Airbnb, Inc. (ABNB) September 2026 Conference Transcript

Okay. All right. Everybody hanging in. Everyone has their coffee. We're making way through day one. It's my pleasure to welcome back to the conference Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb. Brian's been one of the more engaging conversations over the last couple of years, so I always love the opportunity to sit down.

Brian, thanks so much for being part of the conference again. Thank you for having me here.

All right. So I'm going to dust off my law degree and read the safe harbor. Airbnb would like to remind you that during the fireside chat today, they may make forward-looking statements which involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those statements. The company may discuss or make reference to both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Statements made today or effective only today will not be updated to reflect subsequent events or circumstances that may arise.

Well done.

Thank you. I went all the way to law school to learn how to read. And let's start with the platform, because when I think of this company and I think of you, it always comes back to what are you building, what are you scaling, and how are you evolving the platform? The platform has been on quite a journey over the last couple of years. Talk a little bit about what has most excited you as the platform has changed and grown and evolved, then we'll use that as a jumping off point to get into a whole array of topics.

Airbnb was essentially, for a long time, kind of a one-hit wonder. You know, our brand is a noun and a verb. It means to stay in a house for a short period of time. And for, like, 15 years, we were just that. And imagine you're building a house, and a house is a one-story house. And now you want to add 10 floors to the house. Most ranch houses you can't just add 10 floors to. You need to rebuild the house from the ground up. And so around 2021, 2022, we realized, okay, this core business is going really, really well. But if Amazon had just sold books, they would have been a much smaller company. And we felt like there was a lot of platform extension we could do. But to be able to do that, we had to basically rebuild the company from the ground up. Now, I'll be honest. If I was a professional CEO and I wasn't the founder, I might not have the courage to do that because we had to take some growth hits for a couple years. It took a little longer than I thought. But we laid the foundation. We basically rebuilt the company from the ground up. Our vision was to become AI native. And our idea was we're going to go from homes to everything for travel and eventually to living and beyond. And so obviously our core business is quite large. It's going to be approaching $100 billion in GBV. We have service and experiences. There really is no Amazon for services. There's really just two popular services in the world, food delivery and ride sharing. What about the other 100 types of services? Why can't you hit a button and get those services to your home? We think that's a huge opportunity. Experiences. Concert tickets are more popular than ever. People want to have experiences. He says, I like to think you'd want to bet on a trend or an opposite of trend. Artificial intelligence. The key word's artificial. So the opposite of artificial is authentic, real. In the age of artificiality, people are going to want things that are real, real experience, real people in the real world. And then we realized, wait a second. If we can do nearly $100 billion in a core business, there's this other business that's like 10 times larger. It's called hotels. And for years, I mean, our first tagline was forget hotels. I thought we'd never put hotels in Airbnb. But our customers asked for it. And at some point, I stopped being ideological. I started becoming practical. I said, okay, they want hotels. And then I realized, actually, half the hotels in the world are independent hotels. They're small hotels. They're B&Bs. And they actually don't want to be part of this oligopoly. They want to actually come on Airbnb. We have a lower commission. We have younger travelers. So we started going into hotels. Then we realized, wait a second. Airbnb has a lot of homes in the platform for short-term rentals. What if we could offer longer-term rentals? We could be the biggest housing platform in the world. And so we started realizing, like Amazon, they went from books to DVDs to CDs, but eventually they went to everything. We started realizing this platform is incredibly extensible. And so that's the journey we've been on, from homes to everything for travel to eventually things beyond travel.

So with that in mind, what have you learned the most about the consumer landscape and the way the consumer sort of interacts with your company and your brand more broadly? Because I think there was a perception of the company around COVID, and then there was a perception coming out of COVID. And as you sit here today, what are you learning the most about how consumers want to evolve with you as a company?

It's a pretty different company. So a lot of travel, people start on Google and chatbots. The thing about Airbnb is because it's a noun and a verb, a lot of people come directly to Airbnb. Nearly 90% of our traffic is direct or organic. So we've learned that, like, the brand has got, like, a huge affinity for people. We've also realized people want more from Airbnb. A lot of people, their first way of trying Airbnb now is through a service or experience. And in fact, one of the reasons we're doing a hotel is we think it's a gateway to get all these people that never stay in Airbnb to be able to come back and book a home. One in three people book a hotel and Airbnb come back and book a home. So there are people that will only book hotels, we'll offer them a hotel, and there are people that will come and then will book other businesses. The other thing we've realized is Airbnb basically works equally well in every country in the It's one of the only businesses in the world where it works really well everywhere. It's a universality that people like to host, people like to travel. Brazil is our third biggest market in the world. You know, 70% of our business is in five countries. Four of the five countries are accelerating. So the weird thing is our mature business isn't actually mature. We still have Asia where we're basically no penetration, but it's a global network effect. So you would imagine Japan, Korea could be huge. India is growing 60% year over year. So we have a huge amount of opportunities. So I think maybe the story is it's a story of a flywheel. And the flywheel, as it gets stronger, growth begets more growth begets more growth.

Okay. Maybe sticking with that theme of international, what do you see as the key investments you have to make to capitalize on the investment opportunity? How much of it is on the country-by-country management side of the equation, the supply growth side of the equation, making sure consumers know what you can offer in a given country? How do you execute against the international opportunity?

It's just three things. You need to have the right supply, you need to localize the product, and you need to make sure people know about the product, essentially, marketing. I think the first thing you've got to do is localize your product. It doesn't take a lot to do that, but, like, the app has to be, like, 90% the same everywhere, and that last 10% is where you live and die in, like, India. You know, in Asia, like, people like more dense information, so you have to be more of a browse-based. In Japan, they don't use search as much. They use browse, so you have to, like, just know these nuances. is the way you pay in India is, like, really, really critical. You have to have local payment providers. Once you do that, now you have to know to get supply. And so, basically, if you want to get, like, Chinese travelers, you need to ask, well, where are Chinese travelers going? Well, they're going to Japan. So now we need to basically connect all the corridors. So you basically get the right supply and the right market at the right price based on where you get demand, and then you basically connect supply and demand. It's not that expensive. You know, the great thing about our business is it's pretty capital light. You know, we basically have remained pretty steady 35% margins, and it's really actually hard to invest a lot of money in this business because you're kind of building supply, building demand, building supply, building demand. There's no major capital expenditures, so it's just really just keeping the pedal in the metal.

You talked earlier about direct traffic, the level of app engagement you have with users. That's an enviable position relative to a lot of the industry that relies on search marketing, SEO, and traffic from a lot of other sources. How do you take that advantage around the app usage and direct traffic and turn it into more frequency, loyalty, scaled behavior on the user side of the equation?

Yeah, this is a great question. So, number one, the more things you offer, the more people will come to you. You're going to get more share of wallets. So if you go from homes to hotels and service experiences and you go into, like, living under their verticals, you're going to get people to use the app more frequently. That's number one. Number two, we're not just a store. Most people take their app with them. They take their phone with them when they travel. They use their media to, like, check in, right? They have their itinerary. So what we're realizing is the moment you're on your trip is a great point of sale. We can sell you things when you arrive in your destination. So we're not just – it's not just like a chatbot where it's a demand generator. It's a companion on your trip. We have a messaging app that's one of the biggest messaging apps in the world. More than 5 billion messages are sent between our platform, between guest and host. We have one of the biggest calendar apps in the world. We have one of the biggest reservation apps. So Airbnb is kind of like five or six apps in one. And it's just this flywheel where we continue to crank the flywheel. And maybe I'll just say something about where I think Travel Search is going. because I get a lot of questions about, like, well, ChatGPT now can control your computer. It can book on behalf of you. What is your opinion on chatbots? What's your opinion on AI? What's your opinion on consumer? So maybe I can just share a couple thoughts. I think that right now most of the value is going to the stack and to enterprise. If you think about consumer, there's been almost no change to daily life in four years. AI has not changed the world, not even come close. Go to a random state, ask a random person from the time you wake up, the time you go to bed, how's your life changed because of AI? I use the chatbot once in a while. AI has not changed daily life at all, at all. It's changed how companies do business. It's changed how investors invest. It hasn't changed the world at all. If technology doubles every year for 10 years, that's 1,000x. So I believe we're at the beginning of a 1,000-year journey. I also do not think there's a cycle. We are not in an AI cycle. We're in a 1,000-year cycle. We're not in a window where I've got to get into OpenAI or Anthropic and it's over. There's going to be 50 more Anthropics. There's going to be 50 more, maybe 100. This is the beginning of a cognitive revolution. And most of the money, I believe, is going to go to the consumer layer, not enterprise, not the GPU stack, not the data centers. It's going to be the consumer. And we haven't seen that revolution yet. If you open your phone and you look at all the apps on your home screen and ask what apps have changed since the launch of ChagibT, including ours, Almost no app has changed. You ask people how its daily life changed. It hasn't changed yet. This is me being bullish on AI. This is me saying that most of the value hasn't yet been created. I don't know when this consumer revolution happens. I think it's the next 18 months to 24 months. I think we're going to see a massive shift from enterprise to consumer. And I'll give you an example. I'm on the board of Y Combinator. There's 165 companies in Y Combinator last batch. 159 were enterprise. No one wants to do consumer. Everyone's afraid to do consumer. It's hard. It's a hits-driven business. But I think there's a clue here. Most of the public is against AI in the United States. They're against it. Most people are against data centers. It's not because of power. It's not because of water. It's because they're afraid it's going to replace them, not just their job, but their entire way of being. And I think part of why we're getting it wrong is we're using stupid words like superintelligence. And we should never use that word. We should just stop saying the word superintelligence because to an ordinary person, it sounds like an alien species. We should stop freaking saying that word. And actually, maybe we're underestimating how intelligent we are. And maybe this is a cognitive revolution where AI doesn't become smarter than us, that we actually ride AI, that we can actually ride this cognitive revolution. And also, maybe the other reason that people are against AI is because we are not creating applications to make their daily life better. We still have the opportunity for everyone to have a first-year doctor, everyone to have a great tutor. I mean, we could go down the list of ways AI can completely change people's lives, and it's starting to. Chat to Batiste is starting to scratch the surface. But a chatbot is not the right interface for 90% of things. The problem with a chatbot is it's text-based. Here's a huge problem with AI. It's single-player. You cannot collaborate with other people on a philanthropic and open AI model yet. It's very difficult. Most of the revolution is going to happen when it's multiplayer. And they can do it, but that's a big thing. AI is still text-based LLM, large language model. The biggest revolution is going to be video generation, photo generation, and multimodal world models. I believe when these things converge, and in the future we're not going to be typing, we're going to be speaking to computers. Maybe not in a coffee shop, you know, you might still be typing, but I think if you've ever seen Iron Man, that's what computers will look like. You will speak to them. And I think that all this suggests that we are in the first inning. And I believe that Airbnb is part of this first inning. We are not going to be a company that develops AI, but we're going to be a company that applies AI. And my goal is for Airbnb to become an AI-native company that basically uses this once-in-a-generation opportunity to take this existential risk that's an existential risk to everyone that becomes, therefore, an existential opportunity. and for us to use this to go into businesses we had no business going into before.

Okay. I want to stick on that theme. So when you think about deploying AI and changing your own company, outward looking into users, how much of this is about eventually making AI conversational, as you talked about, and how much of it is about just improving discovery of what you even offer to consumers?

I mean, it's all probably wrapped into one, like just starting with AI. So nearly half our customer service tickets are now handled by AI. It's pretty amazing. It doesn't mean humans are being replaced. It means we're now taking those people, training them to do more premium customer service because the AI can do more self-serve. I don't think the chatbot is the right interface for Airbnb for four reasons. Number one, it's text-based. Number two, it's really hard to compare, right? AI, you have to go back into a thread. Number three, it's single-player. It's not multiplayer. The average Airbnb is three guests. So you need to design AI to be collaborative. It's not been designed to be collaborative. That is maybe the biggest flaw of consumer AI right now. And the fourth is there's really not this notion of messaging, have an identity. Everyone at Airbnb has to have a verified identity. They have the same messages. So what we think is there's something between our e-commerce paradigm and a chatbot, something that's much more visual, that is conversational, but it's not a chatbot. We haven't developed it yet. We're in pilots. I don't know if we'll be the ones to do it, but I do think that that's going to be where AI goes. It's going to be very, very rich, very, very visual. And, you know, here's a question. Why is TikTok and Instagram more popular than Twitter? I think because photos and videos are more popular than words. I think literacy is going to go down. Fewer people are going to read. I don't know. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but I think that's where it's going. I think young people want to be visual, and so I think that photo and video is going to be where the future of AI is, not words. And I think that early adopters still can value on cloud code. I don't think that that is an indication of the late adopters. I think the late adopters are going to be doing much more visual stuff.

Okay, interesting. Just sticking on the theme of AI, you talked a little bit about the way you use it internally as a company. Talk a little bit about what AI has done for your business, how it's created efficiencies, how possibly it's created elements of you being able to reinvest back in the business and capitalize on some of these growth.

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of crazy. It's actually, I didn't know if AI would be good or bad for Airbnb. And a lot of people thought it would be bad for Airbnb. And it was a totally reasonable expectation that it would be bad for us because couldn't you just go to a chatbot and, like, search for every Airbnb and every hotel, and then why do you need us? Are we just a data layer? And that was a real risk. And it was an existential risk to the company. But my thought experiment was the following. If AI is an existential risk to Airbnb, then isn't it kind of an existential risk to everyone? And if it's an existential risk to everyone, it means it's an existential risk to our competitors and the business we haven't gone into, so therefore it could be an opportunity. And the key other insight we had was ChatGPT and Anthropic and Google, we have access to the same technology they do because the models they develop, they sell. So we can use Astra, we can use Fable, we can use all their models. And so then the question is, can we be better at specializing in one area that gives us a reason for people to come directly to Airbnb? So we basically, last year, got very, like, AI-pilled, I guess is the name of the term. Everyone got on Cloud Code. And we now ship 80% more features than a year ago. It's nearly double the output. Now, we don't really care about how much code is shipped by AI. I don't care how many tokens we're using. I just care how many features are developing. Pretty soon, we're going to be shipping at twice the rate we used to. Customer service has been completely revolutionized. Customer service is really, really difficult. Imagine we have no SKUs. A guest and host speaks different languages. It's all said unseen. They say they're locked out. They say there's an odor in the house. No photo can prove it. And you've got these seasonal workers trying to adjudicate, and they want this solution answered right now. AI can look at the last 10,000 times an exact situation like that happened and can recommend to the agent how to solve it. A human can never have done that before. From a search standpoint, your Airbnb search is really difficult. If you search on Google, you want one answer. You search for a home in Paris, you don't want one answer. There's 50,000, 100,000 homes. What's the right home for you? And now let's add all the other permutations. Oh, and by the way, let's add, like, two other opinions on the trip and all the variables. There's literally billions of permutations for every type of trip if you're completely open-ended. No search algorithm can do that. You need AI. So we basically have like 20, 25 features. It's basically across the board. And, you know, I basically think, you know, I did a talk a few years ago that Paul Graham wrote an essay about. He called it founder mode. It basically meant like acting like a founder, being in the details, being like a change maker. I think in the age of AI, everyone has to be in founder mode, even professional managers, because we have to reinvent our business from the ground up. And so it started with me. I basically said I have to be completely AI-pilled. I basically downloaded a huge amount of context of my life onto Cloud Code. I did it really securely, but I basically took like a million emails and 50,000 Google documents and 82,000 keynote slides, and I used it to train an AI to provide me context. And one of the biggest challenges a CEO has is none of us know what the hell is going on in our companies. We just don't. And so we do these things called meetings to figure out what the hell is going on. And all of our executives, they're well-intentioned, but they manage up and they tell us what we want to hear. If we have really healthy cultures, they'll tell us bad news. But still, you're at the mercy of what they tell you. Now with AI, you have an intelligence layer. You can just know what's going on before people tell you anything. You can still have meetings, but now those meetings are much more productive. So this thing has become like a superpower. I can have more information 24-7. I can cut through the bullshit. It's a lot more fair. We know who the high performers are, who the low performers are. It's just been a total revolution how we operate. And AI is not distributed equally. I think the winners of AI aren't the people that are most advanced technically. They're most advanced culturally. I don't know if that makes sense. In other words, we all have access to the same technology. Like Airbnb and every one of our competitors and every one that is on stage, especially in consumer, we all have the same model. The question is who has the culture? to adapt quickly. So AI becomes which companies can move to the speed of AI. That becomes a cultural thing. And that's probably the biggest thing is I can't point to any one feature. I can only point to the culture of Airbnb being a culture of being AI native.

Okay. Understood. And a lot of interesting stuff in there. Let me stick with the culture of Airbnb because I think one of the more unique things the last couple of years, which you referenced is you're pushing beyond the core of the product. The analogy you've used on earnings calls is Amazon. When you think about growing the supply side of your market and moving into new areas, as a leader, what do you think about in terms of the market opportunity relative to the incremental friction to get into a new area, whether it's experiences or hotels or things like that? How does that get factored into your management process?

I think that we had a big debate years ago, should we stay focused on our core, or should we do vertical expansion? And we ultimately realized that every time we add a category, it not only expands our business, but it makes the core stronger. That was a general thing we found. It took us a year and a half to develop service and experiences. It took us, like, eight months to develop car rentals. It took us a few months to develop, like, resort passes. So every new business, we're able to launch faster and faster because we can reuse components. I eventually want us to be able to launch dozens and dozens of categories. So the supply acquisition is getting faster because every time we add a new supply type, you know, we basically reuse the tools from a prior technology. So, for example, services, if you want to, like, get a massage, there's, like, a platter of, like, three types of massages. and that page we reuse for hotels because the hotel has multiple rooms. So basically what we wanted to do is we wanted to reuse components on the back end and AI can essentially create listings really, really easily. It can even source leads for you. It can help the salespeople. The big challenge becomes discovery. If we add 50 categories and people think of us as one thing, how do you discover everything? And so that's the thing I think we're still trying to crack. How do you basically merchandise a lot of things in a very narrow amount of real estate? I think the answer to this becomes personalization. We have to know much more about people. We've been living in a 30-year paradigm of e-commerce, essentially eBay, Amazon. What is the paradigm of e-commerce? Anonymous customer, you don't know much about them. All you know is the last thing they clicked or bought. They go to a search box. They type something in. They get results. They see a page. They book it. I think we're starting to live in a world where the AI knows a lot more about you, and everyone gets a very different experience. Some people will come to Airbnb, they'll only see hotels. They'll never see a home because they don't like hotels. They don't like homes. Some people hate hotels, and they're never going to see a hotel on Airbnb. Some people only want to use Airbnb for car rentals. So we need to really understand people. The more personalized we can be, the stronger the flywheel is going to be.

When you look at the scope for where the platform can go over the next three, five-plus years, Are there any adjacencies you're intrigued by or areas that you're always interested in exploring as potential extensions of what you've built today?

So, like, for example, with travel, there's a lot of, we can, like, imagine all the things we've done in travel. We launched car rentals. Car rentals is a fast-growing category in our business. It's been, like, a huge boon and will probably be one of the biggest, like, sellers of car rentals in the world at one point. There's a lot of other verticals of travel that I could point to, a lot of types of verticals of services. But I think there's a lot of opportunities in housing. You know, I think, like, longer-term rentals is a huge opportunity for us. We're probably one of the biggest housing platforms in the world. It's not that hard to go from short-term rentals to longer-term stays. It doesn't take a lot of incremental exposure to be able to do that. And then I think there's a lot more around living. You know, you can literally use Airbnb not just to travel but to live. So there's a lot of verticals around that. And then I think eventually human connection. I think it's really hard for people to meet one another one day today. And I think that a lot of people are using Airbnb to meet one another. So I think traveling, then living, then human connection, those are probably the three horizons. We're still mostly focused on travel. So I think that will be the big folks in the next three to five years, but you're going to start to see us moving into living.

Sticking with this idea of the supply side and lodging, as you get into short, long-term living, lodging broadly, and you bring hotels on the platform, What have you learned about how to bring supply into your ecosystem like hotels where there's both commoditized and non-commoditized inventory to also retain the uniqueness that Airbnb has as a platform? Because you're known for sort of unique offerings that people can't find. How do you merge supply like hotels into that ecosystem and retain your brand around a unique? That's a really good point.

So, well, first of all, we're starting with the most unique hotels. And it turns out about half the hotels in the world are independents and boutiques. and we started really by going after them. Here's the interesting thing. The boutiques and independents are underserved. They pay a higher commission on booking and speed in the chain. See, if you're Marriott, here's the dynamics that happen in the hotel industry. There's a lot of independent hotel owners. They want to stay independent. But Hilton and Marriott, in particular, are rolling up these independents. And a lot of these independents feel forced to sell because the Merritt and Hilton have loyalty programs and also they can negotiate lower commission rates on Expedia and booking. And so the independent hotels are having trouble competing. And so when we launched hotels, we had a huge number of independent hotels come to us. What is it, the enemy of your enemy is your friend? So they came to us because we had a lower commission. They weren't second-class citizens. They were unique, not commoditized, and that's what our brand stands for. They wanted younger travelers. We have the, you know, our first-time bookers are the fastest they've been in four years, and 50% are Gen Z. So we're the brand of the new generation. The great thing about young people is more of them every year, so it's kind of a good trend to have on your side. So that's what we've learned. Start unique, but also be personalized. So it doesn't mean we can't add commodity inventory. As long as Airbnb always has enough unique inventory to come to us direct, we can supplement with commodities. But our heart and soul will always be in unique inventory. But the great thing is that TAM, if you add commodities, is unlimited.

I wanted to ask about the World Cup this summer. It's obviously one of the biggest global events that's ever happened. What were some of the key learnings out of that event where there's a lot of people in the world coming to one country, and it's not just a lodging event, but it's also an experiential event that played out across social media and social influencers and things like that. What does a company like Airbnb learn from an event like the World Cup this past summer?

Well, I mean, let me just back up for a second. Like, events are how Airbnb started. I mean, you know, I was 26 years old, 25, turning 26. I was completely broke, living in San Francisco. A design conference, an event was coming to San Francisco. All the hotels were sold out. And we said, what if we turned our house into a bed and breakfast for the conference? I didn't have any beds. We pulled out three air beds. We called it Air Bed and Breakfast, hence Airbnb. Then we launched the Democratic National Convention. Then we launched the inauguration in 2009. Here's the dynamic. Events built Airbnb. The reason why is many people, regular people, put their home in Airbnb with the intention of only hosting for one week for an event. And nearly half the people continue hosting. That's the secret of Airbnb. Events built Airbnb. And these people are regular people. They're not property managers. And so we realized that events shine Airbnb's strengths. See, a lot of cities think Airbnb's a problem. But when events happen, we become a solution to their problem because the hotels are sold out, they're gouging customers or they're driving up rates, and we basically allow a city to expand their supply inventory. That improves their relations with cities. It attracts a lot more hosts. And it creates a very cultural experience of people staying. For example, the mission of the World Cup is to bring the world together through football, soccer. Our mission is essentially to try to bring the world together through travel. They're very, very adjacent. And just like the Olympics, these events are really big. So, you know, Paris, we had 600,000 people stay in Airbnbs for the Olympics. We had tens of thousands of new supply types. Our relations in Paris were better after the Olympics. And we realized there's a lot of big events. There's also a lot of small events. What if we were to industrialize this event strategy and really use this as a supply acquisition strategy? So a big way we get homes and Airbnb is by promoting for events. A lot of people list one. About half the people continue hosting.

When you think about where the business stands today, how should investors think about where there's the biggest opportunity to monetize all of the utility and activity that you're seeing on this platform? When you think about building, you know, continuous varied streams of revenue in the years ahead.

I mean, so from a growth standpoint, I think category expansion is where it's at from the top line, and international, but I think from a margin standpoint, it's probably seller services. If you think about Amazon, if you think about Alibaba, you think about Etsy, you think about many of these marketplaces, they take a huge margin on the supply side. And so I think there's a lot of different services we can sell to host. I mean, the obvious one that everyone talks about is sponsor listings, essentially an ad-based platform, that is a pretty easy straight shot to a billion dollars to incremental high-margin revenue based on, you know, like what other brands have done. But I think even that is just part of a platter of host services. So that's probably the obvious one. I mean, we have a very high-margin insurance product, travel insurance, that does quite well. So that's obviously also going to grow a lot as well.

So we only have a few minutes left, and I always like to end on, and you've talked a lot about it, as you always do, and when we get an opportunity to speak. But talk a little bit about your vision for the company. Leave investors with what are your key strategic priorities and what are you most focused on executing on for the company in the years ahead?

There are three things that we're trying to do. The first thing we're trying to do, and I talked a lot about this, is go from providing homes for travelers to everything you need to travel and live and connect around the world. And so you're going to see a lot of vertical expansion, and every month you'll see an acceleration of new verticals launching. That's number one, category expansion. Number two, I think we're going to invest a lot more in the customer, in the community, in building out profiles. We're going to have some major announcements next year. I can't share too much, except to say that I think I want to shift from a marketplace to much more of a community, a community where people feel like they're a part of the brand. We know more about them. We have a deeper relationship. maybe the analogy is like kind of Amex, right? Amex is not just a credit card company. It feels like you have a membership. And, in fact, the former CEO of Amex, Ken Chenault, is on our board, so I think that's a real roadmap for where we can go. And a third is just using AI to be completely native. The one thing I'll just say before I go is somebody asked me recently, what's most surprised you about our company? What surprised me about our company is our mature business is not mature at all. You know, every time we keep thinking the growth is going to slow down and it re-accelerates. I mean, our growth last year was 10%. The last quarter I think it was like, you know, nearly double. And so almost every market is accelerating. Almost every country is accelerating. And it's hard to explain why. I mean, one explanation is we're just executing really well. The other explanation is maybe the market was so much bigger than we ever thought. Maybe that, you know, every time I raised money, the question was how big can this market be? And I had no evidence. I'm like, well, the market's as big as we are. And it just kept growing and growing and growing. So I think our core business could probably be double the size, just our core business, before you enter into any other verticals. And then you have international expansion. You have all the different verticals. So I think the TLDR is just, it's very, very early. And I was just interviewed before this, and someone said, you've been running at me for like 19 years. You're like an OG. And I'm like, man, I guess, am I that old? In an age of AI, I actually feel old if you're 45-year-old in this industry. But I still think it's really, really early. And I don't think Airbnb is a mature company. And I'd like to have this thought that, like, we're getting younger every year because the road in front of us is longer the road behind us. And I like to think that, you know, we are more fired up than we've ever been. That's what founder mode is really about. It's about, like, having the enthusiasm that you had the first day you started the company. It's about, you know, a lot of people say founders set the vision. I think more importantly, the founders set the pace. We set the pace. Because the vision is just something you discover day to day. But I wake up every day with a sense of urgency, every day with a sense of, like, we need to, like, seize this moment. We have this once-in-a-generation opportunity, and we are here to reinvent ourselves. So I'm just so excited. I don't think we've ever had more fun as a company. I think it's really early. and I think we went from the sixth inning back to the second inning, if that makes sense.

Well, Brian, thank you so much for being part of the conference. Please join me in thanking Airbnb.

Thank you.