I took Tanny's collar off her so that we don't have the same problem.
That'll save us some time in post.
Welcome to Season seven, Episode eight, the season finale of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them.
I'm Ben Gilbert and I'm the co founder of Pioneer Square Labs, a startup studio and venture capital firm in Seattle.
And I'm David Rosenthal and I am an angel investor and startup advisor based in San Francisco.
And we are your hosts.
Today we cover the hottest and most anticipated company to IPO in 2020.
And oddly, in a year marred by the global pandemic and just this month an all time high number of stay at home orders.
This hot IPO is a travel company.
Airbnb, originally known as Air Bed and Breakfast Inc.
Is going public today, raising over $3.5 billion and initially valued at over $47 billion.
The company is insanely impressive.
They operate in 220 countries and 100,000 cities.
Last year there were $38 billion of bookings made on the platform.
There are over 50 million active guests who book nights to stay at over million listings.
And unlike other companies that we've covered recently, well, yesterday, like DoorDash, this is truly a global company with 86% of hosts outside of the United States.
And yet, while this company has changed the world and how a meaningful fraction of the human race travels, their growth has been slowing more severely than any of the other unicorn IPOs we've covered.
And that's before even looking at the effects of the global pandemic.
Now, of course, David and I did our usual deep homework on the company, but this is one where we've been doing our research for years.
Not just as guests on the platform since 2010, but actually as hosts too, starting in 2015 for David and 2017 for me.