Why Silicon Valley Loves Airbnb—for Now: The Information's Weekly Newsletter

As we round the corner into a holiday week, I’m feeling grateful for our incredible team that continues to plow ahead with new product launches and important articles in the last few weeks of 2020. This week, I strongly recommend you read Tom’s buzzy interview with the CEO of subscription social media site OnlyFans, along with Zoe’s story about the unraveling of job site Hired, including the CEO’s surprise resignation on Zoom.

Cheering On Airbnb

This week you saw something you don’t often see: goodwill for a tech company.

Maybe it was a reaction to the endless years of lashing out against tech CEOs on Twitter, often coming from other tech CEOs themselves. Or the incessant pressure from the press about tech companies and their bad behavior. But as I read positive tweet after positive tweet supporting Airbnb, its CEO Brian Chesky and its initial public offering planned for early December, I couldn’t help but ponder what it was about this tech company that had everyone—well, cheering it on.

There are the obvious factors. As the company’s S-1 registration filing revealed this week, the company is going to make a whole lot of people a whole lot of money. This includes Valley VC funds like Sequoia and Founders Fund, as well as startup accelerator Y Combinator and Airbnb board members like Angela Arendts, former head of retail of Apple. Everyone has nice things to say when fortunes are on the line.

It is also true that the co-founders of Airbnb—Brian Chesky, Nate Blecharczyk and Joe Gebbia—are nice, low-key, friendly people who have avoided the public and private confrontations and scandals of other CEOs like Uber’s Travis Kalanick and WeWork’s Adam Neumann. Given how long these companies have been around (Airbnb and Uber were founded within a few months of each other in 2008 and 2009, respectively), this is no small feat.

Then there is Airbnb’s business itself. While Airbnb has a slew of competition, it doesn’t have a direct competitor that is high profile in Silicon Valley, akin to what Lyft has been to Uber, for example. That rivalry brought out both sides’ competitive instincts and created—mostly for Uber—many enemies.

Airbnb poses a big threat to the hotel industry and to cities, which have passed all sorts of legislation to slow its growth around the world. But those issues seem to be of lesser concern for most people in tech, based on how little they were discussed this week.

That lack of concern, coupled with the fact that the company has become an underdog of sorts in a pandemic that has devastated its business, leads us to the current situation. Many people seem to be giving Airbnb the benefit of the doubt that it is a force of good in the world—something they don’t extend to other tech companies.

Has Airbnb cracked the code on how to be disruptive without being hated, in a way others in tech could learn from? Perhaps.

Or do all those cheering have blinders on? Will Airbnb eventually contend with as great a backlash as we’ve seen others confront?

I think it will be a mix of both. Airbnb’s growth will not be without consequences for society, and its leaders are not perfect.

A few months ago, I got a call from one of Airbnb’s earliest investors. He was pissed. Cory had written a very fair profile of Chesky at the onset of the crisis that this investor felt was unfair. And he proceeded to spend almost an hour berating me for publishing the piece, picking it apart line by line. He called me back the next day and continued the attack.

Honestly, it was an odd series of calls, with the investor disputing many things the company had told us directly. We checked, and our sourcing for the disputed points held up. “How dare you do this to Brian?” I remember the person saying.

I left those calls on the one hand impressed with the support that Airbnb has engendered, and on the other amazed at the blinders its fiercest advocates continue to wear.

Being both impressed and skeptical is one of the hardest things about my job. But it is possible to feel both things at once. For journalists, it is critical.

It’s also why everyone hates journalists. They think we can never see the positives and cheer someone on. The problem is that in tech, there has historically been too much cheering. Time will tell whether that holds true for Airbnb.

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This Week's The Information Articles:

• Underperforming Tech IPOs Are On the Rise by Ross Matican
• Airbnb to Show Profit Improvement in Q3 by Cory Weinberg
• Facebook Rejected Employee Push to Throttle Misleading Political Posts by Alex Heath
• Goldman Sachs Goes on AWS Hiring Binge to Boost AI, Cloud Efforts by Kevin McLaughlin
• OnlyFans Chief Talks Sports Ambitions and Role of Adult Content in Site by Tom Dotan
• Rental Startup Domio Faces Likely Shut Down After Failing to Raise Funds by Paris Martineau
• Jack Ma’s Investment Firm Raises $3 Billion as Foreign Capital Chases China by Juro Osawa and Yunan Zhang
• Alphabet’s Internet Balloon Subsidiary ‘Loon’ Hit Financing Turbulence by Nick Bastone
• As Cloud Adoption Booms, Integration and Talent Remain Challenges by The Information Staff
• Facing Antitrust Probes, Google and Facebook Avoid Big M&A Deals by Laura Mandaro and Nick Bastone
• Airbnb’s IPO Signals That Rigid Lockup Rules Are on the Way Out by Ross Matican
• Job Site Hired, Once Valued at $500 Million, Discusses Winding Down by Zo? Bernard
• Microsoft’s New Weapon in Console Wars: a ‘Netflix for Games’ by Nick Wingfield
• Airbnb’s Chesky Takes Far Lower Salary Than Most Tech CEOs at IPO by Martin Peers
• Chinese Self-Driving Startups Plus and Hesai Considering Going Public by Yunan Zhang
• The Information’s 411 — Dark Side of the Loon by Tom Dotan
• Why Silicon Valley Loves Airbnb—for Now by Jessica E. Lessin