Should We Be More Data-Driven? Sometimes.

I was working as a data scientist at Airbnb when Covid-19 struck. And as you might expect, Covid-19 was a special kind of brutal for a business that relied on good faith human-to-human interaction. When the world is forming insular <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/pandemic-pod-winter-covid/2020/10/14/214ed65c-0d63-11eb-b1e8-16b59b92b36d_story.html" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">social pods</a>, it’s going to be hard to get anyone to stay at a stranger’s house. And so, as you might expect, our metrics tanked — our core metrics dropped to single digit YoY values. No one was booking Airbnbs anymore, and sure as hell no one was looking to host new Airbnbs. And as we faced that precipitous metrics cliff, our CEO Brian interjected with an admirably swift response. While we were all setting up home offices and hoarding toilet paper and canned goods from Costco, Brian held an emergency all-hands. He told us definitively: “travel as we know it is over.” He had no clear answer to what we should do next, but still there was a lighthouse-like directive through the storm: stop everything you’re working on that isn’t critical and figure out how to survive the pandemic. And what happened afterwards was impressive. The company effectively pivoted, which is a wild thing to be a part of at a company of that scale. We launched Airbnb online experiences in record time. With a new mantra of “near is the new far”, we curated and pushed people towards locales that were great bunker locations for the pandemic. New initiatives that clearly didn’t fit into the future were shut down (I was part of a team called “social stays”, and in spite of the heavy sunk cost, we killed the endeavor quickly). We took on new financing, restructured the company. The company made hundreds — perhaps even thousands of decisions — a day, and, as a result, managed to swim through the worst of the pandemic with as much finesse as you could possibly hope for. <a href="https://towardsdatascience.com/should-we-be-more-data-driven-sometimes-3dcf5e2753ae">Learn More</a>