Ted Audio Collective Hi everyone.
You're listening to After Hours.
I'm Youngmi and I'm here with Felix and Meher.
Hey guys. Hey Youngmi.
Hey Felix. Hey Meher.
I'm so happy to be back in Boston.
I think you guys are too, right?
I mean, I'm just, I'm so tired of living in airplanes.
Yeah. It's fun for a little while.
I need more survival tips for traveling well.
You guys have any tips?
Well, you know, recently I've kind of caved and on these longer trips, I've kind of just given into comfort.
And so my hack is going to the pajamas, which is there's no shame.
No. Oh, no. There's no shame in this.
There's no shame in this.
Now you're wearing pajamas.
You're wearing, you put the pajamas on, like you go do the full change into the pajamas?
I've done it now several times.
It's a recent innovation and it's paying off and there's no shame in it.
Really? It's a perfectly fine thing to do and the comfort is big, that you feel better afterwards.
So that's my hack, which is give up on your fashion sensibilities and put on your.
Yeah. Okay. So you trade comfort for dignity.
I get it. You guys brought in topics to talk about tonight, right?
We did, yes. So I would love to talk about Airbnb.
I had a feeling that might be one because last time when we did the IPO podcast, you mentioned it so briefly.
Yes. Fantastic. How about Yuma here?
So I characteristically have something very old economy, which is in contrast to Felix, which is Kraft Heinz has had a really massive fall from grace in the last month or so.
Tremendous. I want to know what you guys think is going on in this story.
That'll be a good one.
Okay. Okay. Okay, Felix, Airbnb.
Full disclosure right from the outside.
This is one of the IPOs that I'm actually excited about for a couple of reasons.
Basically like every company on the planet, Airbnb also claims to be a tech company, but here I think the story is actually consistent with some of the recent success of tech companies.
So Airbnb has been profitable for about two years.
They're growing very quickly.
The company predicts that at the end of the first quarter this year, they will have booked about 500 billion guests.
So it's astonishing growth.
And then on top of that you have the classic network effects that often characterize the most successful tech companies.
The more apartments, the more rentals, the more listings you have, the more useful the site becomes.
And that's a virtuous cycle that tends to strengthen itself.
So I can't wait for them to go public and I can't wait to hear what you think about the company.
Well, so I'm a little ambivalent about this company.
I confess, which is for all the reasons you said, Felix, it's attractive.
There are these amazing network economics, it's disrupting an interesting industry, and it's got this great origin story, which is like too good to be true.
And I guess ultimately I am worried that it's all a little bit too good to be true.
So I guess my concern with Airbnb is recently it feels like there's a whole bunch of these, for lack of a better term, kind of super hosts coming up, especially recently Felix, during all this growth, there are these massive super hosts.
So what's a super host?
A super host is somebody who's doing this on a commercial scale and they have entire, perhaps buildings with apartments.
And there is no actually person living there traditionally, it's just basically running a hotel, but circumventing the regulations.
So I kind of think this is different than Uber, in the sense that people raise these concerns about Uber, basically running a foul of the law, because that's what these super hosts are doing in many cases, they're running a foul of the law.
To me, I was never that sympathetic to the argument in Uber because I felt like the regulations were really anti -competitive.
These taxi medallions were just basically benefiting the people who owned the medallions and we were getting terrible service.
And that's where Uber really solved a problem.
Here I'm a little bit more concerned that the negative effects of these super hosts may actually be larger than they are in the case of Uber.
And I confess I find myself being somewhat sympathetic to the underlying regulations, like hotels should be in a certain part of town.
I guess in this case, I'm really ambivalent because I think the level of activity that is not consistent with the law is large.
And unlike in Uber, where I could get myself to feel maybe okay about it, I can't get myself there here.
And I'm worried that the model is predicated on super hosts who are circumventing laws, and it's not really consistent with that charming ideal that they liked to propagate.
So that worries me.
What do you say, young me?
You know, Mehear, I'm totally on your side on this one.
Really, you abandoned me?
Yes, I am so sorry for you, Alex.
And it pains me to say it because I love companies like Airbnb.
I love the promise of Airbnb, and I love the way they entered the market.
If you were to take a snapshot of Airbnb in its early days, you would have seen a company that was really consistent with the promises they articulated.
And so you would see individual homeowners generating extra income by renting out an extra room.
And it gave tourists and visitors to a city access to the kinds of neighborhoods and the kinds of tourist experience that was much more authentic, I think, and closer to the true character of a particular city.
And all of that is just so fantastic.
But if you were to take a snapshot of them today, my sense when I visit that site is that the number of properties now that are being hosted by professional investors that have multiple properties, that percentage has just grown and grown.
And then you hear cities now that used to welcome Airbnb now having a much more contentious relationship.
So in the U .S., cities like Nashville, New Orleans, New York City, and then you go, you know, I just came back from Europe and I was in Amsterdam where they are so upset at what Airbnb has done to that city, Venice.
And so the question I have is, do they understand what it means to be a responsible corporate citizen?
And I think when you're small, a small company, the obligations are really very different.
And the reason why I'm actually more generous when a startup comes in, and, you know, might not abide by the letter of the law, the reason I'm more generous in that case is because we actually want innovation to happen in our cities.
We want experimentation.
And we don't want things to be so rigid that some new player can't come in and begin to test our entrenched systems.
And we also want to learn what the externalities are, both positive and negative.
So I don't, I actually am very tolerant of small companies coming in and doing different things around the edges of regulation.
Once you start to get big, though, I think the obligations really change.
I completely agree that this issue exists, but I also think the consequences that you draw are completely the wrong ones.
So let me start by just talking a little bit about how big the problem really is.
From the big lawsuit in New York City, I think we have a sense of sort of a worst case scenario.
So in New York City, there are 50 ,000 Airbnb listings, and the lawsuit that was brought against Airbnb alleges that a third of the listings are commercial in nature.
So that means there are still 30, 35 ,000 listings that are not the kind of illegal hotel that I think Mihir described correctly earlier on.
For each of the issues that you have identified, there are cities that actually have introduced sometimes legislation, sometimes just regulation that address all of these issues.
For instance, in New York State, actually, there is a law that would force Airbnb to collect hotel taxes, to sort of create a more level playing field and make sure that the city doesn't forego the revenue.
Barcelona just forced Airbnb to identify the parties that rent their apartments so that you could more easily check whether they're registered in the right way.
And then there's a whole host of cities that actually have become more generous over time.
San Francisco has now a regime where you're allowed to rent out your apartment up to 90 days a year because they recognize the big benefits that Airbnb will bring to the city.
But in these larger markets, we're talking 20 to 40 % of value of listings is coming from super hosts.
And so that's a pretty big number, and it's been growing very, very quickly.
But if you want to identify the parties who rent out, that issue goes away.
Well, yeah, and so do a lot of the economics then.
Why would that be? Well, what we're talking about is the future of Airbnb.
And so if you think 40 % of volume is effectively illegal supply, and you're talking about the optimism about Airbnb, well, you should adjust your expectations and you should look at the past couple years of growth and question it.
I guess the more important point though is I'm concerned about the super hosts and in particular, if they end up having these effects in kind of gentrifying neighborhoods where they're pushing up rental costs and house prices, then it's a little problematic.
And then the related concern is that there's just a lot of these super hosts which are really then contradicting the spirit and maybe the letter of a lot of laws.
Here's maybe my biggest concern.
Typically, when we see one of these companies grow very quickly, and when we see externalities, we start thinking about ways to regulating these businesses and that's totally okay.
If we end up regulating these businesses so that it undermines the entire benefit that they bring, that's where I have a concern.
And I think we're in the process of doing something very similar to Airbnb by placing a million restrictions and we're completely losing side of all the benefits that the company produces.
So Felix, this is where I would somewhat disagree.
I actually think cities have a very mixed relationship with Airbnb.
I think that they on the one hand recognize the enormous benefits that Airbnb can bring to a city.
I really do, but I also think they're struggling with some of these problems.
And if you look at some of the regulations that these cities have put in, I have found them to be surprisingly thoughtful.
In other words, a lot of these cities, what they're doing is they're trying to figure out how do we eliminate the bad behavior at the margins?
So non -owner occupied properties, for example.
How do you put curves on that?
If you have multiple properties that you're listing, how do we put curves on that?
The number of nights, should you be able to rent out your room 365 nights a year?
Or should it just be 90 nights a year?
Geo -fencing, I mean, these things to me seem like on the one hand trying to protect the individual homeowner who's just trying to rent an extra room every once in a while, versus trying to protect against the more professional investors that are coming in and really trying to make a killing.
So that part is good.
Then the question is, how has Airbnb responded to that?
And there, I'm a little bit more mixed in how I perceive their response.
On the one hand, I see them working with city regulators to try to come up with a happy medium.
On the other hand, there's continues to be, at least anecdotally, so much abuse, and it's so easy to game the system.
I don't believe you should be allowed to call yourself a technology company, unless you're actually using technology to run your business in a clean way.
And this is where I think if they were to begin to use artificial intelligence to more intelligently root out some of the abusers of their system, then it'd be much easier for me to have a good feeling about how they're trying to mature as a company.
But right now, I feel like a lot of their attitude has been sort of caveat emptor, buyer beware.
It's up to the hosts to make sure that they're in compliance.
It's up to the guests to make sure that the properties that they're renting are legal.
And in many cases you read about guests ending up renting properties that they had no idea were illegal, only to find out afterwards that they were illegal.
But New Orleans is a great example in response to, because essentially everybody wants to be in a relatively small area in the city that is deemed most attractive.
What has New Orleans done?
It has outlawed Airbnb in certain districts.
And so it's just not available where you have big issues.
But here's the problem, they can't enforce.
So how is it that Barcelona can do this and New Orleans cannot?
So for example, if you're a city like Barcelona, maybe you have the resources to go in and begin to do the enforcement associated with thousands and thousands of listings.
If you're a city like Cambridge, you probably don't have the resources to do that.
And so therefore you're pretty much, you know, you're not gonna get any help from Airbnb.
And that's just a theory.
I don't know why there's the discrepancy across cities, the way that you describe, but that's where I struggle.
If they wanna be a good corporate citizen, I would love them to be a little bit more aggressive in making sure that those partnerships with cities are robust.
I mean, I think we can all agree that smart regulations make sense.
And I think there are lots of examples, Youngmee, exactly as you said, where they're coming up and they're doing it.
The question to me is, what does that do to their model?
And my concern, if we're talking about Airbnb generally, as a proposition, Felix is an IPO proposition.
I don't know if we know enough about how big a chunk of their business gets impacted.
You point out, well, yes, Barcelona has done it and yes, London has done it, but how much did that compromise their business?
So say we get the regulation right and we strip out all the undesirable behavior.
How large an opportunity is this really?
It's super hard to know.
But then at the same time, we also don't quite know yet, what's the price going to be at which they hope to go public?
And I think that is the question that we need to, I think follow very closely.
Is the price that they set, does that imply I have to grow my business in perhaps reckless ways or does the price at which they go public imply that I have a really great idea and it's created a lot of value and we can live in a world in which there's reasonable and thoughtful regulations in place.
And I think for one hope it's very much the latter.
They started out with this premise of individual homeowners renting out excess capacity.
So they started out from a position of we are very different from a hotel.
They just recently announced the acquisition of hotel tonight.
Yes, I saw, yes. Those are two ends of a very different spectrum.
And this is why the regulation piece I think is really salient for them in figuring this out because once you have all of these things on a single platform, it becomes a little bit more difficult to argue that you should be treated differently than the Marriott Hotel chain, for example.
But before we run out of time, because we are running out of time, I have to ask you guys, so do you use Airbnb when you travel?
So I have used the competitor of Airbnb with mixed, sometimes we got lucky and we found exactly what you hope to find.
And sometimes you show up and you find out the swimming pool was actually just digital in nature and it doesn't really exist yet.
I think it's exactly the same with Airbnb.
What are you hearing here?
Yeah, look, so I'm one of those super hosts.
I have about five buildings, I'm 11.
So that's how you feel so strongly about this.
Okay, me here, you wanted to talk about 3G or Craft Hines, or zero -based budgeting, or maybe all of the above.
Exactly, maybe all of the above.
Well, in a way that's the question, which is what has gone wrong at Craft Hines?
So, just briefly, what happened most recently was they lost about a third of their value when they announced their earnings, they announced a huge write down of some of the brands that they had bought.
And this is one of the largest food companies in the world.
And just by way of background, it features some of the most kind of maybe interesting players around today.
So it began when Warren Buffett and 3G bought Hines about six years ago.
And then about four years ago, they merged it into Craft.
So that became a very large food company.
And in fact, two years ago, they took a run at Unilever where Youngmey used it on the board.
And so now they've had this kind of incredible fall from grace and just to be clear, I think people see many different things in this fall from grace.
Some people see kind of the aftermath of PE and highly leveraged transactions, and 3G being an aggressive user of debt, and that kind of compromising the growth prospects of companies.
Some people see their kind of use of what's called zero -based budgeting as being kind of indicative of this.
And so there's a view that well, maybe this just reflects people overdoing it on zero -based budgeting.
And then there's a third view, which is no, this is actually about the food industry and about these old tired brands.
And maybe it's just about the food industry.
And then the final version, which is maybe the most dramatic is actually, this is about kind of American companies who have been cost cutting their way to profits when top lines have not been growing and things are kind of coming home to roost in some sense.
So I just kind of, I'm really curious what you make about what's happened to Kraft and Heinz.
What do you say, Myung -min?
I would never want to say that cost cutting is bad.
No, sometimes cost cutting is absolutely necessary, but radical cost cutting can be short -sighted.
It can be short -sighted if it starves your brands and in the process if you begin to starve the company of growth opportunities.
And I think you're seeing some of that unfold at Kraft Heinz right now.
So your view, your take on this is that it's really about the specific practices and the specific player.
And you don't see this as a kind of food problem.
If you were to ask me, what is the 3G playbook?
I would say number one, it's brutal and at times short -sighted cost cutting.
I'd say number two, it's a highly leveraged balance sheet.
I'd say number three, it's starving investment in brands and R &D.
Now, is big food in trouble?
Nobody can be complacent right now, which means today more than ever, if you manage big brands, you must invest thoughtfully in those brands or you need to restructure portfolios to make sure that you're jettisoning the brands that are no longer relevant and you are acquiring brands that are relevant.
So you've gotta be doing a combination of those two things, but that requires investment and care and feeding.
And so you need to be doing all of that stuff.
Yeah, Felix, what do you think?
I agree with Yang Mi's point that zero -based budgeting had some role to play, although I fear a little bit that the tool is now being seen largely as the way that 3G Capital uses it and not quite recognizing what is actually really fabulous about zero -based budgeting.
So the basic intuition is in many companies, the budgeting process starts with last year's budget.
And so zero -based budgeting, I think the basic idea was, if I ask you why is it that our travel expenses were $8 .2 million last year?
Why not zero or why not half of that?
That question actually forces you to now start thinking about, yeah, so why do we travel?
And what's the benefit of travel and how much traveling should we do in the first place?
And so on and so on and so on.
And so I think what you would see is that in companies that do this well, one result of zero -based budgeting is that you have a much deeper understanding of your cost structure.
And then I would emphasize that what you then do with these cost savings, that is entirely divorced from zero -based budgeting.
And the part, I think where I would see it exactly the way young me has seen it, that the part that was really questionable that 3G Capital used all the savings and none of it went into the investment in brands.
But I hope we will not now learn the lesson that, oh my God, zero -based budgeting was really horrible.
Let's never do that again.
Oh, I couldn't agree with Felix more.
Zero -based budgeting when combined with managerial thoughtfulness can be an extraordinarily powerful tool, particularly in these rapidly changing times.
But it still boils down to judgment and it's a mistake to think that it's a purely scientific exercise.
And I will say that when you strip costs out of a particular company, it's more cut and dry in some industries than it is in others.
So for example, if you're producing widgets, it's easy to go in there and to be able to draw a really straight line between each individual employee and how much value they add in the production of those widgets.
If you are in more creative industries, if you're in the fashion industry, the beauty industry, any industry where brand matters, where growth depends on having a sensitivity to human emotion and consumer trends, there, it's much more difficult to draw a straight line.
In other words, Slack, believe it or not, a little bit of Slack is actually an ingredient for creative inspiration in a lot of companies where brand matters.
And so even when you go in with a zero -based budgeting approach, you've got to layer on top of that a real sensitivity to where the dynamism in that industry is actually coming from.
I'm wondering a little bit about this though, because I think there's a tack on this, which I think is more specific about food, frankly.
So first let's look at mature food, right?
Let's look at Campbell's, let's look at General Mills, let's look at Kellogg's.
And they are all struggling, and they're all struggling a lot.
And you see it in the aggregate data.
So if you look at the top 25 food and beverage companies, they still today, they have roughly 50 % of global sales.
That part of the industry is growing at 3%.
If you look at the next 400 companies, they have a quarter of global sales.
They're much, much smaller, but they're growing at 43%.
The big disruption in food, I would argue, is not necessarily come up from what's happened to the economics of food, but rather the meaning of food has changed dramatically in the past 10 years.
Which means food now needs to compete along a completely different set of dimensions.
And where the big brands are vulnerable is so much of their brand meaning has been wrapped around a set of values that just simply no longer hold, no longer matter.
And so they risk irrelevance.
But there's a flip side to this too.
And the flip side is the following.
When it comes to food, it is easier than ever to build a $25 million brand, a $100 million brand.
Which means that it used to be the case that if you looked at a small brand and you thought, wow, that brand is growing at 200 % a year, you think you have a winner on your hands.
Today, that doesn't necessarily mean you have a winner on your hands, because you can blink and that brand will be gone tomorrow.
And so as a result, you get statistics like the one that Felix just described.
But here's an example.
One of the most disruptive brands in food in the last few years is a brand called Halo Top, which is an ice cream.
And if you look at the growth profile of that brand, it looks phenomenal.
And it's very easy to draw the conclusion that my God, that's the new winner and all of the magnums of the world are gonna be gone.
I would be very careful.
It'd be interesting to take a look and see where Halo Top is in five years, and then compare it to where Ben & Jerry's is in five years.
Let me ask you, can I just ask you on this, some of these brands, like Let's Be Concrete.
So Oscar Mayer, Velveeta, are these things revivable or are they just from a different era?
So here's what I would say.
There's a limited number that are reviable and no company has 100 % batting average.
But this is what I mean.
So managing big food today requires figuring out what are the brands that you think you can channel into this new century with a renewed kind of relevance.
And what are the ones that you need to jettison and what are the new brands that you need to acquire?
But that's art and science.
One question that I find so interesting to think about is whether a brand like Oscar Mayer, not so much whether it can survive or not, but whether some of the new brands that we get, whether they will ever achieve as iconic a status as Oscar Mayer had at some point in time.
And the reason is the moment food choices become, they're not regular consumption choices now.
They tell a story about who we are, how we feel, how we see the world.
And in that sense, food is now much closer say to fitness or to fashion where it's about expression of identity.
And much of in these markets, I think differentiation becomes much, much more important than it used to be.
I mean, I'm kind of a believer like you, young me, which is brands can be saved and they can be revived, but it requires a completely new way to think about that brand.
Part of my concern in these settings is insiders just are so kind of classically trapped in their old way of thinking about that brand that they're just not capable of kind of completely from the ground up reinvention.
And that requires, of course, a lot of resources.
Yeah. Okay, guys, do you have a recommendation for me?
I have a recommendation.
There is a... You just won me here?
Not two. Well, I'll squeeze them in without you knowing it.
Trust me. So there's kind of a new series coming out of, unsurprisingly, the UK called Dynasties, which is a nature show.
It's only got five episodes and they follow one particular animal, but their emphasis is on a family.
So they do, for example, penguins and they do lions, but they're following the social dynamics of families within those animal groups.
So these nature shows end up having this huge amount of drama associated with this mother who's like protecting a child.
And then there's a threat from another...
So it's reality TV for animals?
You put it perfectly.
It is reality TV with animals and the directors have done this amazing job of creating personalities with these animals.
So, and you're right.
I mean, like a reality TV aspect to it, which makes it so dramatic that it's fantastic.
So Dynasties... So which animal is like the Kardashians?
God, you know, I'll tell you.
So we've seen... The one that is amazing is the penguins.
The penguins are just totally stunning.
That's a good one. Okay, Felix.
I have a movie recommendation and it's a Chinese movie.
The title is, Ash is purest white.
And one reason why I just absolutely loved watching it.
I think it's one of the movies that gets sort of the broader Chinese environment in which people live just exactly right.
The movie doesn't play in Beijing.
It doesn't play in Shanghai.
It plays in Dutong in Jiangxi Province.
You see the kind of poverty.
You see the transactional nature of relations in China.
Obviously you cannot talk in any sort of detail about social criticism, but in one scene, for instance, you see the heroin take a boat ride down the Yangtze River and you see how high the water will be once the three gorgeous dam is built.
And you get a sense of just how many people will be displaced as a result of the dam.
Because it's China, you have to be super, super careful what you can and what you cannot say.
But it's a wonderful contribution to a better understanding of China.
In particular now, I think that China bashing has sort of become on vogue.
I think just understanding levels of poverty, understanding where some of the desperation of the Chinese come from.
I think they will be in select movie theaters in the next couple of weeks and then hopefully we'll get a wider release.
Sounds great. That sounds so good.
Mine is a Netflix show.
So have you guys seen the new Ricky Gervais show After Life on Netflix?
No, I like him a lot, but I haven't seen it yet.
I've always liked him, but I have to say, I've always found his standup to be hilarious on the one hand, but it's a little glib, a little facile.
His new show, which is called After Life is the opposite.
It's so profound really.
It's about a man who is trying to exist after his wife's death.
And it's one of those shows where the swing in emotions.
So you are, you're outraged, you're laughing, it's brutal, it's crushing, it's appalling at times, but it's also so funny.
And he makes himself so vulnerable in this show.
The topics are really heavy because it's dealing with grief and depression, but he brings a humanity to it that's really pretty remarkable.
I've only just started it, so I'll be really curious to see where it goes, but I would highly, highly recommend it.
It's called After Life, it's on Netflix, and I think it was just recently released.
So you guys should definitely check it out.
That sounds great. Absolutely.
Because he can do both, he can do really funny, but then he can also kind of do sweet too.
So if he's able to combine them, that's amazing.
It is amazing, yeah.
So, all right, so that's it for tonight.
Thanks everyone for listening, this is After Hours.
Bye bye.
