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“I can’t make products just for 41-year-old tech founders”: Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky is taking it back to basics
Of course, you shouldn’t discriminate, but when we say belonging, it has to be more than just inclusion. It has to actually be the proactive manifestation of meeting people, creating connections in friendships. And Jony Ive said, “Well, you need to reframe it. It’s not just about belonging, it’s about human connection and belonging.”And that was, I think, a really big unlock. The next thing Jony Ive said is he created this book for me, a book of his ideas, and the book was called “Beyond Where and When,” and he basically said that Airbnb should shift from beyond where and when to who and what?Who are you and what do you want in your life? And that was a part of the inspiration behind Airbnb categories, that we wanted people to come to Airbnb without a destination in mind and that we could categorize properties not just by location but by what makes them unique, and that really influenced Airbnb categories and some of the stuff we’re doing now.
Yale Law Journal - Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox
Although Amazon has clocked staggering growth, it generates meager
profits, choosing to price below-cost and expand widely instead. Through this
strategy, the company has positioned itself at the center of e-commerce and now
serves as essential infrastructure for a host of other businesses that depend upon
it. Elements of the firm’s structure and conduct pose anticompetitive
concerns—yet it has escaped antitrust scrutiny.
This
Note argues that the current framework in antitrust—specifically its pegging competition to “consumer welfare,” defined as
short-term price effects—is unequipped to capture the architecture of market
power in the modern economy. We cannot cognize the potential harms to
competition posed by Amazon’s dominance if we measure competition primarily
through price and output. Specifically, current doctrine underappreciates the
risk of predatory pricing and how integration across distinct business lines
may prove anticompetitive.
These concerns are heightened in the context of
online platforms for two reasons. First, the economics of platform markets create
incentives for a company to pursue growth over profits, a strategy that
investors have rewarded. Under these conditions, predatory pricing becomes
highly rational—even as existing doctrine treats it as irrational and therefore
implausible.
Second, because online platforms serve as critical intermediaries,
integrating across business lines positions these platforms to control the
essential infrastructure on which their rivals depend. This dual role also
enables a platform to exploit information collected on companies using its
services to undermine them as competitors.
LinkedIn’s Alternate Universe - Divinations
Every platform has its royalty. On Instagram it's influencers, foodies, and photographers. Twitter belongs to the founders, journalists, celebrities, and comedians. On LinkedIn, it’s hiring managers, recruiters, and business owners who hold power on the platform and have the ear of the people.
On a job site, they’re the provisioners of positions and never miss the chance to regale their audience with their professional deeds: hiring a teenager with no experience, giving a stressed single mother a chance to provide for her family, or seeing past a candidate’s imperfections to give them a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. These stories are relayed dramatically in what’s now recognizable as LinkedIn-style storytelling, one spaced sentence at a time, told by job-givers with a savior complex.