CNN
—
After years of reputedly unstoppable expansion, the tech trade is now going through the “ultimate reality check” because it confronts broader financial uncertainty and waves of layoffs, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky informed CNN on Thursday.
“It’s like we’re all in a nightclub and the lights just came on,” Chesky mentioned in an interview on “CNN This Morning.” After a length of “exuberance and euphoria,” he added, “now we all have to, like, take a hard look at things.”
His remarks come at a hard second for the tech trade. Facebook-parent Meta mentioned closing week it used to be reducing 11,000 jobs after just about doubling its body of workers all the way through the pandemic. Amazon showed this week that lay offs had begun in its company team of workers, with experiences announcing it plans to chop 10,000 positions. And Twitter lately minimize roughly 50% of its body of workers as new proprietor Elon Musk races to strengthen its final analysis.
Airbnb could also be an exception. Chesky mentioned the corporate isn’t present process layoffs right now, and in truth is hiring. But this is due largely to the corporate reducing 25% of its body of workers initially of the pandemic because the shuttle trade used to be clobbered, and shedding extra workers through attrition after.
“Two-and-a-half years ago, we lost 80% of our business in eight weeks,” Chesky mentioned. “People were predicting we were going to go out of business.”
“We just hunkered down,” he added. “We rebuilt the company from the ground up, and we stayed really lean.” Now, Chesky mentioned, “we’re stepping on the gas, we’re not putting on the brakes.”
While the reckoning hitting a lot of Silicon Valley is painful, Chesky seemed to counsel {that a} extra sober reassessment of the trade may just additionally provide a chance for the tech sector to reconsider its position in society, after years of complaint for the affect its merchandise could have on other folks.
“I think Silicon Valley has done so many amazing things for the world, but we have to be careful having a fetishization of new technology, as if the new technology is going to solve all the problems that the last technology created,” Chesky mentioned. “We need more diversity in Silicon Valley, but that diversity should not just be demographic diversity. We need artists, humanists in this industry.”
