Airbnb’s new chief business officer shares his top priorities for hosts and travelers.

As Airbnb’s recently appointed Chief Business Officer, Dave Stephenson plays a key role in the company’s future growth plans.

He’s also playing another role that’s important to this development: an Airbnb host.

Stephenson, who served as AirbnbThe chief financial officer has been hosting a mountain cabin outside Seattle, Washington for the past several years, since 2019 after joining the company from Amazon. While the occupants of his cabin may not be aware of his position at the company, Stephenson’s approach is indicative of what he sees ahead for Airbnb.

An avid skier and hiker, Stephenson is quick to share details of the best trails with his guests. The cabin is equipped with a pizza oven, and Stephenson shares his pizza dough recipe with guests, as well as coffee shop recommendations and anything else they might need.

“I enjoy sharing with others what is important to me,” he said. “I think they appreciate that local knowledge and they kind of know how much I care, and it’s nice as a guest, thinking, ‘Wow, this host really cares about me and cares about experience.'”

Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky told employees in a memo that Stephenson’s move to his new CBO role at the start of the year marked an “inflection point” for the company and a focus on growth in existing and new businesses. There is a mark.

“As we grow from our core, it will be important to have an executive dedicated to our long-term growth plans, and there is no one better than Dave to do that,” Chesky wrote in the memo. I wrote

For Stephenson, those long-term growth plans are focused on three key buckets: increasing international expansion, increasing the number of hosts on the platform and building additional experiences and services.

International expansion is key for Airbnb, and Stephenson is spending a lot of time on the road helping to facilitate it, whether it’s in Germany, South Korea or Brazil. Part of that is making sure “all the functions are working together to deliver the results we expect,” he said, even if that means for the country. The specific marketing plan resonates, or if there are other specific local aspects that need to be adapted to reach success. For example, Stephenson said, there is a local approval in Germany that makes consumers more comfortable, the company ensured. It also had Weissenstein Palace — an 18th-century castle in Bavaria featured in the Netflix series “The Empress” — available for exclusive stays on Airbnb.

“It’s just making sure that we’re being very deliberate about how we’re seen in a country,” he said.

As far as experiences go, Stephenson goes a long way in providing his guests in Washington: a reason to return, not only to the property but to Airbnb as well.

“We’re going to focus on the kind of unique things we can do to improve the guest experience,” he said.

Airbnb is also looking to expand its services, making it easier to be a host as well as a guest. This may include helping hosts facilitate check-in or assisting guests in obtaining items needed by guests, such as clothing. For guests, it could be transportation to airports or even a fully stocked fridge upon arrival, he said.

“The deeper the relationship we build with guests and hosts, the better we can understand what each of their needs are, and then the better we can do to meet them,” he said. “The more satisfied they are, the better experience they both have and the more likely the host is to stay. [on Airbnb] And a guest is more likely to want to come back and try Airbnb somewhere else.”

When Stephenson joined Airbnb as CFO in 2019, one of the things he said he tried to bring to the company was a “more proactively rigorous financial organization.”

In many ways, that means acting like a chief operating officer, he said. “As CFOs, we think about business metrics, customer metrics, revenue metrics; all of those elements, how we actually run the business are just as important as the financials.”

The CFO role has evolved beyond the traditional finance function to focus on operations, supply chain, and increasingly cyber security. A CFO role was the right fit for Stephenson to take on additional responsibilities at Airbnb, who was also named head of employee experience in 2021, overseeing talent and leadership development as well as recruiting and compensation.

Stephenson took on the new CBO role at the start of the year, while Eli Mertz, formerly Airbnb’s vice president of finance, began his transition as CFO following the company’s quarterly earnings call in February. of

“Finance is like Switzerland in terms of how it works and already works,” Stephenson said. “The chief business officer is in some ways an extension of that, a neutral function that makes sure all the other functions are working together effectively and really well.”