Airbnb’s Chesky on Steering the Ship Through COVID, IPO

Airbnb Inc. managed to withstand a global pandemic and come out the other side in better shape, as people reimagined their work-life balances with the flexibility to ditch offices for the mountains or coastal towns.

But that success wasn’t a guarantee. During the early days of the pandemic, the vacation-rental company lost 80% of its business in eight weeks.

“I’ve never had a near-death experience, thankfully, in my life, although I’ve heard it being described,” Chief Executive Officer Brian Chesky said in an interview on “The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations.” “A version of that happened from a business sense. It was almost like our business flashed before our eyes.”

Now, two years later and after the surge of the delta and omicron variants, the company posted its best year yet, reporting record profit and revenue in the fourth quarter. Even with the highly contagious omicron variant and a war in Ukraine, the company is optimistic about the first quarter and summer travel following many seasons of disruptions.

The interview, which took place last month, will air on March 16. The following conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Why didn’t you go public sooner, and do you have any regrets about waiting?

I just didn’t feel like we were ready to go public sooner. I think in hindsight maybe we could have gone public sooner. I mean it’s important to remember, when we were growing really quickly, there were not regulations on the books for Airbnb, and a lot of people were wondering, “Was this business gonna get regulated out of existence?”

But I felt like going public was a big stage. It was almost like, kind of a weird analogy, but if you’re baking a cake. Going public is putting it in the oven — it’s hard to change the ingredients after you go public, right?

And so I wanted to make sure that everything was kind of baked before we went public. Now, once the pandemic hit, that was more than a decade after we started. I was accused of having waited too long and having missed the IPO window. I would’ve never imagined what had transpired over the course of 2020, but I think looking back it worked out really well for everyone.

You said that COVID has changed everything. People are changing the way they work and the way they travel. Can you explain what you mean?

I think the world is never going back to the way it was fully before the pandemic. And one of the changes I think has been a change in how we work. Many people had a job at an office.

They’re not going to be required to come back to the office five days a week. I don’t think CEOs per se are going to determine these policies, I think workers will. Because all of us CEOs I think want the best talent. And I think flexibility is going to be the second most important benefit after compensation.

So I think we’re now living in a world where many people are going to work remotely. They might go in to the office, but not five days a week. If you don’t have to go into office five days a week, you’re more flexible. You’re less tethered to any one city.

What do you do for outside interests when you just want to chill out a bit?

I tried to become more intentional about reclaiming a personal life. So I got a dog. I have a seven-month-old golden retriever named Sophie. She travels with me to all my Airbnbs. I started exercising again. I think it’s really important to exercise every day.

I assumed successful people have people around them, and really successful people aren’t lonely. But it turns out that, for me, becoming really successful became kind of an isolating experience, because I couldn’t really share that experience with my mom or my sister or my friends from high school, because they couldn’t really relate to it.

And I woke up one day kind of realizing that most of the people I surround myself with were people I was paying. And I just needed to reclaim friendships. And so I kind of just got more intentional about reconnecting with my high school friends, my college friends, other people. And so I try to stay connected to people now, because I think it’s very easy to get isolated when you’re a CEO.

Michael Tobin reports for Bloomberg News.

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