Topic

ABNB

A collection of 24 issues

Airbnb 4Q'25 Update

Programming Note: I will be traveling with my family for the next three days. Hence, I will take some time off, but will be back on Tuesday next week. Earnings for most internet or SaaS stocks these days appear to be just another event for these stocks to go further

Spotify's Teachable Moments

Spotify launched its premium subscription plan back in 2009 and it took them nearly a decade to reach the milestone of 100 million premium subscribers back in 1Q’19. It took them 16 quarters to add the next 100 million premium subscribers. As they are set to reach 300 million

Airbnb: Inbound Headwinds, AI Moat Question, and a CTO Shakeup

The travel industry has received some not-so-encouraging news in the last couple of days. First, Skift reported that international travel to the US went down for eight consecutive months. Overall overseas visitation to the US fell 2.5% in 2025. With this year’s Football (Soccer) World Cup in sight,

Adobe and Airbnb

Yesterday, I stumbled onto this time-series chart of Adobe and Airbnb’s EV to LTM Gross Profit (GP) multiple. I thought it was quite interesting that they trade at almost the same LTM EV/GP multiple. While Adobe consistently grew gross profit at low double digit rate, Airbnb used to

My experience on Airbnb Experience: Part 2

My first Airbnb Experience can be found here. One of the benefits of living in Sacramento is it’s just two hours driving distance from both San Francisco and Lake Tahoe. You can basically organize a day trip to see mountains, beach, or forest and you only have to pay

Behind the scenes: Airbnb vs Booking

A subscriber from Thailand recently reached out to me and let me know that he has experience of hosting his home through Booking.com, Airbnb, and Agoda. He was gracious enough to allow me access by making me a co-host. It was intriguing to observe these platforms through the eyes

Anthropic's focused bet, Portfolio Change

A programming note: As a reminder, I will take the next two days off for Thanksgiving, and hope to be back on Saturday. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! For a brief moment, Gemini was leading the benchmarks until Anthropic released Opus 4.5 this week. For the uninitiated, Sonnet and Opus are

Solving the "DoorDash Problem"

Nilay Patel from “The Verge” has recently been talking about the “DoorDash problem” for some consumer internet companies. What is the “DoorDash problem”? From The Verge: “Briefly, it’s what happens when an AI interface gets between a service provider, like DoorDash, and you, who might send an AI to

Why I may have underestimated the potential for Airbnb Experiences

Brian Chesky has made quite the uproar in re-launching Airbnb Experiences in the last 6 months. As far as I can tell, almost none of the investors shares remotely the same enthusiasm about experiences as Chesky appears to do. I too was more on the “unenthusiastic” or “indifferent” camp when

Airbnb 3Q'25 Update

Airbnb had a notable acceleration in Gross Booking Value (GBV) growth as it increased from 10.8% in 2Q’25 to 14.3% in 3Q’25. This acceleration was driven by the twin acceleration of both the nights & experience or N&E (from 7% in 2Q’25 to