 Good afternoon, everybody. And welcome to our session on the new platform economy. My name is Jonathan Zittrain. I teach on internet and law at Harvard University. And it's my pleasure to have this distinguished panel to start to interrogate what we mean by the platform economy and what it means to us. Platform is a word that can mean different things to different people. At the very least, I think, represented here, we have two kinds of platforms. One is the platform that is foundational to almost everything digital these days, such as the internet. Unowned, no particular CEO who runs it. It just sort of bizarrely runs itself. It's like a collective hallucination. It's wholesale as much as it is retail. It expects other people to build on top of it and other companies. And then we also have as platform a more retail conception and thoroughly owned with entrepreneurs and others who have on that first platform built new platforms that people at the world at large can use in ways that are so new and interesting, we all thought it worthwhile to gather here today to talk about it. So I thought it might make sense to start at the top of this little graph I've just hypothesized. And so I thought maybe I would start with you, Nathan. Nathan Bacharczyk, you are the CTO and co-founder of Airbnb. Yes? Yes, that's right. Confirmed. Don't worry, this is not a cross-examination. Friendly witness. Wonderful. And for the three people somewhere in the world who may not have heard of Airbnb, how do you encapsulate what Airbnb is? Airbnb allows travelers to stay in someone else's home. And is there any exchange of money? Or is it just sort of paying the sign out front? I want to confuse it with couch surfing. Yeah, so let me elaborate. You come to Airbnb and we make it just as easy to book someone's home as a hotel. So you search, you see lots of homes that you can stay. All kinds of homes, extra bedrooms is one type of accommodation, entire homes is another. We even have tree houses, and that's the power of the platform, all kinds of accommodations. And when you book it, basically, you're paying Airbnb. We hold your money until after you arrive. So you know it's handled safely. If you need to cancel, something's not as described when you show up, you can call us, get the money back. Afterwards, you leave a review for each other. So in a sense, we've built a platform to facilitate things like payments, reviews, search. But we're actually not the provider of the ultimate service, which is the accommodation. So when you say we have tree houses, you mean tree houses exist. And we facilitate the person with the tree house with the person who wants to sleep in the tree house. Exactly. We're actually not the service provider or the facilitator. But we've really made sure that the facilitation we do speaks to the specific customer needs. Now, this is one of those ideas that now that it's happening in its 2016 seems like, well, of course. At the time you started, was there already burblings around this? Or was it seemed like fresh territory? We started it eight years ago. And nobody thought it was a good idea back then. The obvious thought was, why would you allow a stranger to stay in your home? So fast forward eight years to date, 70 million guests have now stayed in strangers' home, just 40 million last year alone. So last year was more than the previous seven years combined. And when was the moment that it went, even perhaps in your own heart, from this is a cool thing to do, but there's always law school to, whoa, there's something here? Well, about after the first year in early 2009, we focused our attention on New York and really curating the experience that a traveler would have in New York by meeting every single host and photographing the properties professionally and helping to set the price, curate the description. And it's when we got hands-on and helped to shape this into an attractive product then the booking started to happen and the network effect started to take off. And let's just define network effects. What's a network effect? Well, basically what happened is, once we had 40 desirable properties in New York City, people from around the world want to go to New York, they're looking for alternatives, it's expensive. They started to book them, hosts made money, hosts would tell their friends about it, their friends would see the high quality property come to it and host as well. Meanwhile, a traveler goes home, back to Paris, back to Berlin, tells their friends there and it starts spreading word of mouth. As we start getting properties around the world, the Airbnb service becomes better. So today we have two million properties in 191 countries and that's the strength that the Airbnb brand is the fact that it's one-stop shopping with a huge assortment anywhere you might want to go in the world. But the strength of the network effect in particular is if you have a treehouse and you're looking for somebody to fill it, you should go where all the people looking are and maybe they're on Airbnb, and if you're looking for a treehouse, you should go where all the vendors, lenders, lessors are, also Airbnb and that's a virtuous circle which might account to, I guess at one point you gave a quote that said, quote, we are quite effective in providing demand for our owners, our hosts and there really isn't a need therefore for a competing service. And that's network effects for you. Do you still, is that how you're feeling? Yeah, so it's a two-sided marketplace on the host side. These are individuals renting primarily their own home. That's the typical case. At most they can sell 365 nights a year and probably actually much less. So if we can do that. You're talking about leap years. If we can do that effectively, then there is no need to cross list that property elsewhere and that's the benefit of scaleness business to effectively deliver those limited number of nights that a host wants. And that is a platform then. That's the thing under the tip of the iceberg that everybody might use and therefore becomes almost invisible, but is facilitating each other. I like to think of the host as micro entrepreneurs and we're giving them a hospitality toolkit. Yes. Facilitating the reviews, the payments, the search, the quality standards, and it allows a regular person who might not even be that sophisticated in terms of IT unless you participate in the global economy. Got it. Now let's look at this also then with respect to content and video, so Susan it seems great to turn to you now. Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube. And I guess when you encountered YouTube it was no longer just a gleam in the eye of Chad. So tell us about your entry into YouTube. Sure. Well, so YouTube was founded by Chad and Steve as you alluded to. And actually at the time I was at Google and I was running a competing service called Google Video. And we were competing with YouTube. And I realized running Google Video, the power of anyone being able to upload content and everyone all over the world watching it. And so I saw this trend is going to take off. This trend is meaningful. And there was actually one video in particular that I saw that was one of the first user-generated hits. It was of these two kids in their dorm room singing to the Backstreet Boys and their roommate is actually doing the homework in the background. And if you still watch this video today, I still laugh every single time I see it because it's funny. And the views on it were just exponential. And I could see here you have two non-professional people creating content, but yet people all over the world want to see this. And so I was running Google Video. I realized how powerful it would be. And I saw we couldn't compete effectively with YouTube. And so I was a big advocate of the acquisition. So YouTube acquired YouTube very early on. YouTube was just less than a year old at that point. And why couldn't Google Video run by a fairly large company that was conversant in tech compete with YouTube? I think it had to do with the community. It had to do with the fact that there were a set of people there who were watching it, a community who was discussing and engaging in the videos. And they also had really good product. I mean, they had a good product, a good brand, all of those components. And the logic that went through my head is, well, maybe we can't compete with them. But this is going to be a really important market. This is going to be the future of online video. And there's a good chance that we can't compete. And do we want to take that risk? It's really a much better decision at that point for us to make that purchase. And it was seen as really risky at the time. I remember actually Mark Cuban put out this headline story, the week that we were deciding to buy YouTube that said, only a moron would buy YouTube. And here we were discussing, like, let's buy YouTube. So it wasn't obvious at that time that this was a good decision. But I think given that I had seen the power of having creators all over the world create new forms of content, I saw that was important. And now it became a believer. And I thought it was really important for us to acquire. Have you had a chance to talk to Mark since? No, I haven't discussed this with him since. But I think he's, yeah, I'm happy. I think he has revised his opinion on it. But I'm not certain. But I think next time I see him, yeah, I'll ask him. And is this also the sort of platform that benefits from the network effects that Nathan was referring to? That people would go there to see the videos. And then if you're going to put up a video, you might as well go where the eyeballs are. Well, I mean, I think we're a community. And definitely our publishers, there are viewers, and there are advertisers, right? And they all work together. And so definitely as you have more viewers, you as a user, as a creator, if you create a video and you want to show it to the world, you're going to upload it to YouTube because you want the world to find it. That said, I think that video right now is an incredibly dynamic space. And when I look around, I see lots of other companies getting into video and they're getting into it in really creative ways. I mean, you look at Facebook, you look at Snapchat, and you see that there is a lot of room to continue to innovate. And I think that's going to be, it's just going to be a really exciting era for us going forward. Uh-huh. Let me turn now to Arun Sundarajan. Arun, you teach at NYU. You study- Yes, I do. Exactly, very good on the record. I am not the CEO of NYU, though. Hope Eternal. But you study this stuff, and it sounds like both Nathan and Susan are telling stories of democratization that two guys in a dorm room with a third involuntary person just trying to get the homework done or somebody with a treehouse can just a few clicks and you're on your way to reaching your audience or transacting with them. And I just love for you to tell us. Is that the story here? Yeah, I mean, I think Airbnb and YouTube are great examples of what I've started thinking of as a conduit to crowd-based capitalism where you've got, you're moving away from systems where a hierarchical organization is sort of producing stuff for people to buy and towards a platform, for lack of a better word. You don't mind if I use the term platform during this session, do you? It's free as the air to breathe. Okay, all right. But it's sort of enabling large distributed groups of people to start to sort of get access to demand that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to get access to individually. Yes. And so we see this in retail in China with Alibaba and in the United States with eBay. We see this in other forms of sort of advertising supported content through Google and Facebook. We see it in transportation services through Uber and Lyft and Ola in India and Didi Kuwaiti in China. And again, all of these are telling the same story of a platform and there are different kinds of platforms, but they're all aggregating providers who are distributed and giving them access to a global market. They're also sort of layering on top of that some form of branding and legitimacy that makes people comfortable with the idea of getting a real world service in the case of Airbnb or in the case of Uber and Lyft from someone who they don't know. Yes. I mean, we've sort of really raised the bar on trust here, right? I mean, we're getting into strangers' cars and saying, drive me to another city. But what's really interesting to me as well is that a lot of these platforms are blurring the lines between personal and professional in the provision of commercial-grade services. I mean, my 12-year-old daughter watches YouTube stars. She pointed to someone on the street the other day and said, he's a YouTuber. And this is like a completely new world for me. But these are people who have essentially sort of built a brand through YouTube. You've got people who are doing it through Airbnb, the people who are doing it through blah, blah car in France, which is city-to-city transportation. And I'm excited by this as an economist because for two reasons, the little reason is because it has vastly expanded the set of industries in which network effects are going to be prevalent. Like, I'm an economist, so I like the word network effects. My sociologist friends call them communities. But the major reason why I'm excited is that I feel that we're at the early stages of inventing a new model of organizing economic activity. It sits somewhere between the traditional firm and the hands-off marketplace. And if you think about Airbnb as an example, they are a marketplace. People merchandise. They set price. They control inventory. But Airbnb provides certain things that a traditional company would provide. They provide a face to the consumers. Uber is more company-like than Airbnb. They set pricing. I mean, on the other end of the spectrum, on Alibaba, or on Etsy, or on eBay, all sort of retail platforms, most of the commercial activity is controlled by the decentralized small retailer. And the platform is more like a market. So I get the feeling that we're in this process of experimentation, where we're going to try a bunch of these firm market combinations. But later in the 21st century, we would have converged on a few standard platform models that will mediate a significant fraction of the world's economic activity. And when I think about this, two questions that come up, and I hope we can sort of discuss them during the panel. One is, is this reorganization of economic activity going to exacerbate the inequality that we've seen growing? Or will it be more equalizing? Will it actually be democratizing in an economic opportunity? And before you move to the second question, just your quick answer to that question. I realize this is an academic asking an academic, and we're in dangerous turf. I know, but the simple answer is that I'm an optimist. I think that there is tremendous equalizing potential as we start to. And what Susan and Nate sort of pointed to already sort of alludes to that answer, right? I mean, people who wouldn't have otherwise had access to a global market now do. You're empowering the individual to sort of build a small business. But now a channel, a sociologist or a pessimist, if there's any lack of overlap between the two, and tell us what would be an example of it exacerbating. Well, there may be a fear that as the network effects continue to sort of reinforce the dominance of a single platform in an industry, that perhaps that platform is now in a position to sort of capture a lot of the value that flows through it. I mean, that's the argument that's given. I find this argument fallacious because the kinds of platforms that, you know, these platforms depend very heavily on their continued brand, you know, the delivery of a high quality experience on the providers. And so it's smarter for them to view the providers as partners, as like, you know, sort of part of a community rather than as, you know, sort of inputs to sort of extract rents from. So your hope would be the market with police. Let's get your second question on the table before we move on. Okay, and the second question, and this comes up repeatedly, this comes up most significantly in Nate's world with Airbnb and with Uber and with Lyft. But I see a blurring of lines between platforms and regulators or between the role of the platform and the role that traditionally used to be played by the government. We've seen this with like, you know, who's allowed to drive a taxi. We've seen sort of like, you know, questions raised about like, you know, what system of rules should best sort of, you know, keep short-term accommodation safe. And, you know, the platforms have stepped up to the plate and said, you know, we're going to create, like, you know, there's nothing that exists here. So we're going to create a way to make this work. Yes. And, you know, but sometimes that sort of, you know, these new business models don't fit into the world. The minimum standards that used to be set by regulatory authorities now may be within the ambit of the platforms to do. And I should just quickly ask, say, Nathan, if my treehouse has some real loose planks in it, and we've already lost one relative through it, but it was fine, if I put that in the listing and just say, beware, there's a loose plank, it's marked with a red line, the kind of thing that like, the Holiday Inn would not let that room. Is that okay? Is that just part of the democratization? Or would you say, no, no, there's certain minimum standards, even if it's disclosed, and we wouldn't want to list it otherwise? I think transparency and expectation setting is critical, because I don't think it's usually black or white. There's a full spectrum of risk and hazards that might crop up, and so, of course, communicating that upfront, the best Western or whatever traditional brand probably wouldn't let you have a treehouse in the first place, because there's not a railing on the ladder, something like that. What we have done to protect consumers is now personal liability insurance, which is included in every transaction that's not something you have to check a box and pay extra for, but in about 20 countries, including the US, if you fall through that board or step on a nail, you're gonna be covered by an insurance product that we include as part of your booking. Now, statistics show that that is incredibly unlikely, that hasn't happened before, but if anything like that were to happen, there are safety nets in place. This is right to Arun's point that here it is then, even in the ideal, the market setting the standards rather than a regulator doing the same, and I guess, Susan, it's worth asking you on the content side, to what extent do you feel YouTube as a platform and a community has a role to say this particular video does not reflect YouTube values versus, hey, people wanna put it on if they're entertained by and it's not illegal, let's just have it clearly marked. Yeah, yeah, I mean, so definitely there are certain standards that we have from a content perspective of content that we don't wanna have on YouTube and that we don't wanna have part of our community. So for example, anything that would be inciting violence, hate speech would be another example. And so adult content, right? Those have all been decisions that we've made early on because that is content that we don't believe as part of the community that we want associated with YouTube. And so we actually, the interesting thing is that the way that we detect that content is we actually rely on our users to flag it for us. So every video has an opportunity for a user to select flag and then it goes to a set of people at YouTube that review that and decide whether or not it meets our policies or not. And now Nathan gave plenty of statistics about Airbnb use, just roughly, how many YouTube videos are uploaded every day, just roughly? Well, we counted in hours of videos. We have 400 hours uploaded every minute. So I don't know what that translates to into actual numbers, but is a very, very significant number. And so when you're dealing with numbers of that scale, we basically have to rely upon the community to be able to identify the videos that are a problem and to be able to pull those down really quickly. And once it's flagged, as you say, it gets reviewed, roughly how many people check into work or maybe they telecommute and just watch flagged videos all day long? Well, I don't know the number, but we try to have enough people that we can, we make sure that we meet certain standards of being able to pull it down really quickly, depending upon the category of the content that is pulled down really quickly. So something that would be really a problem, should get pulled down within an hour, just content that someone might have said is a problem, definitely pull down within 24 hours. And I think that, you know, I think the points that Nate and Susan raise highlight the fact that we can't think, we can't imagine a world in which, if a lot of commerce is flowing through platforms, that there's a government regulator who is doing all the things that a regulator used to have to do, sort of like preventing market failure. You know, the platforms are generally in a much better position. And so we have to sort of come up with systems in which the platforms sort of are the entity to which you sort of delegate some of that responsibility. You let them use machine learning and, you know, the massive sort of like, you know, data flows that they have to actually set the standards and enforce them. And that requires sort of coming up with a much greater level of trust in the platforms over time. Let me get our other two panelists into the conversation first. Chuck Robbins, hello. Hello, how are you? I am very well, thank you. I like your tie, by the way. I appreciate that. Flattery may get you somewhere. But you are the CEO of Cisco. Cisco is one of those brands that's ubiquitous but does have that kind of wholesale flair to it. And when we think of, then, the two kinds of platforms we opened with, you guys are part of the network that are custodians of the generative internet on which all this stuff is built. And so here's an open-ended question. How's it going down there? How's the internet doing? We're the collective hallucination, isn't it? Yes, yes. You know, it's fascinating. I've been listening to the discussions and I thought about a few things. Number one, I think we built the platforms that enabled these platforms. And this whole, everything we're talking about this week in Davos is something that we've been talking about for about eight years and it's just phenomenal to see it come to life. The other thing I thought about is that we actually embraced, I think, the power of creating a platform even 15 years ago because as I think about what you do is you create an ecosystem where value is shared across. There's tremendous benefit. You create loyalty. You create stickiness. And I thought about one of the decisions we made early on that I think has differentiated us in similar ways in that back in the, probably about 15, 16 years ago we made a decision to really think about a global ecosystem around the platforms that we were building. So even today, we deliver all of our solutions through an ecosystem of hundreds of thousands of people that get up every day and they derive value from being a part of this interconnected system. Is there a specific example like a day in the life of a bit moving along the internet or something? Well, I think the issue is that our platforms, while we like to think that it's everything you need, there's usually other stuff that comes with it to actually enable what you guys ultimately try to do and what our customers try to do. But what we created was an ecosystem of value exchange. So partners integrate our solutions. They build applications on top of our solutions. We then subsequently created a set of certifications that created a broader ecosystem of loyalty and again, value exchange where people built careers. So it's an interesting correlation to the economic and the benefit that you see from what you've done. But just help us out here for a moment. Is what you're thinking about routers, the basic building blocks that move a bit in the right direction when it could go in two different directions, it picks the right one. Are those the sorts of building blocks you're thinking of or something else? Well, I'm thinking about core, the networking infrastructure that runs the underlying internet clearly. But the collaboration capabilities, the security technology, the mobility infrastructure that goes into service provider networks, all of that is part of this broad ecosystem that delivers it every day. And then we even subsequently created a global educational network called Network Academies to create more people who were able to be a part of this ecosystem. So now we're transitioning all of our platforms to be of the flavor that you described. So we're opening up programmability on everything we build so that you can then develop on top of it, add value, build businesses on top of it, et cetera. So it's a similar transition. And the kinds of constraints they were talking about as platform operators where there's stuff that YouTube has community guidelines that doesn't quite work or Airbnb may yet someday find the lighthouse so dangerous it will not list it. Although I did see a lighthouse listed on Airbnb. It looked very good until in the fine print of the listing it said it came with earplugs because if it's foggy, the lighthouse has a 400 decibel horn on top that's made go off. Part of the experience. What do you expect? It's the lighthouse. Exactly. But is it that you're more in the engineering part of the infrastructure? So how Cisco technologies are used is less something that would be Cisco's responsibility or is there an analogy to the sorts of decisions that Susan and Nathan make? I think if you asked our customers when we have challenges they think it's very much our responsibility. So it's a different form of responsibility but we believe that what as we move to a world that we're talking about here in Davos of digitization we think that creating an ecosystem that has the ability to dynamically engage with the technology. Even the technology we build is quite similar. So people don't know this but we have close to a million developers that are actually writing applications that interact with our portfolio today. So we're- And those are developers that are not employed by you. That's correct. They're just people out in the world that write something. They're writing higher level security applications that take advantage of our security portfolio or we have collaboration solutions that we have developers that are building third-party applications that'll place calls into the capability. So you could see an Airbnb actually connect with our collaboration portfolio and initiate a video call within your application for customer support or something of that nature. So it's all coming together. And is this your vision as well for the internet of things we've been hearing so much about? Well, I think that what we talk about what's going on here in Davos, every business, the strategy of every business is going to have technology at the core, right? We've gone through this phase where every customer, every company, every country knows that technology has to enable your strategy. And now I think what many of our colleagues here have proven is that technology will fundamentally define differentiated business models and differentiated business strategies of the future. And so whether I'm looking at my friend Dr. Dinner on the front row here with Bosch that we've been engaged with who's looking at how technology enables him to change the business model of how he engages with the consumer around the technology that he sells into the home. And I think those are the kinds of things that we're going to continue to see. And to the extent that the underlying technology can be modified or adapted based on the data flowing out of different objects, we think that has value and creates greater insights for our customers. And do you see that as the kind of platform that would be unowned like the internet itself? Objects might talk to other objects. Developers can write some pipe between a tea kettle and a shovel out front. So when you're done shoveling, the kettle turns on. Or is it the kind of thing that would be, that's an idea you can have. Or is it the kind of idea that there would be, through network effects, maybe one company that synthesizes it all together in the way that maybe you have an Airbnb synthesizing between. No, I think the power of what has been created with the internet is someone owns every piece of equipment that actually connects, right? Someone has title to it eventually. But this interoperable sort of open ecosystem of technology has created a bit of a democratization of capabilities around the world. You layer onto it broadband and the capabilities. And I think you do have the opportunity, I personally am an optimist as well. And I believe that all of this technology and everything that we do, I think we're on the fundamental front edge of really being able to solve some of the world's largest problems because of the technology innovation that we've seen, both with access as well as the notion of platforms and sensors and all the things that are coming. So I think it'll continue to, we're gonna go from 18 billion connected devices to 50 billion in 2020 and perhaps 500 billion in 2030. So that's a massive network effect. Many more devices than people. Yes. Pierre Nantair from Accenture, which I believe has no headquarters. Accenture is in fact a totally distributed organization. Totally distributed, virtual and digital. Do you know where you're going after the conference is over or is it sort of wherever the cheapest flight is? Maybe you might talk to my hologram. He's like, you know, Airbnb. So touch me, touch me. That's right, Airbnb. By not be me. Yeah, yeah. So you've been listening to this conversation and interesting threads here starting to develop around competition or whether there's a need for competition. Where the regulatory thing kicks in. Susan's story of Google Video realizing time to get YouTube. What do you see either in the analog world happening not just with tech companies and what's your sense about the way in which companies relate to one another if they're trying to do something interoperable? Does that mean the competitors are not competing? What's your sense of this? Yeah, I mean, we're living in a very interesting world where we are indeed at Accenture when we're serving our clients in their digital transformation of their analog business, if you will, of their current business on how you emulate this platform concept. Yes. How you leverage the technology of the different technology providers, including our friend from Cisco to create a platform economy more around the industry. So here we talked a lot around platforms that could be used by you, me, consumers to platforms which are more in the B2B environment. And this week we are disclosing our 2016 technology vision and it's gonna be on the platform economy. And interestingly, just to give you some data and some facts, 80% of the executive we surveyed in that research mentioned that indeed platform gonna be key in their growth strategy moving forward. At the point number one, 75% confirmed that indeed the industry boundaries gonna be blurred. And to your point, they will have to cooperate inside the industry and even outside the industry on the cross-industries standpoint. And only 30, but already 30% are already building platforms. And it has been confirmed with an IDC research that is mentioning that in 16, probably 100 industry-based platform will come live. So maybe your next question might be tell us more about these industry platforms. Yes. It might be, but hold that up for a moment. But let me share with you the three because I guess it's interesting to see and to leverage what's going on. All right, quickly, yes. Quickly. I mean, the first one, the three clearly are platforms within a company. Yes. Platform within an industry. Yes. And platform we're gonna create cross-industries. So you see now a very clear typology of these different platforms clearly enabled by the internet of things and digital technologies. We're gonna change dramatically the way the business is operating. Well, let me throw out a question then based on exactly that taxonomy you put out, which is let's take an example of something probably common to almost any platform that's being built, especially one that's trying to bring strangers together in different ways. And that is reputation. Airbnb I gather has reputations that develop. That's part of the services Airbnb is offering. YouTube has some sense of rating and flagging. And I imagine, Chuck, you've got those developers, some of them might be up to no good. I don't know the extent to which there is reputation developing among those developers. But that could either be within each platform. I may have a terrible Airbnb reputation, but on YouTube I'm gold. Or do you see the idea of something emerging that would be a reputation you garner as a human and you can bring that to any platform for better or worse? Is this a great vision or a terrible one? Or I don't know. Susan, yes. Well, I'm not sure it's such a great idea. You're the Mark Cuban in this scenario. Yes, I'm the Mark Cuban, exactly. Well, I think one of the biggest things that we have for our creators is the number of subscribers that they have. And so, or the number of views that they've had. So creators will say, I have 10 million subscribers or I have a video that was seen 100 million times, right? And so that's like a specific measurement of how successful was their work in terms of being an entertainer. And I don't think that's really relevant if they would be good at hosting people in their house. Like they might be, but they might not be. And so correlating those two metrics I think is not gonna be that useful. The reputation you're thinking about is very specific, but of course in the taxonomy Pierre was talking about, there was also cross within an industry. So if there's another competing video platform, I don't know, Vimeo, you name it, could you imagine it being full faith and credit that my YouTube views I can bring over to Vimeo and garner an audience more quickly or vice versa, or does that just seem more trouble in its work? I do not sense excitement here. Yeah. I think it would be complicated to implement. And but I'm not saying like there aren't some, I think some places it's very useful, for example, is like credit. We use that right now for credit cards, right? Like every single place that you go, you have a credit score and you can use that because that's universal. It's universal that if I paid in one place, like I'm probably gonna pay in another. And so I think- If you have a lot of YouTube views, you're probably a deadbeat. Sorry, obviously. Well, you might be a good, well, yeah. Well, so if you're a YouTuber and you're great, you're right. Like maybe you would be useful on other platforms too, but different people have different mediums, right? Like people who are classical violinists are not necessarily great rock violinists. So I think we have to think about what are the universal applications and what are the things that we can take across platform, as opposed to saying, oh no, we're gonna have this one-sides fits all and it's gonna judge you all the time. And your reputation is just one thing and it all relates in this one area. I think people would find that scary and also as a platform, not that useful. Like it's not really that useful to me, whether or not they own a lighthouse or a tree house or a regular house. Yes, I've just been thinking about the Uber driver that wants to move to Lyft. Could you take your reputation with you or sign the ticket and you've got a view on this? Yeah, I mean, I think this is an attempting idea, but I think it's harder than it sounds. Because first, getting the business model to make sense around that, I think is a real challenge. How to normalize reputation in a shareable way, I think is a real challenge. And then data privacy issues. On one hand, the idea behind sharing reputation is to make it seamless. On the other hand, people don't like their data seamlessly being shared. So I think that's also a real thing to do. So your first worry is how hard it would be to make it work and your second worry is what if it works? Which makes it sound like it's not a great idea either way. I just think it gets really tricky. Pierre, no, I guess it's maybe a profound idea, but probably a bit complicated for the reason we discussed. And what we see more is people building a platform or participating to a platform because you can own indeed, I mean, the values, the content, something which is, of course, extremely important in the platform economy is the cybersecurity and the security boundaries. You're going to put it inside. So starting to have platform cooperating between each other would be probably technically a reasonably complex, but probably would create enormous complexities in terms of how you ensure the integrity of the information, the data protection, the data integrity, the data privacy that's going to be set in each of the platforms. So what we see more, for instance, in lab science is today we build a platform around predictive analytics where you can access to anonymized patient data. We're doing that in the US with 50 million patients gathering 250 billion data, anonymized where the labs and the pharma players can access to this anonymized information that's very important and create their own algorithm, their own algorithm, but they are sharing this anonymized data so they can move more rapidly to the information and then they can keep their algorithm on their own. This is more the kind of services we see. And we are custodian of the security of the way the platform going to work, of the architecture and of all the integrity of the system. If you're starting to share that with another platform, then it's going to be extraordinarily complicated. A diffusion of responsibility. Because when the word being mentioned, you need at the end of the day to be accountable for the outcome you're delivering from the platform. And someone will have to be accountable if it's an actionable platform. It's going to be us ensuring the end-to-end integrity of the process. Yes. I'd like to open it up to comments, questions, thoughts from our audience. Here you go. To your left. To my left, right here. Please feel free to tell us who you are. I'm from work for Norwegian bank, small bank. Question for Airbnb. When will you start to sell homes? When will you start to sell homes? Right, so the question is, when will we start to sell homes? I don't know the answer to that. But I don't think soon because I don't think it plays to our strength. I mean, the power of the Airbnb platform is that we're allowing so many people to participate that we don't have to actually go buy homes poor concrete. And so I think as we think about growth, it's going to be about leveraging that advantage, that uniqueness in our business model, as opposed to going in a more traditional direction of real estate acquisition. Which is a neat, real question about if you're a platform, what's the boundary of your platform? When do you say, hey, let's just keep doing what we're doing versus get into other things? And Susan, that might be a good question to ask you, as Google goes to Alphabet, is there anything Google won't do? There's at least 26 things, I guess, in the English alphabet. Yeah, I mean, I think we're just being a platform provider. I think the power of being a platform provider is that we can make all the people who develop on top of us more efficient. They don't need to worry about getting an audience. They don't need to develop about video streaming or developing a player or finding their next new audience or the rating system, right? They don't need to worry about any of that. And so just enabling the platform to be better is a huge task in and of itself. And so we really see ourselves as how do we enable our creators to be more successful? They want fame and fortune. Like how do we generate more revenue for them, get them more views, and better user experience. So fascinating, here's one more way of maybe asking the question. If we were to go to YouTube five years from now, how different would it look? I mean, I hope it looks a lot better than it currently is. There's some current ways that we're evolving the model. So for example, we introduced a subscription service in the United States that we're planning on rolling out to the rest of the world over the course of this year. And so that's an example where we're thinking about a new model where users can access YouTube but have it be ads-free and have other services like background and offline. But it's still within the fundamentals of like, this is a platform. User-generated videos. You're generating better content. And I think as we get better and better at what we do, and our monetization gets better, the line, what I see that's really interesting is the line between user-generated and professional has completely blurred. So we don't say anymore, oh, we're just user-generated content. We just talk about how much does it cost to produce that content? And so some content might be $40,000 a minute and some content might be $100 a minute or $5 a minute. That's how we think about it. And there's a spectrum. But you see the traditional people creating stuff that looks user-generated and people who are maybe started in their bedroom. To create stuff that looks user-generated is extremely expensive. Well, maybe not. But you have people who have built media empires out of their bedroom. And are they now professionals? You talk to them and they have their own clothing line. They have their own makeup line. And these people are clearly professionals at this point. But you too, but pretty much stay in the video business is what I hear you saying. It wouldn't be let's facilitate your clothing line kind of thing as a way of growing the business. No, it's big enough on its own. Yeah, Jonathan, I think that there is a tendency of platforms in general to sort of expand into industries that are sort of neighboring. If you think about Google and Facebook a few years ago, you wouldn't have thought of them as competitors or as direct competitors, but slowly the boundaries between what they do start to blur because they create these assets. Reputation is one of them. But simply having access to a captive consumer base is another. And so it makes logical sense for them to say, well, what's the adjacent industry that we might wanna go into? So in Airbnb's case, selling homes may not be the right one. But there may be other parts of the hospitality, sort of like provision space, which Airbnb will be naturally positioned to sort of envelope into, and maybe commercial space for a pop-up or something. It doesn't have to be a dwelling or it could just be. And I mean, I don't wanna spell out your strategy for you here, but. Please, this is why we're here. It could just be other slices of the experience that the customer is seeking of which Airbnb is a part today but involves travel, which involves, or it could be laterally towards. I hear you saying something like a florist might sign up through Airbnb to have fresh flowers waiting at the Airbnb place, or is that what you're? Well, there's certainly. Not a free idea for you, Nathan. But I'm thinking about sort of broadly in the sort of like, I'm going to a different place. Right now I use Airbnb to find accommodation, but there are other things that I spend money on, like as part of that travel, and there may be some of those that Airbnb can expand into, like sort of getting transportation, getting a flight there. Are you thinking Airbnb plus Uber? Is this what I'm hearing? I don't know if I like that one as much. Hey, Jonathan, one thought on this. I think that having acquired 185 companies over the years, you have to be thoughtful, I think, to your point, Nathan, about what's your core capability. But I do believe at the pace that the industry's moving and at the pace that our customer's expectations are changing, I do believe that there will be more strategic partnerships than we have today. So in some of those cases, Nathan and the team may figure out that that's not something that we want to get into, but it's close enough that we create more value and more stickiness for our customer by building a partnership that allows the floors to deliver the flowers or whatever it might be. And I think that's something that we've been focused on. We announced a big relationship with Apple that we don't want to do what they do, but we think that by doing things together, we create greater value for our customers with us together. Yes, it seems very much what Pierre was saying. Yeah, on this, of course, not the platform, we could see a form of specialization with some form of getting to more the adjacent business. But the platform that would be universal and do everything, I think going to be challenged because the set of requirements, and I like the question from the banking sector, because the banking sector is probably one which is the most at risk regarding the digitalization by nature and which is threatened by all of this. And now we're more talking about the blockchain kind of technology underneath because you need to run massive number of transactions with a massive level of security behind where you need to authorize the transaction and so forth, which I guess is quite different from probably a YouTube. So if there's an emerging blockchain platform which oddly enough is completely, it seems, attempted to be, it only works when it is unowned. No one entity has accountability for it, which is hard to imagine. But if that's emerging, I'm just curious, what is your advice to the bank? Is it you should be getting all into this or hold firm and when Bitcoin... I mean, you should definitely look at it and I think probably all the banks, you're going to talk too well-claimed, they are looking at it. I'm not sure they're all looking at it seriously, but 100% who said, yes, I'm looking at blockchain because it's probably a technology that could disintermit me totally. It's a membership. So the blockchain technology worked with members. So indeed, you don't have a owner, but it's a kind of membership. But open membership, anybody can join. Open trusted. It's an open membership, but then you have a set of rules between the members. Between the members. But indeed, it could enable real-time transaction with an amazing amount of data, which is going to be fully securitized, and if I would be a clearing house kind of activity or an exchange, I would be scared. Sort of like the way SWIFT is a cooperative, right? I mean, that is owned by the member banks. That may be the model that emerges for the use of blockchain by financials. But you could see that. The way that there have been efforts to see, could there be trustees of the internet or of the web? So the point is going to be whether to trust the members and then whether the technology going to be providing the right security around the sector. But we're more moving to one ownership, to a membership, which is probably what we're calling the community or the network effect. Well, we give the platform answer to his question, which is rather than us suddenly buying a bunch of properties, as a platform, what we could do is partner to provide some kind of credit score about if this person would want to be an Airbnb host, here's the kind of income they could expect, and would you be willing to underwrite a mortgage for that person as a result and take that into account? That would be the platform answer. What do you say? Are we going to move a car off this floor today? Yeah. It requires a discussion, I understand, but got it, question over here. Yeah, so Winston Damarillo, I'm a telecom operator out of the Philippines, and digital economy requires digital transactions. And in an emerging market, a lot of people are unbanked and very cash dependent. So what do you think's going to happen and how do we enable the rest of the world to take advantage of sharing economy and the services offered in the digital platforms? Who wants to take that? Well, I'll start. I think you're seeing in many parts of the world today. And one of the things that we see in emerging countries are that a lot of the historical technologies that have enabled network build out and capabilities are being bypassed and going straight into mobile capabilities. You're seeing it in Africa quite significantly. So I think you will, I think you're just going to see a transition straight into mobile banking and cashless payments that will enable these industries. And we see telecom operators around the world who are actually beginning to look at delivering those services. It's just another service on top of their connectivity. So that's, we see that happening early now. Yeah, I mean, exactly the same thing. It's, I mean, first we talked about inequality. I mean, you mentioned that at the very beginning. I mean, the first inequality is a digital divide. It's the number of people not having access and not being able to participate to this internet revolution. I mean, second, indeed, we are moving to models in the emerging markets which are 100% mobile driven. So it's a massive leap frog to the mobility-based model. And it's interesting to see that banking transaction are now 100% delivered on the payment, on the basic payment, mobily, much more in Africa and the other market than it's the case in Western Europe. And it's interesting to see indeed, and I'm referring to a recent transaction, maybe you've seen in France where Orange, the French operator, been buying a bank. Yes. I mean, it is the first time where Telco is buying a bank. Talk about an adjacent industry. To provide a bank directly through the Telco. And when you think about this, all of this enabled by mobility, you have some breakthrough delivery models. In many ways, I think that blockchain-based payment systems, I mean, Bitcoin is one of them and they're having problems now, but it doesn't sort of disprove the idea that blockchain-based payment can actually be successful. I think that's particularly important for countries in which traditional sort of banking is not as widespread and the level of faith in traditional institutions is less because to me, the blockchain represents sort of the next phase of crowd-based capitalism where the crowd is not the source or the provider, the crowd are the market makers collectively. And I expound on this in a book that I have coming out in May, and I had to say that. But there's also, there's another part to this which I think is really important, which is that we can't expect the digital technology or the access to the digital technology itself to be the entire solution. People have to know how to run a business online. They have to know how to access the business and I think we need real-world intermediaries in emerging markets where people may not be as comfortable, say, as they are in the United States, simply going and clicking and booking an Airbnb or setting up a store on Etsy. I mean, having that layer in between that takes the people who don't have, say, sort of basic business training and sort of like, you know, sort of on boards them online rather than simply saying you have a mobile phone, now you're on your own. I think will be a really important part of this growth being inclusive. Yes. We've really covered a whole spectrum of platforms in a brief period of time, ranging from the completely unowned and difficult to predict and have accountability for like the internet, like the web, and like, as it is now, the blockchain and some of the technologies and currencies built upon it, coming up through things like Swift that are collaboratives but have a form of governance that's within an industry or group of players that are otherwise competitors, then moving to government-regulated platforms like a medallion system for cabs or something. But the one piece, again, represented very well here is just a really successful company that builds a business that snowballs and that offers great opportunities, but there's still going to be questions involving ethics, involving inclusion. I'm sure there are people that get really upset when their video is downvoted and think it needs to go back or people on Airbnb who got, they'll tell you 18 ways in which they were unfairly categorized as a host or a guest. Do you think these things, and I'm asking, I guess Susan and Nathan to bring us in for a landing here as the operators, are these things digestible within the company or ultimately are some of these best done through some interoperable model or if it's governance of a kind, it ought to be government governance? I'm curious how much the companies can take on here? I mean, I think you're right, these are really hard issues and we spend time thinking about it and we debate these issues internally. So I don't want to, I 100% agree and I don't want to trivialize it in any way because these are serious and important and hard issues. On the other hand, these decisions need to be made quickly, efficiently. Every hour you delay is another 400 hours of video. Is another, well, and also once a video is up, you have to make it like, I mean, I'll just say like when we had the first ISIS beheading of an American, it came up and within a minute we needed to decide, are we gonna leave it up or are you gonna pull it down? And so it's not like you can turn to some third party group at this point and be like, well, what do you think? No, you have to make that decision at that point and the thing is we're a brand, we have users and so we're incented to do the right thing for our users, our publishers and our users and if we don't, they tell us and they'll say, well, I don't want to be in a place where this kind of video is shown and therefore I'm gonna go to a different platform or oh my gosh, my child saw this kind of video and so now, you know, that's a problem. So we're gonna get that feedback and we're really gonna try to make the right balance for us based on the constituents that we have. Which is a very different view, not a bad one, there's a distinct view from a rights-based view that says unless it's illegal, someone should in a public park have the right to say something even if it makes the park less desirable and it's interesting to see it, of course, naturally you'd want to have the model you describe. Nathan, did you want to? I think the key point I would like to make is that this has to be an iterative process. Yes. Just the development of these platforms have been an iterative process. Look at how much the internet has evolved over 30 years and gave birth to all these new platforms, new opportunities and new issues that have needed to be confronted. We're gonna see that even in YouTube, in Airbnb. And so new issues will come up and it'll take time to find the solutions for them. I like to say that every week something happens that I never could have expected. And you have to just solve them as they come. Sometimes it's not clear what the answer is. I think that's the issue that's difficult when talking to regulators, which is wanting all the answers up front and yet you're doing something new and you're not even sure what the issues are going to be. But what we've seen, I think time and again, is that over time, iteratively, a lot of these issues do get addressed because the reputation of the company is something that needs to be maintained. Yes. And so it's in the best interest of both the public and the private to rise to these challenges. Yes. But it does take time to figure out. Exactly, Susan's point then echoed. Now I just say as these decisions when they are made by governments often they are debated. It's under lights and cameras and such. I guess sort of a plea of sorts. It would be fascinating for each of you and one of you does have a book coming out. The memoir, the iterative memoir, which has the 10 tough choices you would never believe we had to make before lunch. My guess is a lot of people would be really interested to see the way you confront these really difficult problems. I think one really important point to point out is we are global. And so when you talk about regulation, you usually talk about it in the context of a specific country. So if we operate in every single country of the world, you have to realize that there are different sensibilities in those different countries. And so one regulatory body also isn't going to meet the demands of every country in the world. If I gather YouTube was now back in Pakistan because for Pakistani citizens there may be stuff they won't see that others would. Yeah, so we just re-entered Pakistan, which was, it took work for us to get to that stage. We would love to see the chapter of that memoir. Unfortunately, we do not have time. I only want to end by pointing out the forum has a digital economies group that's been thinking about this and there's some materials over there if you want to grab them. And we owe our panel a huge thanks for taking this really big topic and getting some movement on it. Thank you.