He must use all of his software engineering and algorithm skills to stay ahead. “It is brutally competitive,” he shared. “One of the challenges is that you don’t know where the competitors are going to come from. In a fairly short span of time, Airbnb is on everybody’s radar. The reason it’s so competitive is because there’s not a lot of switching costs for online customers. If you don’t satisfy their demands today, it’s fairly easy for them to switch to a competitor. That’s what compels us to build something that is world class. If you stop focusing on that it puts you just a step behind.”5
