Brian Chesky thinks AI is about to rewrite consumer products — and he says he already has a playbook for it. Welcome to Tech Podcast Podcast. We listen to the shows so you can decide if they’re worth your time. Today: Chesky on Airbnb, AI, and whether there’s actually a framework here or just founder mythology. My bar is pretty simple: did he say anything a product manager couldn’t have printed on a slide deck in 2023? If yes, we queue it. If not, I’m telling you. This one’s from TBPN:
Yeah, I mean things are really good. Um we've accelerated growth for the first time since the pandemic. Um we grew 10% um last year in revenue and this quarter we announced that revenue was 18%. So from 10 to 18% which is a pretty big acceleration.
Brian Chesky on TBPN: Airbnb just reported revenue growth jumping from 10% to 18%, and he’s crediting a small internal team called Project Hawaii that’s focused entirely on conversion rate in the guest journey. The Rausch Street reference is doing some real work there. That’s the original Airbnb apartment, so he’s basically saying he pushed a giant marketplace to act like it has five employees again. Either that’s a real operating insight, or it’s the most polished founder myth I’ve heard this month. What I’d want next is the actual change in the guest conversion flow. Because “startup energy” is the story, sure, but there’s got to be a real product decision under that. If TBPN asked that follow-up and got a real answer, queue it. If they let him stay in the mythology, skip ahead to the timestamps. You’ll find links to every story we covered today in the show notes, so if one caught your ear, take a minute to dig into the original reporting.
That’s Tech Podcast Podcast for today. Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back tomorrow. This is a Lantern Podcast.