Thread by @varun_mathur

In Airbnb We Trust

Airbnb’s trust-driven UX is an existential threat to marketplace platforms trying to appeal to humans with the idea of blockchains

Humans are emotion-driven with inherent cognitive biases => trust brands

@BradStone The Upstarts shows pragmatism > idealism👇

Before the advent of Airbnb, Couchsurfing attracted millions of users, but ultimately a highly idealistic, non-profit outlook and lack of a product designed with an end to end aha user experience cost it market leadership

They also initially turned down VCs, riding their high🐴

Airbnb, being driven by determined founders who believed in providing a spectacular experience for users, eventually co-opted Couchsurfing

The fate of blockchain marketplace startups could be similar. They have run experiments, but huge % of value is set to be captured by Airbnb

While the early adopter tech community and nodes can trust public blockchains and cryptography, for a regular human user, what matters is what brand can be trusted.

Through roomsharing, Airbnb has provided the training wheels for that trust to be built amongst people directly.

It can, and I believe it eventually will, extend into adjacent P2P marketplaces such as hiring a driver, dog walking, credit, compute capacity, disk space rental, etc.

Think Amazon, but 100x bigger.

In a trustless world, people can trust each other through the Airbnb brand.

For token based marketplaces which succeed to a given extent, a growth-hungry Airbnb could eventually co-opt the open source code *and* data, owning the consumer experience with its own brand for any legit P2P commerce.

For such startups, if Airbnb also uses a public blockchain eventually + issues its own token — how will your product differentiate ? If it recognizes it is a *platform for P2P trust*, then what happens ?

An Airbnb token could be the only token which matters for any P2P market.

Airbnb right now is artificially constrained and focused on travel. But this brand has something magical.

Just as starting an e-commerce startup requires navigating around Amazon, a P2P market requires thinking around Airbnb.

Its a force of nature, and you plan around it.

The valuation of blockchain projects and consumer marketplaces is aspirational - it reflects a perfect world where Airbnb would not want to grow in your adjacent market, but why won’t it ?

Wall Street + better consumer UX would drive them towards an “Airbnb for Everything” unit

Going back to the RSS example from the previous UX thread, where Facebook actually brought personal news aggregation and a simplified identity UX to billions while idealists lost; for P2P trust, I believe Airbnb would bring the ideals of crypto and blockchain to billions.

Airbnb would eventually realize its manifest destiny as a P2P Trust UX platform for billions

From renting rooms to renting disk space, Airbnb is where it would be at, unless projects -> products which users ❤️

cc
@andrewchen
@cdixon
@tonysheng
@nlw
@naval
@jpgg
@jgebbia