economy that's built. You know, there's a lot of other great startups like the ride sharing startups, delivery startups, even other travel companies, where as robust as those platforms are, there aren't really a lot of companies built on top of them.
Mm-hmm.
There are literally thousands of companies built on top of Airbnb. You could literally build like an app store for them, and there are billions of dollars flowing through them. I think if you look at the suite of services that are possible from a guest side and a host side, there's a huge amount of opportunity. We just did a small thing on the guest side, which was we launched travel insurance.
Mm-hmm.
You know, we're pretty good at, like, making things pretty integrated. I like to think that one of our core capabilities is we're like the interface layer. We're not the best AI company, but we're gonna design the best interfaces for AI. We're gonna design the best interfaces for marketplace. That's where we really excel, and I think that will allow us to offer a lot of services.
Okay. One of the things we've talked about over the years a little bit has been the sponsored listings.
Yeah.
-opportunity.
Yeah.
Maybe sort of any update on where you are with that, where you've made the most progress and sort of at what are the sort of key hurdles you see to really overcome to roll out that business?
There's not a lot of hurdles. I think it's a massive opportunity. You know, I think you could imagine easily adding a few equivalent percentage rates of take rate if you were to scale that over time. I think there's a lot of comparables with Amazon, one of the largest advertising platforms now in the world, or Etsy or Alibaba or even Booking.com. This is a big part of their take rate. You know, my CFO's from Amazon, and he used to use a Jeff Bezos quote that you wanna focus on the most perishable opportunities first. The great thing about sponsored listings is it's not perishable. The bigger the platform gets, actually, the more interesting monetization gets. Monetization's great at scale, and so you wanna get as much scale as possible. We still feel like we're still in land grab mode.
That is not the number one most perishable opportunity, but it's absolutely on the horizon. When we would do it, I would also wanna do an ad platform different than anyone else. I'd want it to be much more targeted and really abide by, you know, user experience principles and be very, very careful overturning that dial too quickly.
What about a loyalty program? You know, loyalty programs in travel have been around for a long time. There's another online travel company starting to promote a loyalty program that includes alternative accommodations now. How do you think about the importance of Airbnb having a separate loyalty program?
That's a great question. When I started Airbnb 14 years ago, I joined this program called Y Combinator you probably heard. The first day of Y Combinator, they give you this gray T-shirt, in the front of the T-shirt, it's got their mantra, the mantra is, "Make something people want." It's almost too simple to work. Make something people want. Isn't loyalty like when you don't have to pay people? Like, your friends are loyal 'cause you pay them? That seems like kinda weird.
Yeah.
I think that's the way we think about it. That being said, I really do love what Amazon Prime did because I think that's more like a membership program where there's only so much service we could provide for our current take rate. You could imagine, for example, an elevated tier of service or unique access. I don't wanna pay for loyalty. I think that in a weird way feels like an oxymoron, but I do imagine that there's a lot of paid opportunities, service layers. The last thing I'll just say about this is, you know, just to zoom out, I just wanna share one last thing. I would zoom out.
You know, like I think that I've been thinking a lot about, like, what business are we even in? You know, are we a travel company? Are we a housing company?
Mm-hmm.
What do we do on the horizon? I'm 41. I started this company with my two friends when I was 26. I wanna feel like the biggest ideas I had weren't in my twenties or thirties, we are dreaming over the horizon. I also wanna make sure that whatever we do in the future, that we're solving some really important problem in the world. I think that Airbnb, when people see it on the surface, they see homes, they see spaces. I think if you go back to that first weekend, to the original Airbnb, it's always been about more than just space. It's been about connection.
Mm-hmm.
It's about people in the physical world face-to-face connecting. I think we are now living in the loneliest time in human history. We hired the former Surgeon General of the United States when the pandemic broke out. He's now the Surgeon General again. He said, "Do you know what the number one killer in America is?" I said, "I don't know. Is it cardiac? Is it, like, obesity? Is it cancer? Is it cardiac disease?" He said, "No, it's loneliness. Loneliness takes 15 years off your life." I thought, "Wow, that's pretty bad, but how prevalent is this?" What I realized is that one out of three Americans are chronically lonely.
It gets worse because if you actually dig into the details, and if you have teenagers in this room, this might resonate, two out of three teenagers are chronically depressed or hopeless, defined by a two-week period in the last year where they just can't function. One out of three teenagers, one out of three teenage girls has made a suicide plan. Why is this? It's hard to know, but I think modern life is starting to make people lonely. You know, the office is now Zoom, the mall is now Amazon, the theater is now Netflix, and time with friends, time sleeping, time exercising is spent on a device.
Mm-hmm.
The problem with devices is social networking became social media, and your friends became your followers. No one has changed someone else's mind in the YouTube comment section. Your Instagram followers aren't coming to your funeral. It's not to say any of this is bad. I think all these technologies are great, so long as you remember they have to be in balance with meaningful connection in the real world. How are you gonna do that? I'm not saying we're here to solve this problem. No one company is. I'm quite certain that we need to balance all the time on screens with time in the physical world with people we care about, either reuniting with friends or meeting other people. I think that travel is a great way to do that.
Whatever time I have left doing this, and I hope it's a long time, I think there's a much bigger North Star for us than just putting heads in beds.
Mm-hmm.
I think there's something about making the world feel a little bit smaller, making people realize the other is not so other, people are 99% the same. To really build products and services that, at their heart, bring people together, foster connection. What we have invented, probably more than a marketplace, is a system of trust to get strangers to live together. If they could live together, what else could they do together? I think that's where this company is probably going in the coming years.
All right. Well, Brian, can't wait to see what happens beyond the horizon. Thank you so much for joining us again.
Thank you all.
Thank you.
Thank you, Brian.
That was good. That was good.