Airbnb, Inc. Class A Common Stock Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026

Okay. All right. Everybody hanging in, everyone has their coffee? We are making our way through day one. It is my pleasure to welcome back to the conference Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb. Brian has been one of the more engaging conversations over the last couple of years, so I always love the opportunity to sit down. Brian, thanks so much for being part of the conference again.

Thank you for having me here.

All right, so I am going to dust off my law degree and read the safe harbor. Airbnb would like to remind you that during the fireside chat today, they may make forward-looking statements which involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those statements. The company may discuss or make reference to both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Statements made today are effective only today, will not be updated to reflect subsequent events or circumstances that may arise. Let us- Well done. Thank you.

I went all the way to law school to learn how to read. Let's start with the platform, because when I think of this company and I think of you, it always comes back to what are you building, what are you scaling, and how are you evolving the platform? The platform's been on quite a journey over the last couple of years. Talk a little bit about what has most excited you as the platform has changed and grown and evolved. Then we'll use that as a jumping-off point to get into a whole array of topics.

Yeah. Airbnb was essentially, for a long time, kind of a one-hit wonder. Our brand is a noun and a verb. It means to stay in a house for a short period of time. For 15 years, we were just that. Imagine you're building a house, and the house is a one-story house, and now you want to add 10 floors to the house. Most ranch houses, you can't just add 10 floors to. You need to rebuild the house from the ground up. Around 2021, 2022, we realized, okay, this core business is going really, really well, but if Amazon had just sold books, they would've been a much smaller company. We felt like there was a lot of platform extension we could do. But to be able to do that, we had to basically rebuild the company from the ground up.

Now, I'll be honest, if I was a professional CEO and I wasn't the founder, I might not have the courage to do that because we had to take some growth hits for a couple of years. It took a little longer than I thought, but we laid the foundation. We basically rebuilt the company from the ground up. Our vision was to become AI native, and our idea was we're going to go from homes to everything for travel, and eventually to living and beyond. Obviously, our core business is quite large. It's going to be approaching $100 billion in GBV. We have service and experiences. There really is no Amazon for services. There's really just two popular services in the world, food delivery and ride-sharing. What about the other 100 types of services? Why can't you hit a button and get those services to your home?

We think that's a huge opportunity. Experiences. Concert tickets are more popular than ever. People want to have experiences. I like to think, do you want to bet on a trend or the opposite of trend? Artificial intelligence, the keyword's artificial. So the opposite of artificial is authentic, real. In the age of artificiality, people are going to want things that are real. Real experience, real people in the real world. Then we realized, wait a second. If we can do nearly $100 billion in a core business, there's this other business that's, like, 10 times larger. It's called hotels. For years, our first tagline was "Forget hotels." I thought we'd never put hotels in Airbnb, but our customers asked for it, and at some point, I stopped being ideological.

I started becoming practical, and I said, "Okay, they want hotels." Then I realized, actually, half the hotels in the world are independent hotels. They're small hotels. They're B&Bs, and they actually don't want to be part of this oligopoly. They want to actually come on Airbnb. We have a lower commission. We have younger travelers. We started going into hotels. Then we realized, wait a second. Airbnb has a lot of homes on the platform for short-term rentals. What if we could offer longer-term rentals? We could be the biggest housing platform in the world. We started realizing, like Amazon, they went from books to DVDs to CDs, but eventually they went to everything. We started realizing this platform is incredibly extensible, and that's the journey we've been on, from homes to everything for travel to eventually things beyond travel.

With that in mind, what have you learned the most about the consumer landscape and the way the consumer sort of interacts with your company and your brand more broadly? Because I think there was a perception of the company around COVID, and then there was a perception coming out of COVID. As you sit here today, what are you learning the most about how consumers want to evolve with you as a company?

It's a pretty different company. A lot of travel people start on Google and chatbots. The thing about Airbnb is, because it's a noun and a verb, a lot of people come directly to Airbnb. Nearly 90% of our traffic is direct or organic. We've learned that the brand has got a huge affinity for people. We've also realized people want more from Airbnb. A lot of people, their first way of trying Airbnb now is through a service or experience. In fact, one of the reasons we're doing hotels, we think it's a gateway to get all these people that never stay in Airbnb to be able to come back and book a home. 1 in 3 people who book a hotel on Airbnb come back to book a home. There are people that will only book hotels.

We'll offer them a hotel, and there are people that'll come, and then they'll book other businesses. The other thing we've realized is Airbnb basically works equally well in every country in the world. It's one of the only businesses in the world where it works really well everywhere. It's a universality that people like to host, people like to travel. Brazil is our third-biggest market in the world. 70% of our business is in 5 countries.

Yeah. Four of the five countries are accelerating.

The weird thing is our mature business is not actually mature. We still have Asia, where we are basically no penetration, but it is a global network effect, so you would imagine Japan, Korea could be huge. India is growing 60% year-over-year, so we have a huge amount of opportunities. I think maybe the story is it is a story of a flywheel.

Okay. The flywheel, as it gets stronger, its growth begets more growth, begets more growth.