(Preview) Airbnb and Its Varied Ambitions, The High Agency Golden Era, HBO Max and the End of an Error
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Hello, and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp, and sitting across from me, Ben Thompson, live and in person. How you doing? Good. I mean, we've recorded together a lot in the past. I never fully appreciated the extent to which you have

podcast voice. We're just sitting here talking normally. Podcast starts like a whole different person. I feel very judged because you were judging me for the podcast voice. You said you could just talk in a normal voice. Also, mere minutes ago, you were judging my DVR hygiene. So all

Oh, terrible. Unbelievable. I mean, it's great. I just feel like I get a real big brother, little brother dynamic. I have to come and fix all your problems. It's amazing. I can't wait to kick you out of my house. It's going to feel great later this afternoon. But here we are, and we have news that we will begin with today.

After more than a year of teasing expansion plans beyond home rentals, Airbnb launched an overhauled app that's not just for homeowners and travelers, but also for personal chefs, hairstylists, trainers, and tour operators to offer their services widely.

Airbnb has vetted providers to offer 10 categories of in-home services, including personally cooked meals, prepared food items, full-service catering, photography, spa treatments, massages, personal training, hair, makeup, and nail appointments.

The services can be reserved anytime without a vacation booked, and many of them include, quote, an entry offering below $50, Airbnb said. The new experiences business touts a trimmed down list of nearly 20,000 tours and cooking classes curated for quality and uniqueness with an average cost of $66.

So, Ben, you wrote about this on Wednesday, and I'm going to read an email from Joseph that's building on what you wrote. Joseph writes, Ben and Andrew, the new Airbnb updates make me think Brian Chesky is experiencing a bad case of Canadian devil syndrome, a term I completely made up.

Let me explain. A few seasons ago, South Park had an episode where in-show celebrities Terrence and Phillip were pitched making a branded free-to-play mobile game. The executive pitching them explains that you give the game away and interested players can spend a couple of bucks here and there for a little boost.

Good, harmless fun, right? Well, as the episode goes on, the executive reveals the deliberately manipulative game loops and Skinner box mechanics that they use to addict players and extract massive profits from so-called whales. Also, this executive is revealed to be the Canadian devil as the executive unfolds. Is this a fiction document or is it a documentary of the App Store, I'm

It does. There are echoes of all sorts of different tech products here. Canadian devil syndrome, then, is the cognitive dissonance within a company between their professed mission and how the business actually makes money. This exists in all organizations to varying degrees. Meta might say they're connecting the world, and they probably even mean it most of the time, but they make money selling ads.

Similarly, Brian Chesky really wants to believe he's building a platform to facilitate real-world connections, but the reality is they've built a short-term rental marketplace.

The big question for Airbnb's future, does Brian Chesky really think Airbnb is an experiences platform or does he just wish it was? So there you go. A related question is, have you ever watched South Park? I've seen an episode or two. I'm setting myself up for these blow-by takes. That's right. In person, anything goes. Yeah.

So it's interesting. He kind of jumped to the end and the conclusion, which is like my part three, raising these questions of Brian Chesky wanting to model himself after Steve Jobs and Walt Disney, all of whom like obsession with detail and the experience directly manifested in the product people bought or the experience they had. And one of the fundamental challenges, that's not what Airbnb does is

Brian Chesky is not actually preparing the homes that people experience. He's not actually coaching the private chef. And even right off the bat with these experiences and the services, they have the Airbnb seal of quality. And it's this beautiful simulated wax seal that they put on there. The iconography. It's all beautiful. It all looks great. And yeah.

these profiles I thought were really interesting, kind of like old school Silicon Valley profiles where it's delivering what the PR subject wants, but also with a little wink wink from the author. Don't worry, we're going to get to the wired profile. Okay, great. It made my week. It was really good. Well, and also just a note on Brian Chesky and lack of self-awareness in terms of his presentation in LA this week,

Did he intentionally ape the Steve Jobs style as he was standing up there in all black? Oh, I'm sure. I think one of the – was it not – did you read the – there's also a Wall Street Journal profile. I didn't see the journal one. Okay. I think you must not have because you would have definitely noticed that there was a section on him choosing what shirt to wear. Perfect. What sheen of black, which is definitely going to be black.

Um, yes, of course, of course he was, uh, you know, I don't think that there's any question about it and what you get in these profiles. And I think it speaks to sort of Joseph's point is this is an executive that wants to exert control and has a high sense of design. And he's a designer. He went to RISD and you know, that that's what he does. And, um,

I'm all for a well-designed app. Airbnb has always been a well-designed app. And that's not a detriment, to be clear. It's good to have a well-designed app. The fundamental disconnect is that Brian Chesky has no control over the actual experience of Airbnb because what he's running is actually a marketplace. And so you have this thing, just to go back to the services angle and the experiences angle, they're going to apply the Airbnb still of quality.

Applying the Airbnb seal of quality is fundamentally incompatible with delivering a successful services and experiences business. Why? Because you need volume. You need volume on both sides. You need a volume of services and experiences, and more importantly, you need a volume of users. And that's the...

marketplaces are so powerful and they're similar to platforms in a way. They're a platform of another sort where you're facilitating this connection between suppliers and buyers. And to do that, you need volume and you need liquidity, like just stuff being available and people going through. And to do that, you can't go in and individually like

Vets. Right. And so there's this, just this sort of weird disconnect. It feels like between the control he wants to exert and the, and what,

The fulfillment he seems to get from – and again, you see – this is not to diminish the app. The app looks amazing. The icons are awesome. Like all this stuff is true. It was clearly slayed over. I'm not diminishing that at all. It's also relatively immaterial to the success or not of Airbnb's business, which is how much supply do you have on? How much demand do you have? How successful are you at matching that? Yeah.

maintaining and accelerating those marketplace dynamics. And so just by and large, even before we get into the critiques I have or skepticism I have about experience and services, that overall disconnect is what was really striking to me, what I think Joseph is sort of tapping into here. Yeah, that's fair. And I think there was another disconnect where Brian Chesky was talking this week about the

the idealized version of Airbnb and how it's just people helping people and connecting people. By the way, do you say airbed or air mattress? Air mattress. Yeah, I say air mattress too. I never heard airbed, but I guess... Did people come back at you and said, what's an air mattress? No, I typed airbed because that's what Chesky said and I guess it is in the name. So I'm like, maybe that's a coastal elite thing. So you're my coastal elite expert. Nope. Nope.

Air mattress for me. No, yeah. It's like, yeah, we started out Airbnb. That's how they started the presentation. We added air mattress in our apartment. Sorry, air bed in our apartment in San Francisco. And we made some money and became this sort of thing. And, and,

And then we're, you know, we have video of it and let's drive around San Francisco and it's so charming and great. And I'm like, that is all fantastic. I really appreciated you interjecting in your update and saying that is not really what the Airbnb experience is, is today or the Airbnb experience, because it's like a lock box. It's very impersonal and that's fine. I actually think.

The Airbnb rental experience can be unfairly maligned sometimes. Like anytime I see people talking about Airbnb online, they're ragging on it. And I think for a little while there, like eight or nine years ago, people were talking about Airbnb just displacing hotels entirely because it's just going to be preferable.

I'm not there. Let me be very clear. I'm definitely not there. Yeah, I am. I'm a big hotel fan. Oh, not of the not of the hotel. I just had this week. I'll tell you that much. But no, but the no, it's a it's in Airbnb. It's such a complicated company. I mean, because a point I used to make years and years ago because you had the two companies that came out together, which is Airbnb and Uber. And I always thought it was very unfair that Airbnb was the darling and Uber was the villain.

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