To say that Airbnb is the largest hotel in the world wouldn’t be a complete exaggeration. Its original concept was “canape and breakfast”. That is, let someone sleep on the couch in your house, give them breakfast, and in exchange, get extra money from you. Over time, this vision drifted towards a very different notion. More commercialized. Holiday apartments. Ultimately, this led them into the abyss of bankruptcy, and it was Steve Jobs who, oddly enough, got them out of there.
Their potential customer was no longer that person who was commuting to work and didn’t want to pay a fortune for a hotel room in the center of cities like London or New York. Now those searching on Airbnb are tourists, families who want to come together in one house for Christmas, and people who want to spend a week in a beachfront apartment in Torremolinos. And the Covid arrived at their homeand everything went overboard.
“Airbnb won’t do anything more than I can personally focus on”
During the hardest phase of the pandemic, and the resulting lockdown, Airbnb lost 80% of its business. That is to say that if before he earned ten dollars, he now earned two. A ruin. It was obvious that something had to be done if they wanted the company not to go bankrupt, and to achieve this, those in charge resorted to the usual: Steve Jobs.
“I will do very little and be involved in every detail, and Airbnb will do nothing else that I can personally focus on,” Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said in a statement. interview in which he explains how they managed to get out of this deep hole into which Covid plunged them. And this is one of Jobs’ maxims: that A company should never do more than its CEO can handle.. He must be personally involved in every launch, every new product and every new idea that arises.
He says that he who covers a lot tightens little. And it’s better to do a few things well than a lot more. Sometimes you have to be more efficient, more organizational than just say yes to everything because your income allows it. This is the idea that people very close to Steve like Jony Ive passed on to Chesky. And this is how Airbnb withstood the biggest blow in its history. And be careful because major world analysts have predicted his death.
Others, like Mohan Sawhney, a marketing professor at the Kellogg School of Management, have announced that they “will be like ‘Schwarzenegger’.” That is to say, their return would mean coming back stronger, with greater robustness as a company. is that now everything works the same way, much more efficiently, thanks to this simple idea that Jobs once explained to his colleagues.
However, the problem they now face is another: a Spanish royal decree that restricts rents and which the company already insists does not solve the housing problem, but at least mitigates the massive touristification of urban populations. Although this is another battle that will last a long time.
An older version of this article was originally published on 09/10/2023.
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