Growing Airbnb (with Dan Hill, CEO of Alma and former Head of Growth at Airbnb)

Ben Gilbert (0:00)

Hello, Limited Partners, and welcome to the Bonus Show. We're recording this today on November 14th. It'll drop next Monday. I don't think we actually need to say this on the Bonus Show, but I'm Ben Gilbert.

David Rosenthal (0:14)

And I'm David Rosenthal. If you didn't know this, what are you doing here?

Ben Gilbert (0:18)

The cool thing about the LP Show is there's not a lot of logistical work to do or overhead here, but thank you so much for joining us as always. Thank you for being a member. It means the world to us. And we've just been super pumped by the amount of you that have come out to continue going deeper with us. And here's my sort of one and only plug is if you feel like sharing that you're an LP, you should absolutely do that and scream it from the hilltops on whatever social media platform or private thread you use.

So with that, David, we have a guest with us today.

David Rosenthal (0:58)

We have a very, very special guest, our first on the LP show and nobody better to join us than Dan Hill. And full disclosure, Dan is the co-founder and CEO of Wave's very first portfolio company, Alma, which we will talk about later in the episode, but the reason he's here and what we're very excited to dive into is he played an integral role at Airbnb.

And was actually in his previous company, one of the very first acquisitions that Airbnb made. So, Dan, welcome to the show.

Dan Hill (1:38)

Hey guys, thanks so much for having me. Yeah, really excited to chat today.

David Rosenthal (1:43)

Awesome. So a little more about Dan.

He is, if you couldn't tell from his accent there, he is British by birth, went to Cambridge for undergrad, was a music major, and then co-founded a company called Crashpadder, which was a European Airbnb competitor. And actually, was it Airbnb's first acquisition or second acquisition? Do you remember, Dan?

Dan Hill (2:09)

I think it was the second. They'd acquired a company, Acolio, in Germany a few months later, but we were definitely in the first two or three acquisitions, I think the company did.

David Rosenthal (2:19)

Yeah, crazy.

Dan then, after the acquisition, moved to San Francisco, joined Airbnb initially as an engineer, and then, we'll get into this, but did just amazing things, shifted over to product management, ended up leading payments, trust, data infrastructure, all of APAC, then finally was the head of growth for all of Airbnb, and then at the very end, Dan, you were head of all of guest experience, right? So growth, customer acquisition, search, flow, the booking flow for guests, just has an incredible background and stories to share here.

Dan Hill (2:55)

Yeah, it was, I mean, we'll get into it, but it was an incredible journey going from, you know, day one at Airbnb writing lines of code to keep the site up to, you know, six and a half years later, focused on, you know, what is the overall guest experience like of traveling on Airbnb?

Ben Gilbert (3:11)

Now, and running growth at a company that's sort of like one of the canonically fastest growing companies of all time, congratulations on all your efforts.

Dan Hill (3:19)

Thanks. You know, it would be remiss of me not to say it was, you know, a huge team effort and, you know, I was focused on a lot of the product, kind of engineering, data science, design sides of the growth, but there were, you know, many people that did a lot of work to get that growth of the company.

David Rosenthal (3:33)

Well, let's dive in. And this is really, you know, in the spirit of the LP show here, you know, what, as Ben and I have talked about, what we really want to do is dive into the nuts and bolts of the day-to-day company building that happens from, you know, on the main Acquired show, we tell the, what is it, we joked about the, you know, the fully grilled and ready to eat kielbasa, but this is the stuffing the sausage, so, of making these companies. And Dan is great. So let's jump in.

So I want to start with the Crashpadder days. You were a music major at Cambridge. How did you, how did you get into tech and become an engineer and start Crashpadder?

Dan Hill (4:16)

Yeah, I mean, it's on the outside, it seems like such a huge jump or a strange shift, but I don't know, for me, it was actually pretty organic.

So, you know, my back in the UK, my mom is a piano teacher, music teacher. She taught in high schools. And my dad is a scientist. He, you know, works a lot with computers. So growing up, on the one hand, I was playing the violin and the piano. And on the other hand, you know, my dad was bringing home, you know, old 386s and BBC micros. And I was sort of, you know, taking them apart and figuring out how they worked. And in 18, I thought, you know what? I want to be a violinist. I want to be a musician. That's my life calling. So as you said, I went to university for it. I studied violin and music and conducting.