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Airbnb's Co-Founder and CEO on Loneliness
I was reading through an $ABNB transcript from a Morgan Stanley Technology conference in March, and this portion jumped right off the page.
It is a bit lengthy but well worth the read as it seems like a fascinating insight into Brian Chesky's (co-founder and CEO) mind and kind of hit home.
"We hired the former Surgeon General in the United States when the pandemic broke out. He's now the Surgeon General again. And he said, do you know what the #1 killer in America is?
And I said, I don't know, is it cardiac? Is it like obesity? Is it cancer? Is it cardiac disease?
And he said, no, it's loneliness. Loneliness takes 15 years off your life. And I thought, wow, that's pretty bad, but how prevalent is this?
And what I realized is that 1 out of 3 Americans are chronically lonely.
But it gets worse.
Because if you actually dig into the details and if you have teenagers in this room, this might resonate. 2 out of 3 teenagers are chronically depressed or hopeless, defined by a 2-week period in the last year where they just can't function.
1 out of 3 teenagers -- 1 out of 3 teenage girls has made a suicide plan.
Why is this? I don't -- it's hard to know, but I think modern life is starting to make people lonely.
The office is now Zoom, the mall is now Amazon, the theater is now Netflix, and time with friends, time sleeping, time exercising -- is spent on devices. And the problem with devices is social networking became social media, and your friends became your followers.
No one has changed someone else's mind in the YouTube comment section.
Your Instagram followers aren't coming to your funeral.
And it's not to say any of this is bad. I think all of these technologies are great. So long as you remember, they have to be in balance with meaningful connections in the real world.
Now how are you going to do that?
Well, I'm not saying we're here to solve this problem. No one company is.
But I'm quite certain that we need to balance all the time on screens with time in the physical world, with people we care about, either reuniting with friends or meeting other people.
And I think that travel is a great way to do that.
And so whatever time I have left doing this -- and I hope it's a long time -- I think there's a much bigger north star for us and then just putting heads in beds.
I think there's something about making the world feel a little bit smaller.
Making people realize the other is not so other.
People are 99% the same, and to really build products and services that, at their heart, bring people together and foster connection because of what we have invented -- probably more than a marketplace -- is a system of trust to get strangers to live together.
And if they could live together, what else could they do together?
And I think that's where this company is probably going in the coming years."
I know he's talking his book a little bit, of course, in some of this, but it does provide a layer of happiness to me as a shareholder to see this thinking flowing through the company's operations.
Curious to know what you all may think.
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