Growing Airbnb (with Dan Hill, CEO of Alma and former Head of Growth at Airbnb)
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Hello, Limited Partners, and welcome to the bonus show. We're recording this today on November 14th. It'll drop next Monday. I don't think we actually need to say this on the bonus show, but I'm Ben Gilbert. And I'm David Rosenthal. If you didn't know this, what are you doing here? The cool thing about the LP show is there's not a lot of logistical work to do or overhead here. But thank

Thank you so much for joining us as always. Thank you for, for being a member. It means the world to us. And we've just been super pumped by the, the amount of you that have come out to, you know, continue going deeper with us. And, you know, here's my sort of one and only plug is if you feel like sharing that you're an LP, you should absolutely do that and scream it from the hilltops on whatever social media platform or, you know, private thread you use. So,

with that. David, we have a guest with us today. We have a very, very special guest, our first on the LP show, and nobody better to join us than Dan Hill. And full disclosure, Dan is the

co-founder and CEO of Wave's very first portfolio company, Alma, which we will talk about later in the episode. But the reason he's here and what we're very excited to dive into is he played an integral role at Airbnb and was actually, in his previous company, one of the very first acquisitions that Airbnb made. So Dan, welcome to the show.

Hey guys. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah. Really excited to, really excited to chat today. Awesome. So a little more about Dan. Uh, he is, if you couldn't tell from his accent there, he is British by birth, uh, went to Cambridge for undergrad, was a music major, um, and then, uh, founded, co-founded a company called Crash Patter, which was a European Airbnb competitor. Um,

And actually, was it Airbnb's first acquisition or second acquisition? Do you remember, Dan? I think it was the second. They'd acquired a company, Acolio, in Germany a few months ago. But we were definitely in the first two or three acquisitions, I think, the company did. Yeah, crazy. Dan then, after the acquisition, moved to San Francisco, joined Airbnb initially as an engineer, and then...

we'll get into this, but did just amazing things, shifted over to product management, ended up leading payments, trust, data infrastructure, all of APAC. Then finally was the head of growth for all of Airbnb. And then at the very end, Dan, you were head of all of guest experience, right? So growth, customer acquisition, search flow, the booking flow for guests, everything.

Just has an incredible background and stories to share here. Yeah, it was, I mean, we'll get into it, but it was an incredible journey going from, you know, day one at Airbnb writing lines of code to keep the site up to, you know, six and a half years later focused on, you know, what is the overall guest experience like of traveling on Airbnb. And running growth at a company that's sort of like one of the canonically fastest growing companies of all time. Congratulations on all your efforts.

Thanks. It would be remiss of me not to say it was a huge team effort. And I was focused on a lot of the product engineering, data science, design sides of the growth. But there were many people that did a lot of work to get that growth of the company. Well, let's dive in. And this is really in the spirit of the LP show here. As Ben and I have talked about, what we really want to do is dive into the nuts and bolts of

the day-to-day company building that happens from, you know, on the main acquired show, we tell the, uh, what was it? We, we joked about the, you know, the fully grilled and, uh, uh, ready to eat kielbasa, but, um, this is the stuffing, the sausage. So, um, of, uh, of, of making these companies. Um, and, uh, and Dan is great. So, so let's jump in what, so I want to start with the crash patter days, um,

You were a music major at Cambridge. How did you get into tech and become an engineer and start Crashpatter? Yeah, I mean, on the outside, it seems like such a huge jump or a strange shift. But I don't know, for me, it was actually pretty organic. So, you know, back in the UK, my mom...

is a piano teacher, a music teacher. She taught in high schools. And my dad is a scientist. He works a lot on computers. So growing up, on the one hand, I was playing the violin and the piano. And on the other hand, my dad was bringing home old 386s and BBC micros. And I was sort of taking them apart and figuring out how they worked. And at 18, I thought, you know what? I want to be a violinist. I want to be a musician. That's my life calling.

So as you said, I went to university for it. I studied violin and music and conducting. But pretty soon after that, probably in my early mid-20s, I was like, this is not the life for me. The stress of standing on a stage every night and playing the violin, the lifestyle of it, it just wasn't what I wanted.

And actually, throughout my time at university, I've been paying my way by making websites for people. Back then, it was take a WordPress installation, help design a theme, set it up, get it up and running for friends. A lot of them actually, musicians, started their careers who wanted some kind of website. And I just found that I was more and more drawn to that kind of work, to technology and design and building things than I was to trying to be a musician.

And so I started a company while I was at university called Serene Studios, you know, back when I didn't know anything about naming companies. And I just basically, it was a consultancy. We built websites and products for people.

And then when I met Steven in my sort of mid-20s, we started Crashpattern. I was like, you know what? Music is something I love. I'm going to keep it just like something I do for enjoyment. And really what I'm passionate about and excited about is building technology.

And we can, we can talk more about this, but actually, you know, the, the types of skill I think you learn as a musician and a conductor actually have a lot of transfer into, you know, how you build products and think about creativity and how you build, um, great teams and great companies. Yeah. That's, uh, it's funny. One of the questions later in the show we're going to get into is, you know, what makes for a good product manager at a tech company? And, uh,

Um, it's, it's funny, you know, being a conductor, uh, probably, probably as you say, there's a lot of transferable skills there. Wait, I want to, I want to just ask it now. So yeah, what, how does it transfer? Well, I think so the music in general, um, is, is actually a pretty, uh, in many ways a pretty mathematical, um, uh, sort of discipline. There's actually a lot of structure, a lot of, um,

A formal analysis that goes into thinking about music, analyzing music and talking about it. It also involves a large amount of, you know, like any humanities subject, a large amount of like critical thinking, writing, storytelling, you know, you're trying to convince someone of your perspective when there isn't necessarily a right or wrong answer.

So a lot of that carries through into product management, trying to convince people of an idea, a vision you have for the future. I think what was interesting about conducting for me is that there's a few things about conducting that are sort of interesting here. The first is that you're the only musician on stage with your back to the audience. Every other musician is facing outwards and is facing the audience. The audience sees them. But your job is really focusing on the team, the people that are actually making the music.

Secondly, I think conducting, you're the only person on stage who doesn't make any sound. When the output of an orchestra is sound, you're the only person who's actually physically contributing nothing to that output. And product management is very similar. You're not the one writing code. You're not the one designing it. You're not the one necessarily conducting user interviews, perhaps. You're not the one answering customer service tickets.

And similarly, you know, I think a good product manager is not the one that takes all the credit for the work. But, you know, the team is the one that seemed to be doing the great work.

But I think like a great conductor, like a great product manager, it's how you create that environment in which people can do their best work. And that comes from the processes you use to how you define the goals, to how you will communicate, to how you give feedback. And really, a great conductor really is just sort of unlocking the orchestra as one to an aligned sense of the goal, an aligned vision, an aligned sort of vision.

view of what we're trying to create together. And I think that has a lot of parallels to what I see in great product managers too. That's awesome.

Did not expect the conversation to go in that direction, but, uh, super cool. Um, okay. So let's bring it back to crash patter. How did you get the idea for this? So crash patter was, um, and Dan, you can, you can correct me here if it's wrong, but essentially Airbnb started around the same time as Airbnb focused on Europe. You guys were based out of the UK. Um,

Where did the idea come from? Yeah. So Stephen and I, Stephen Rappaport, co-founder, we met in London in probably, it must have been about mid 2007. And

So Stephen had the idea. He'd been at the Sydney Olympics a couple of years prior. And while he was there, he was working in a bar, loving the city, but he was staying on one of the people that worked in the bar's floors, staying on an airbed. And this idea, I think, had been kind of like sitting with him for a little bit after he got back that the only way he could afford to travel and be in the town for the Olympics was to stay on someone's floor. He couldn't afford the hotels.

And certainly in the UK back then, you know, it was things like Craigslist and Gumtree were pretty much the only way you would act as accommodation, whether you were renting or you were looking for somewhere, you know, a short-term lease. And, you know, those experiences for a really sort of high consideration purchase often of like where you want to physically sleep, they didn't offer a lot of safety, a lot of trust, a lot of guarantees.

And so I met Stephen just through some friends and we got chatting and we're like, you know, maybe there's actually something here. Maybe, you know, as we look at all these different, whether it's sporting events or things happening, people traveling, maybe there is something about staying with other people as opposed to a traditional hotel.

So we started CrashPatter. The domain crashpatter.com was registered seven days after airbedandbreakfast.com. Wow. I was going to ask if you had heard of it. No, we'd never heard of them. It really was serendipity, I guess, that we could know.

This is like calculus being simultaneously invented in two different corners of the world. Right. Um, you know, of course, you know, pretty, pretty soon after in the coming months and year or so, you know, we, we, um, we, we heard of them. We actually met Brian and Joe in, in London. They were, they were out visiting, um, probably in must've been 2008, maybe early 2009. Um, and we, we all got a drink together in a pub. Um,

So this is like when they're like in YC or just after? This must have, I guess for them, when we actually met them in person, they were probably, you know, I think they probably finished YC. I think they'd raised a round or two maybe. And we're starting to think a little bit, you know, beyond just the sort of New York or San Francisco markets they'd started in. Yeah.

But yeah, when we started CrashPatter, at the outset, we didn't know of them particularly. And then obviously, we became familiar with each other in the coming years. So I'm curious, obviously, probably even at the point where you first met them, your path started to diverge a little bit in terms of growth. From your perspective at CrashPatter, what was it that made Airbnb...

I mean, obviously there were you guys, there was Airbnb, there was couch surfing. There were lots of companies doing this in the early days. Like why did Airbnb become the one that really worked versus you or someone else? I think there's kind of two levels of this answer.

I think the macro level, which is, you know, we don't, I don't take as an excuse, but it's an interesting backdrop. In a marketplace business like Airbnb or Crashpada, a first observation is that your supply and demand are by definition in different places. Most people are not trying to look for a place to stay in their own city.

Contrast that to, I guess, Uber or Lyft, where you get the benefit of having supply and demand in exactly the same place. So you can sort of double down your growth efforts. But the disadvantage that each city has to start from almost zero. Yeah.

Now, what was interesting then for Airbnb is if you look at the US as a market, you know, they didn't have to change anything around language, payments, you know, currency, to an extent, even just sort of cultural norms about staying with strangers and travel until quite late, you know, relatively late into their sort of early growth period. The thing we get on pretty soon is, you know, once we had, you know, a

5,000 hosts in London and we got a good presence in Manchester and Edinburgh, the really next places you had to go for a large amount of travel was Paris, Berlin, Barcelona. And it puts in, there's just a lot more friction in trying to suddenly start to scale internationally quite early on in your growth. So you think it was sort of a competitive advantage that Airbnb started in the US where they sort of had more of those cross-market network effects where they could easily move from one to another?

I think certainly, you know, a backdrop is, yeah, when you, that network effect had a lot less friction in a large sort of homogenous market like the US. Whereas in Europe, you know, and you still see it today, I think a lot of sort of marketplace businesses that start, ones that focus on geography as a sort of key component, often hit these challenges a little earlier on than a straight, you know, a US company.

That said, though, I would say, you know, going into more of the micro level, I mean, Airbnb, you know, Brian, Joe, Nate are probably, if not the best founders I've ever worked with or come across. You know, they had both an amazing vision for what they wanted to do and a community they could create. And yet also the ability to ship great products to hire great people and build a great team.

And, you know, I give them full credit that, you know, in those early days, you know, they were able to just, you know, apply their skill and their talent and to achieve, you know, a huge amount of growth and success. You know, when the acquisition happened, we were larger than they were in Europe. But in terms of total size, they were starting to really sort of dwarf everybody and, you know, in terms

Funding they've then been able to raise and the team they built, you know, they really start to pull ahead in in their ability. Yeah. So, OK, great. This is a great transition to what it was like then inside Airbnb while all this was happening. So the acquisition happens. You come over, you join San Francisco or you move to San Francisco, join Airbnb as an engineer to start there.

What did you find? Like, what did you versus what you expected? And what was it like when you show up, you know, day one? Also, I got to ask the question joining as an Airbnb or joining as a engineer when you were the founder and sort of running the previous company. Like, that's pretty non traditional. How did that happen?

So when I joined Airbnb, the company was 70 people. It wasn't particularly big back then. And, you know, I think...

enough time has passed now. I think Airbnb, the initial genesis of the acquisition was that we had a large base of guests and hosts in Europe. Airbnb was looking to expand into Europe. This is, if you remember, the Rocket Internet, the Summer Brothers had launched Bimdu and they were raised 90 million euros or dollars. And Airbnb was like, okay, we need to think about Europe more seriously now.

And so I think the initial genesis of the acquisition was really like, you know, we had a great presence in Europe, a great community. It was a great way for them to get a lead in Europe.

Over the coming probably, I don't know, few months, to start with, I was mostly focused on the transition, how we help move our users, get them to understand Airbnb and obviously set up their listings correctly on the Airbnb platform. That was when I was more like, wow, this is actually an incredible team. This is not just an acquisition that makes sense from a business perspective. Personally, I am really excited about these people and this work.

And so I joined the engineering team to start. At that point, it was about 20 engineers and everyone just reported to Nate, the CTO. And I was like, this is great. It's an amazing company and I'm just working on great code.

You know, the company back then, I think what was fascinating to me is, you know, from the outside, you know, we had, I think, sort of placed them on a pedestal in many ways. You know, their fundraising, their investors, their, you know, the press they were getting, the quality of the product they were outputting. It was just like, wow, there must be some kind of like crazy magic that they've created.

that is like producing all of this. And we get on the inside and yeah, it's a bunch of really smart people who are packing out the mission, but not without its completely fair share of like, you know, confusion or uncertainty or doubt. And, you know, the site would go down for like eight hours at a time, you know, and so my first job actually was site reliability engineering, you know, literally because I was in London overnight when most of San Francisco was asleep and

And I could at least try and help restart stuff if the site would go down, you know, from the outside, even then, you know, what, seven years ago, now, it seemed like, you know, runaway success, I can tell you, it was, there was still that a lot of that very good startup energy, shall we say, in the building. Yeah.

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Yeah, so I want to, we haven't sort of like planned to ask this question, but I've been thinking about it as it relates to a couple of early stage startups that I'm working with right now. How do you, in that time period for a company, make the trade-offs on sort of like speed to achieve that next feature, either for benefiting the product or for benefiting growth and sort of the expense of

you know, reliability, scalability. It's amazing to hear Airbnb was as big and successful as it was. And there's still that sort of, you know, those sorts of things happening inside the company. How do you think about those trade-offs and where the company is? It's a great question. And I'm not sure there is sort of a magic answer. You know, maybe an observation first. Yeah.

It was always, you know, it's always the thing you can't prove the kind of counterfactual. So when engineers would join the company maybe a year ago and, you know, the engineering team was maybe a thousand people or something at that point, you know, they'd be like, well, why was it ever written this way? You know, it doesn't make any sense. Or, you know, why would you do it in this way? Well, why structure it this way? You're like, well, that helped us get from, you know, 1 billion to 10 billion. So at the time it was good enough, you know, and if we couldn't really,

And we had dreams and aspirations of where the company would go and how big it could be and everything. But in the day-to-day of it, you're like, let's just get through the next travel season. Let's just get through the rest of this year. And if the site's still up, then we'll worry about it next year.

So I think the way, you know, I think good leadership is, is, is just having that a little bit of that judgment about when is the right time to slow down and maybe double down a little bit on, on infrastructure and so on. And when is the right time to push ahead and focus on, on growth? It,

It's more acute in an early stage company where you can't as easily just isolate two pools of resources and have people dedicated to infrastructure and forward product movement. When that's a real trade-off every day, I think you have to look at the different horizons. What will help us be successful two weeks from now, six months from now, two years from now? And make sure you have something playing in each of those that will be paying off.

Cool. Yeah. And so how, I mean,

clearly this is the way your mind works. Um, and, uh, uh, even going back to, you know, music and conducting, when did this transition happen for you from you show up, you know, you're, you're an engineer, you're working overnight, uh, San Francisco time to keep the site up to moving to product management and starting to think about these types of issues. So I guess because my, you know, my background is not, um, in many ways a sort of, uh,

archetypal Silicon Valley one. I didn't study computer science at Stanford and whatnot. I didn't really actually have a sort of... I think to some extent when I joined Airbnb, I kind of knew what software engineering was, but product management wasn't something I'd ever really formally been exposed to that I kind of understood it in some way.

And so to me, everyone just built stuff. And some people were designers and some people were engineers, but I didn't really have much of a sense of kind of the formal disciplines, I think. And what I kind of realized quickly on Airbnb is although I could write code, what I was drawn to, what I seem to be naturally more good at, I guess, was what is more formally known as product management.

And so my first project at Airbnb, after keeping the site up for a bit, was working on something around price prediction. The company had a handful of goals for the year, key initiatives that we were excited about, could be game changers. One of them was around helping hosts set the right price for their listings. We'd seen it was a huge pain point. People didn't know how much to charge for their rooms.

And so myself and a data scientist, Erin, just basically went into a room for a month or two and we're like, okay, let's just see if we can figure this out. And that's where I was like, oh, actually, although I'm writing code, really what I'm doing is like thinking about a user problem and the story and talking to hosts and figuring out, you know, how do they think about setting the right price? And writing the code was just kind of an output from that.

And so, you know, probably at the end of that couple months later, I guess I sort of formally changed the job title to product management and have been doing that for the last seven, six, seven years. And you mentioned that you never sort of formally thought about product management as a discipline. Now, in retrospect, how would you define the discipline? And what were the what was the job as you thought about it as you continue to hire a team of PMs?

Well, I guess the easy answer would be it's like conducting, but for software. But that doesn't help as much. So I think, you know, product management...

The job of a product manager is to sort of make sure that great products is shipped to your users, customers, whoever they might be. And there's really a few parts to that if you break it down. There's a great product. So a product manager has a role to play in what is a great product.

There's ships, you know, how do we actually have something delivered on time or on budget or to that meets the requirements that we need? And then to your users, you know, how do we understand that this is actually solving something they need and a problem they want? And what even are the things that our users are thinking about or opportunities in the market that we can take?

So I guess in a high level, that's kind of what a product manager does is figure out how to ship a great product, ship it, and to actual users to solve a real pain point. You know, I think over my years at Airbnb, I mean, I probably hired 50 product managers and interviewed hundreds, I guess.

uh and you know saw all kinds of different ways that people think about product management i think you know five ten years ago it was a it was a discipline that existed um but yeah i think it's actually even in the last in the last five years has come a huge way and it's sort of formalization and understanding of what product management is and how to get into product management cool thanks yeah let's let's jump into i want to get into like um

some really tactical stuff. And I thought maybe the best, um, avenue to do that is, uh, obviously, as we said, you worked in a product management capacity, leading tons of initiatives at Airbnb. Um, but, uh, but let's jump into, into growth where you spend a lot of time and that's obviously such a important topic, um, for any company and especially startup these days. What,

There's lots of lore I have in my notes, but stories about Airbnb and growth. The photography story, having the top 40 listings that highlighted the plane and the tree houses and all that. Brian living in Airbnbs, all these growth hacks. But those are the stories. What...

what was really going on that you were doing when you started working on growth? That was, um, like, how did, how did you think about driving that, that supply demand growth? Um, so I think, um, maybe as a, as a starting point, um, in any company, you know, there's growth can mean, uh, or be interpreted perhaps in a couple of ways, um, or in a couple of ways that you can think about growth of a company. Um,

The first is the kind of growth that everybody in the company is working on and everybody is thinking about.

And that could be, you know, the way in which customer service people working with your hosts or guests contributes to growth or hinders it if it's a bad experience. If people have safety concerns or issues on the site, that again slows or hinders your growth. You know, how the founders show up and the stories they tell, you know, impacts your growth. And so, you know, I think this could be an interesting...

discussion. But on the one hand, everybody in the company is part of growth and is responsible for growth and is thinking about how to grow the business and working on it. And then there's the other part of growth, which is almost the kind of like, I guess you could call it acquisition side or conversion optimization things, which is more the sort of tactical piece of... Which is one part of the bigger growth story of how do you grow.

I think what ABMP...

Or was it more organic? It was... We probably went through a variety of different structures and organizational structures to think about how to think about growth. The...

I think the thing that the company did really well and the founders did really well was having everybody on exactly the same page about what the mission of the company was and its values and how that translated into creating a great experience for hosts and guests and then how that translated into the metrics that we cared about like bookings, night's books, repeat usage, those kind of typical metrics. I think...

It was a great company and it is a great company in that everybody understood a lot of that connection between, you know, we want to create belonging. This is what that looks like. It's when people have these kinds of experiences and these are the things that are stopping them or helping them have those experiences. And then this is how my team connects to that kind of work. Within growth itself...

The part that I was focused on was with a team of engineers, data scientists, designers, performance marketing folks. We also, of course, had brand marketing and PR and policy and comms as well, thinking about the growth piece as well.

But typically, the team was usually structured around a guest-facing team, a host-facing team, and then a kind of core marketplace team working in the middle. Cool. So on that...

for those teams, for your, for your organization that was doing that, um, what were some of the things that, um, that you guys were doing? I mean, obviously, uh, I suspect you were buying Google and Facebook ads, um, but, but sort of at a, at a higher level for, for, for your teams, like what were, what were your goals? How are you measuring? Um, and what were you guys doing? Yeah, I think,

So the amazing thing about, you know, Airbnb and many companies that experience that kind of growth is that the real driver of that growth is people loving your product so much that they want to tell their friends and family about the experience they had.

What's great about travel is it's already something that people talk about. They share photos when they get back from their trip. It's kind of a life moment that they share. In fact, I remember someone shared the anecdote with me that pretty much sometimes the only things people still share on Facebook are weddings, births, and travel. Trips, yeah. The only thing people still post photos to Facebook about is

And so what was amazing about Airbnb and what the team had built was at the core of it, a product people wanted and needed and loved. So really our job on the growth team, and this is from people like Gustav Alströmer,

and others like was really just trying to figure out how do we take existing behaviors that people have and help them, amplify them, get more people to share that experience. And so the team was kind of broken into the various sort of parts of that journey. So, you know, one thing, and Gustav was

was the first product person focused on growth really at the company. You know, it was like, actually the real opportunity here is in people who are already sharing Airbnb. They're already talking about it. They're already telling their friends. And so launching the, you know, one of the first referral programs that we had where you could invite your friends and get credit towards your future trips.

And so really taking a behavior that already existed and finding ways that we could amplify it, finding ways that people could share the listings they'd stayed at, they could invite their friends, they could plan trips together and get a lot of growth from that. And so that kind of thing was really where we always saw the greatest success was finding behaviors people already had and finding ways to amplify them.

A lot of it then, you know, yes, we spent a lot of money on performance marketing, how we can reach people on Google and Facebook. What was amazing, interesting or amazing for us at Airbnb is, you know, because of so much that I think the company is not just around

a functional aspect of travel, but the culture, the community and the experience you have when you travel, we could actually have, I think, an advantage on things like Facebook or Instagram just because the kind of stories we could tell about people who used Airbnb and the travel that they'd had.

And then we had things like SEO, other mechanisms, particular brand initiatives or partnerships that we'd work on to help growth there as well. I'm curious. It's funny. I love this framing. Obviously, at Wave, as Dan knows, it

We invest in companies sort of, you know, before a product is even built, let alone product market fit. And I was laying awake at night in the middle of the night the other night just thinking about like, what can we do to, you know, help our companies and help us think about this? And what I came to was sort of almost the exact what you were just saying, Dan, of like,

make something that if you can get something that some amount of people love so much that they will tell their friends, like then you can like amplify that. Um, and, uh, and I just love that, that perspective. Um, well,

I'm curious, you mentioned some of the initiatives your team was doing around that, like allowing people, let's take, for example, allowing people to collaborate on trips together. What were the...

As you thought about that project and organizing it, like what were the metrics goals that you were, you were implementing to make sure that, that you were going to accomplish that goal of amplifying, you know, the organic, the organic flywheel. Yeah. So I think, you know, over time, I think something I, I,

came to appreciate more and more is that one of the key jobs of any kind of leader, particularly in a product role, is just choosing how to set goals. Pretty much so much comes from the goal you choose, the metric, the value, and how you think about it. And so we would always try and find goals. On the one hand, at one extreme, you have goals that are very...

you know, immediate and tactical, like the number of people who clicked on the invite their friends button.

On the other hand, you have the goal of bottom line revenue. Obviously, the former is easier to measure. Everyone can understand it. They understand how their work connects to it, and you can A-B test product changes against it. On the other extreme revenue, to some extent for a business, that's probably the one that's, at the end of the day, the most important. But it's very hard to connect changes upstream to it. It can often be extremely naggy and get behind.

So we would always try and find something in between, something that was still connected to user behavior, that was connected to people using your products and loving it, but also connected to an actual outcome that you wanted in the business, whether that be more users or revenue or whatever else. What's an example of that? Yeah.

So in this case, for growth, we would look at things like first-time bookings. Now, we would therefore treat all bookings equally, whether they were for $1,000 or $1, because it connected to the idea that somebody was willing to take a chance and book an Airbnb. They were willing to say, I'm going to do this. And so the team was focused around what are the hurdles that prevent people from pulling the trigger, from making that decision to book that Airbnb.

Now, you could have separate teams or later on, you could look at like, you know, how many nights did they book or could we get them into a different listing? But, you know, from a growth perspective, we found things like that were a good middle ground where it very much connected to the user behavior and the user's challenges or opportunities, but was meaningfully connected to the company's, you know, key metrics at a high level that, you know, the company also cared about. If we think about, say, customer service,

Customer service, which I worked on for a little bit,

Again, you can have things like, how many tickets are we getting? Can we reduce the amount of tickets that the company's receiving? On the other end, you could have what is the cost of running customer service? Neither of those are really that helpful because they're not really connected perhaps to the actual user problem in a way. And so again, we try and find metrics in the middle, like what is the average wait time for somebody contacting customer service?

And actually moving that kind of metric had both the effect of by reducing that, you're often more efficient. And so you'd spend less money on customer service. And you'd also get more growth because people were really happy with their customer service experience. And so we're always trying to find those goals that could connect between a user problem or user behavior we were excited about or interested in and still meaningfully connected to the company's goals.

or output or key metrics. Yeah, I like that framework. I'm curious, as you were working on these initiatives and these features, how much...

How connected did you stay to users throughout the process? Like, I'm thinking back to, you know, again, Airbnb lore out there of, you know, Paul Graham's, you know, mantra delivered from the mountaintop to Brian, Nate and Joe of go to your users, you know, go to New York, go stay in their homes, go talk to them, go sit on their couches. Obviously, as the company scaled, you couldn't go sit on everyone's couch or listen to every customer support call. But were you guys actively doing like user research? Like,

physically talking to people throughout this process or did it become more data driven? I don't think they're too necessarily even at odds with each other. And up until I left, we were very often on the one hand, we'd often have groups of hosts or guests literally in the office and we'd sit and talk with them. We had to use a research team, amazing team who would always be getting people in or going out to meet people and showing them the products we were working on, getting, getting feedback.

We did things like there'd be some kind of weekly metrics meeting. The key teams would get together and talk about how things are going, what's on track, and what are we investing in. And the start of those meetings would always begin with a readout on a couple of the best or worst kind of customer service tickets that the team had that we'd had that week.

Even when we were hundreds of people working on products and things, everyone still tried to make it a point of just directly connecting back to what seemed like in a statistic, a few people had an issue with their refund button. When you read the tickets, you realize that, wow, there's real people and this is a real problem. Let's just solve this. Let's get on top of it. Yeah.

So we tried, even as the company got big, to keep everybody connected to the issues that were happening, the tickets or the bugs or the problems that we were seeing, as well as, of course, some of our most insightful, I think, product work that we did was from just listening to people talk about how they used Airbnb or how they booked travel and what they were looking for and realizing, oh, wow, there's something there. Yeah, we could actually make that happen.

way better. We could improve that if we, you know, let's dig into that a bit more. Did you guys do the thing where everybody or maybe every executive or something does X amount of hours of customer service work per month? Yes and no. We did it for a little bit. To be fair, that gives a huge discredit to what it takes to do customer service well. But you can just, you know, put anybody on a phone and

expect they'll solve the issue. But certainly, our product team and the product managers on my team would regularly go to one of our customer service centers and be listening in to calls, be listening in to people writing in about the products they were working on.

And, you know, reading kind of like a digest of like the top tickets or, you know, questions that have come in. So even if people weren't actively sort of literally handling the phone calls, there was, you know, we had a pretty healthy culture, I think, of listening and getting those insights. Yeah, it makes sense.

Well, in our last couple of minutes here, I would love to talk about Alma a little bit and talk about your current venture. And sort of the first question that I have and that, you know, David, I think you sort of thought of before we dove in here. But in listening to you talk about Airbnb, there's definitely this question in the back of my mind of, oh, my gosh, why did you want to become a founder again? You worked on something that worked and then you worked on something that worked even more. What was the bug and the itch and why go do this?

Yeah. So, you know, I guess a few things came together. You know, unfortunately, I guess in 2017, there were the, at that point, the most devastating wildfires in Northern California. And I remember feeling then that like, you know, people I knew, friends, colleagues had, had,

lost their houses and been really impacted by this. But nobody knew a good way to give back, to donate. There wasn't a great place where you could be like, oh, here are some amazing organizations that totally need $100 right now and they could use that and you can help.

Similarly, through things like Me Too, you know, like a renewed focus on gender equality. And I remember, you know, myself and friends being like, okay, how do we help? Is there a way we can contribute here and do something meaningful?

And so Michelle, who I'd worked with for a number of years at Airbnb, I remember, you know, we were chatting one day and Airbnb launched a kind of matching program, you know, so you could, you know, you gave money to charity, the company would help match that. And Michelle was like, oh, actually, I'm on the board of this local nonprofit that helps people who are homeless. And, you know, these are the charities I support.

And I was just like, wow, we've been friends for four years now. And there's a whole side of you about how you think about giving back that I know nothing about. And my wife and I bought a charity in San Francisco for years. Similarly, it's not something I ever talked about.

And I just, you know, so Michelle and I got talking like, wow, like everybody cares about causes, whether it's things happening right now, like, you know, the wildfires again, unfortunately right now, or it's homelessness in San Francisco's, you know, and again, came up with Prop C vote or it's gender equality or it's immigration. But so many people we spoke to just didn't feel like they felt confident or they felt empowered in how they could do something meaningful to make a difference. So Michelle and I started this year, um,

well, like, let's just, let's do this. You know, this is something we think has to exist and it matters to us and it matters to people that we've spoken to about it. You know, there isn't an easy way to discover amazing, you know, curated local nonprofits and feel engaged. Dan, it's so funny. You're preaching to the choir. I mean, I remember when David first told me about this idea when Wave had made the investment, I was thinking about, you know,

you know, I sort of know the charities that I give to. And I like, I was like, I don't know, I'm fill out the forms on their website, like I know how to do that. And then this actually Yom Kippur, there were a couple of key causes that I sort of like came to that I decided like, okay, I want to, it's important to me to get behind these causes. And I was like, I

I don't even know the organizations that do that. And I'm like Googling around. And I, after a couple hours, like found the, the four that I wanted to pick on that day. And I was like, okay, I, I totally get it. If you know, if you know these organizations already, which you often have to be in a place of sort of privilege or exposure to even know of the organizations to know, to give to them. You know, I, you, it,

it's not as much of a problem, but when you have a new cause that you want to support or you're newly exposed to something, I think you're absolutely right.

Exactly. And so we look to, you know, today, even 56% of American households give to charity every year. The median amount they give is $800. The average is near 2000. People give to charity. Individuals last year gave nearly $300 billion to charity in the US alone. Nonprofits in the US spent $65 billion on marketing, and yet Google's global ad revenue was only $75 billion.

And so, you know, it's this huge thing that's happening. People do it. People give to charity like yourself. But almost everyone, no one feels great about it. No one is like, you know, I feel really good about my impacts. You know, this was an experience that I really enjoyed or really sort of found rewarding.

And so we're trying to just, as you said, how do we just change that whole landscape from a bit of Google searching to reading a little bit about them on Charity Navigator to like, no, these are some amazing organizations. Meet the people who work there. This is the work they do, and this is where your dollars can really make a difference. And really trying to, I guess, create...

what we think doesn't exist right now, which is a really amazing, easy way that people can feel like they are being philanthropists, that they can intentionally give to courses they care about and see an impact from their contributions. It's funny that one of the questions I wanted to ask is like, was there any one sort of most important or impactful thing that you and Michelle took from your Airbnb experience that you're bringing to Alma? But I'm actually going to tweak it a little bit based on our conversation, you know,

This idea that you had of at Airbnb of like, how do we amplify something that people already want to do that makes the product great and then allows them to do it easier and share it so that other people can see how great it is and kind of shout it from the rooftops. And I'm just thinking about the, you know,

the wildfires last year and the origin of, of, you know, part of the origin of Alma and now the wildfires this year and the initiative you guys are doing around the wildfire fund and, um, and the New York times. And I think this is a great way to kind of tie it all together. So if, if you're comfortable talking about that, uh, the,

Love to hear about it. So basically what we do at Alma is we curate five or so organizations into a fund, like a giving circle or a mutual fund. You give $10 a month, $100 a month to the fund, and we then allocate it to these sort of curated nonprofits.

And yesterday, we created a fund to help with the relief efforts for the wildfires that are happening right now again in California. And we did our own research into the organizations. We obviously have places like the New York Times or the SF Chronicle have also done their research and found non-profits.

And we basically pulled six of them that are really amazing organizations together. And you can just go on our website, Amador app, and make a donation to those organizations. 100% of it goes directly to those organizations. And hopefully make it easier for people who feel so moved to contribute and help with the relief that, great,

great. Now there's a really easy way I can just, you know, with, um, you know, with my credit card, with Apple pay, I can just go make it, make it, make a contribution and, and hopefully feel good that it's gone to a great place that, um, can really use the money to do important work. Yeah. I think it's so cool. Like, you know, you read this New York times article specific that we were chatting about it yesterday, but as you point out, you know, the Chronicle and anybody who's reporting on this, you know, they end the article with like, here are five charities that you can go donate to, to make an impact. But, but that's still like,

the amount of work that's left on the reader there, the reader may say, yes, I want to do it, but then you got to go to all those websites. You got to figure out the flow. You got to, you know, whereas Alma, you're amplifying, you're just like, click this link. It's done. What's interesting, I think, for the wildfires, you know,

Other organizations like the New York Times or the SF Chronicle and others have also identified organizations that are great. As you said, what we do is hopefully make it even simpler and more streamlined for you to make a donation. But then for other issues, like...

The fund we launched before this one was supporting women through their career journey. So how do we get more young women into STEM? How do we get fair parental leave for everybody? How do we help prevent workplace harassment? And how do we support more women into leadership, particularly in tech?

And although everyone, you know, obviously in tech over the last few years has been, you know, very thinking a lot about this issue. Still, most people, you know, we spoke to couldn't easily identify an organization that was helping them do those things. And so that's where I think we've been able to bring some, you know, bring something and that we spent a long time trying to understand which organizations are doing what. And then, you know, we pulled a handful of them together that you can again support on Alma. Yeah.

if that's the cause that you wanted to care about. So also doing our own research to try and find these organizations that most people perhaps haven't heard of every day when they think about a cause.

I just downloaded the app for the first time. First of all, it's super nice. These little facts that are at the bottom of the cause, the little did you knows are like this one. In the Fortune 500, there are more CEOs named John than there are female CEOs. That's absolutely abominable. And the way that you guys are splicing this in here in between an etab.org, equal rights advocates, these great organizations to really like drive the point home and sort of...

you know, to go back into startup parlance, like drive conversion at the bottom of the funnel. I think it's, you know, you guys do a really nice job of making the point right where you need to make it for someone to contribute. Yeah.

And that's what we're trying to, you know, and I guess to some extent the sort of marketplace we're trying to build is, you know, these organizations are doing incredible work. And, you know, what we're trying to bring, I guess, is that, you know, can we take some of the things that we learned from Airbnb around how to, you know, people, how to get people to do something new for the first time? And now in this case, it's how do we, you know, get them to think about how they want to give back and start giving back perhaps for the first time.

And so we're extremely fortunate to get to support some of these amazing organizations, like you said, a need to be or equal rights advocates. And what we're trying to do is like, how do we take all those things we learn around, you know, how to help people build confidence and make a commitment and donate or book in the Airbnb terms and bring that to the sort of charity and philanthropic space. And to your point, you know, most people don't.

Just want to know that the organizations have been through some vetting, that they're respectable, they do good work. Then they want to know a bit about the stories, like why is this important? How will my money help?

And that's where we found to your point there, just even, you know, just simple facts that people maybe didn't even realize about a cause can, you know, get people to like, oh, wow, I had never realized that. Yeah, there were more CEOs called John in the Fortune 500 than there are female CEOs. You know, just little things like that. People are like, okay, this is a problem that like this shouldn't happen. Yeah. Here's a way I can do something with it. That's great. Well, Dan, where can listeners find Alma? Where can they find you on the internet? Yeah.

Um, Alma, just go to Alma.app. Um, you can donate on web or you can download the app from, uh, the app stores. Um, I'm, I think linked from our website too. So if you're, if you want to learn more about me or contact me, please do. I'm Dan at Alma.app as well. Um, but yeah, Alma.app is, is where it's, where the product is. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for, for joining us. Really appreciate it. Thanks guys. Really appreciate your time as well. Yeah.

Listeners, there's a little link in the show notes to the Kimberlite page. Feel free to share if you liked any bit of this episode and would recommend that others become an LP too. And with that, we will see you for the next major or the next public episode, Netflix part two. Coming soon to a podcast that knew you. All right. Thanks, Dan. We'll see you guys next time.