Brian Chesky took the stage in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday to tell a story about the future.
That story went something like this: 17 years ago, when Chesky cofounded Airbnb, people were skeptical. Who would ever stay in a stranger’s home, they snarled. (In 2008, seven investors rejected the company, turning down what would have been a 10% stake for $150,000.) But the startup defied the odds—it’s now a verb, noun, and a publicly-traded Fortune 500 company with an $84 billion market cap.
Now, Chesky explained, it was time for the company to once again blaze a new trail by redefining what it means to “Airbnb” something.
With the just-unveiled Airbnb Services and a relaunched Airbnb Experiences, Chesky painted a picture of a world where you rely on Airbnb as your hub for a singular vacation experience. Chesky talked about Airbnb as a marketplace for unforgettable, once-in-a-lifetime moments. Think: making pasta with a chef in Rome, dancing with a K-pop star in Seoul, exploring Notre Dame with a restoration architect, wrestling with a luchador in Mexico City, or even spending a Sunday with Patrick Mahomes.
Chesky closed with a new tagline: “Now you can Airbnb more than an Airbnb.” The idea is that you’d “Airbnb” a massage on vacation—and would eventually start “Airbnb-ing” massages, makeup artists, and hair stylists not just on vacation, but when you’re at home. In short, it was the launch of a superapp that was both a mild repudiation of tech—”somewhere along the way, something drifted, and we started spending more time looking at screens and less time in the real world,” Chesky told the audience—and an incredibly Silicon Valley display.
This presentation, in which Chesky put his best “founder mode” persona on display, was met with both fanfare and criticism. Zynga founder Mark Pincus hailed Chesky’s performance as “Steve Jobs-esque.” Others were skeptical that Airbnb users will turn to the app in their daily, non-vacation lives, and questioned the marketplace pricing Airbnb is using.
The truth, almost definitely, lies somewhere in between.
There are certain ways in which the idea makes good sense. For example, if one of the criticisms of staying in an Airbnb is that you lose the amenities of a hotel, it tracks that the company would want to fix that. Travel is a spectacularly fragmented industry and Airbnb isn’t alone in seeing the level of white space open to consolidation—
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