Leadership History

Airbnb: CEO History

6 leaders · 2008 to present

Company Overview

Airbnb combines scale, leadership, and a clear operating model. The most useful reader path is revenue first, then business model, founders, CEO, competitors, and risk.

6

Ellie Mertz

Chief Financial Officer

2024 – Present

2 years (current)

Key Decisions & Impact

Mertz joined Airbnb after seven years at Netflix in finance roles including vice president of finance, then spent 12 years at Airbnb itself across vice president of finance and global FP&A leadership roles before being promoted to CFO effective March 1, 2024, succeeding Dave Stephenson. She holds a bachelor's degree in science, technology, and society and a master's degree in history, both from Stanford University, an M.I.A. from Columbia University, and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Her defining focus as CFO has been sustaining Airbnb's post-IPO profitability and capital-return program, including its share buybacks, while the company diversifies into Experiences and Services; her financial credibility outside Airbnb was underscored when Netflix appointed her to its board of directors in June 2025, and she also sits on the boards of DoorDash and Faire.

5

Catherine Powell

Global Head of Hosting

2020 – 2024

4 years

Key Decisions & Impact

Catherine Powell, formerly a senior executive at The Walt Disney Company, became critical to Airbnb's post-COVID operating model because host trust had been severely damaged by the unilateral cancellation refunds of early 2020. Her leadership focused on rebuilding the host relationship, improving host education and tools, supporting quality standards, and making hosting feel more reliable as an income source. The measurable outcome was the stabilization and growth of the host side during the recovery period, with active hosts growing from roughly 4 million to 5.5 million between 2020 and 2025. Powell departed Airbnb on June 30, 2024, as part of the same leadership reshuffle that made Dave Stephenson chief business officer and Ellie Mertz CFO; Airbnb did not name a successor to the standalone Global Head of Hosting role, instead folding host-facing responsibilities into its broader operating structure.

4

Dave Stephenson

Chief Business Officer and Head of Employee Experience

2019 – Present

7 years (current)

Key Decisions & Impact

Dave Stephenson joined Airbnb as CFO in 2019 after 17 years at Amazon, bringing operational finance discipline to a company preparing for public markets. His tenure has encompassed the emergency financial decisions of COVID-19, the December 2020 IPO, and the subsequent transition to sustained profitability. Stephenson helped architect the cost discipline that transformed Airbnb from a cash-burning private company into a public business generating $2.5B in net income and strong free cash flow. He oversees capital allocation including the share buyback program, manages investor relations, and maintains the financial framework that allows Airbnb to invest in growth while delivering consistent margins. In December 2023, as Airbnb described itself as reaching an 'inflection point' from growth to durable profitability, Stephenson moved from CFO into the newly created Chief Business Officer and Head of Employee Experience role, handing the CFO title to 11-year Airbnb finance veteran Ellie Mertz effective March 1, 2024, while remaining responsible for Airbnb's broader business growth and human-resources function. He later joined SiriusXM's board of directors in September 2025.

3

Brian Chesky

CEO

2008 – Present

18 years (current)

Key Decisions & Impact

Brian Chesky has led Airbnb from its 2008 founding through the IPO era and into its mature public-company phase. His early decisions centered on trust, design, professional photography, and host supply growth rather than competing with hotels on standardization. During COVID-19, he made the company's most consequential operating decision: cutting roughly 1,900 employees (25% of the workforce), shutting down non-essential projects in transportation and media, and refocusing on core stays, domestic travel, longer bookings, and profitability. That reset helped Airbnb recover from $3.4B of 2020 revenue to $12.2B in FY2025. His current era is defined by AI-assisted trip planning, the Services category launch, rebuilt Experiences, quality controls through Guest Favorites and listing removal, and the ongoing challenge of growing while satisfying regulators in cities that restrict short-term rentals. Chesky, a Rhode Island School of Design graduate, co-founded the company with fellow RISD graduate Joe Gebbia in October 2007 after the pair rented out air mattresses in their San Francisco apartment to attendees of a sold-out design conference, charging $80 a night and including a continental breakfast of Pop-Tarts, an idea that generated nearly $1,000 in its first week and became Air Bed and Breakfast.

2

Nathan Blecharczyk

Chief Strategy Officer

2008 – 2024

16 years

Key Decisions & Impact

Nathan Blecharczyk led the technical and strategic systems that allowed Airbnb to scale from a small lodging experiment to a global marketplace processing $91.3B in gross booking value annually. His early work on platform architecture, payments, search, and booking reliability made scale possible. As Chief Strategy Officer, he focused on international expansion, data-driven marketplace tools, pricing intelligence, and regulatory adaptation. He was the primary executive behind Airbnb's China strategy — a major growth attempt that ultimately ended with the 2022 domestic listings exit after failing to overcome Trip.com's local dominance and regulatory complexity. Blecharczyk, a Harvard-trained computer scientist, joined Chesky and Gebbia as the third co-founder in early 2008 and built the technical backbone -- the website, payments processing, and search infrastructure -- that turned their air-mattress experiment into Airbedandbreakfast.com when it launched publicly in August 2008.

1

Joe Gebbia

Chief Product Officer

2008 – 2022

14 years

Key Decisions & Impact

Joe Gebbia shaped Airbnb's product and design culture from the 2008 founding until he stepped back from full-time operations in 2022. His key decisions centered on making private homes feel trustworthy through professional photography, host presentation, the review system, and emotionally resonant brand language. Gebbia helped establish the design-first culture that separated Airbnb from listing directories and hotel search engines. He championed the launch of Airbnb Experiences in 2016, extending the brand from lodging into hosted activities. His lasting impact is less a single metric than a durable consumer behavior: guests learned to evaluate private spaces through photos, profiles, and reviews rather than relying on hotel brand standards alone. Gebbia, who met Chesky as a fellow industrial-design student at the Rhode Island School of Design, supplied the original air mattresses that gave the company its name and later stepped away from full-time product duties in 2022 to focus on Airbnb.org, the nonprofit he founded to house refugees and disaster-relief workers, while remaining on Airbnb's board.

Challenges & Strategic Context

The biggest risks are local rental regulation, housing-policy backlash, quality inconsistency, host economics, travel cycles, hotel competition, and platform trust failures.

Airbnb CEO and Leadership FAQ

Who is the current chief executive officer of Airbnb, Inc.?

Brian Chesky currently leads Airbnb, Inc., overseeing strategic vision, balance sheet health, and organizational execution in travel marketplace, short-term rentals, hospitality technology, and experiences.

What is the CEO's primary strategic agenda for 2026?

Under executive direction, Airbnb, Inc. is prioritizing workflow automation alongside disciplined capital allocation to maximize shareholder value.

How has executive leadership guided Airbnb, Inc. through past market transitions?

Leadership at Airbnb, Inc. has historically navigated industry cycles by restructuring operational priorities and expanding competitive moats.