Airbnb Interview, Joe Gebbia, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Airbnb

Airbnb is amazing. 500 thousand hosts are sharing their apartments, rooms, houses with possibly (my guess) ten of millions of guests already booking accommodations on Airbnb. If (my estimation) a third of these Airbnb accommodations are currently booked at an average of $50/night, that means perhaps $8.3 Million in revenues on Airbnb every day for hosts, of which Airbnb may be drawing $1.25 Million for it’s “Service Fees”, which may mostly be profits at this point. I may be underestimating this thing. Airbnb may be generating $15 Million in daily sales with more than $2 Million nearly pure profits for Airbnb daily, a current $730 Million profit per year. Of course Airbnb has a lot of employees already, and they spend money on Host Insurance, R&D and Marketing. Yet it’s pretty clear that Airbnb is a very profitable business. The question is how much is Airbnb worth now? At the Gigaom Roadmap conference, a guestimated valuation of $12.5 Billion was mentioned on stage by the interviewer. I ask Joe Gebbia jokingly at the end of the video if Google is going to acquire Airbnb. I don’t really mean it jokingly, I would like to see Google acquire Airbnb. And then properly guide it towards the total revolution of rental for people’s spaces worldwide, preferably with a smaller than 15% “Service Fee” on each booking and perhaps more trusted rankings and bookings system. The problem might be that Airbnb already is too expensive and that Google may not want to spend above the price of a Motorola on acquiring it at this point. What’s your experience with Airbnb? I’m posting this video from an Airbnb apartment, after having just spent about a month in several different Airbnb apartments on different continents and I know people who quit their jobs after becoming Airbnb hosts, it really is amazing.

Filmed at the Gigaom Roadmap 2013 using the Tiffen Steadicam Merlin 2 with arm and vest: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6rO_hBC7RA

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