Name: How AirBnB Is Trying to Make Itself More Inclusive
Uploaded: 2016-07-12
Duration: 5 min 39 s
Description: Redesigning its web site is just the start.

[ MUSIC ] You're dealing with people. It's not that you're inherently discriminating, but part of your product allows people to do that. How are you thinking about that from a company standpoint, how you're messaging your own employees? How are you thinking about this from a product standpoint? How are you building it to maybe Try to work that out as best you can. So I can talk maybe high level. Belinda's actually leading this effort. I'll just tell you kind of as a founder how I think about this. Generally speaking, I think we were late to this issue. And I think one of the questions is, well, why were you so late to this issue? I think we were so focused on a notion of trust. And keeping people safe. They wanted to have everyone have a real identity with photos. Make sure. Cuz we were responding to other crisis of trust and safety. And while that happened we took our eye off the ball on this incredibly important issue. And what we noticed was that people were making judgements about who to let in their home. And by the way, people should have a choice about who to be in their home. But what choices are they deciding? These choices were very subjective, and discriminatory potentially, and one guiding principle is that you want to give people tools so they can make objective measures. We commissioned our own study in Stanford, and one of the things we found is there can be discrimination if everyone's a stranger. You tend to snap judgement to predispositions you know. But if you see somebody's reviews and you learn about them, where they went to school. The moment you can take the stranger out of somebody and this isn't just about race. This could be about countries. Sure. Suddenly, this levels the plank feel and so, we need to do first and foremost is add objective measures So that people don't rely on prejudice. That being said, there are racist in the world and we need to have a zero tolerance and we absolutely have zero tolerance. And so we developed a better escalation system so if we hear something in the community, we absolutely make a stand in the community. But the last thing I'll say in [ UNKNOWN ], we are basically in the middle of a 90 days study. But as we're also realizing. When we designed the platform. Jody and I. Three white guys. There's a lot of things we didn't think about when we designed this platform. So there's a lot of stuff that we need to reevaluate. I would just add. We've always had policies in place. But the last few months we've had a lot of learnings. And so we've We've brought in experts to help us. We hired Laura Murphy, who is the former head of ACLU in Washington, to come and really spearhead this for us so that we understand the issues a lot better. And we're gonna do a full review, top to bottom, of our entire platform to make sure that in every design In every kind of part of the product that inclusion is top of mind, so we are going to be kind of rolling things out over the next 90 days and- How do you think about this issue, right? so of course you want it to be perfectly inclusive in your product, in your company there isn't an executive [ UNKNOWN ], however How do you look at the liability of it? When you were subject, you were pillar for this very early on. And how much of it do you look at it and go, this is something that is our responsibility to fix or this is society. And I don't know how much we can do. Gosh, I think we have not focused as much on pure liability the same way, because we feel like we have a responsibility. And I use that not in a legal stance, but yeah. We have a moral obligation to insure that everyone on our platform is treated fairly, and it's not just of The leaders and the company doing it, this is kind of a whole company effort and we're engaging with our own employees and our community to find the best path here. Part of that is in the company creating a safe space to even have the conversation. We recently hired a head of diversity and inclusion David Kane who is kind of helping us with all of these issues and part of that is Is giving people the tools to even have the conversations. Fair enough. The one thing I'll say is, kind of the height of or when this controversy started bubbling up, I sent an email to the entire company. And in the email, one of the first things I said, is the inclination of a company and the chief executive Is when there's an issue, inclination is to address the issue. I wrote it in quotes, address the issue. Cuz what is address the issue mean? Address the issue sounds to me like doing the minimum amount of work to stay out of trouble. And this is kinda what these topics are. But I said that [ UNKNOWN ] is a little bit different than the other companies, because again. If you're tying to bring people together for different backgrounds, different raises, different cultures then discrimination for most companies is an adjacency to their mission, your mission is whatever is whatever is most important to you. Our thing most importantly is to bring people together. This was an obstacle to our mission and that if we merely try to address the issue we would actually probably not accomplish our mission. And so we had two choices. We could either address the issue, which I think would be on the wrong side of history. Or it'd be a forgotten part of history. Or we could actually, I mean one of the great things about technology is, we have the opportunity to kind of drive change that we hope the rest of the world will mirror. And that is, I think, why we are under such scrutiny, but we also have such responsibility. So then the question they ask the companies What kind of world do you want to live in? And then we should lead by example. We're not gonna create that world, but we should set the example. Good point. I'm gonna come to the audience for questions in one minute, but I want to talk about a different segment of your community, and that's the business community. Right. How are- [ MUSIC ]

Redesigning its web site is just the start.