Workplace

Airbnb believes work-cations are here to stay. Hybrid workplaces beg to differ.

Better take your bleisure trips while you still can.

A leisurely Airbnb

Nearly 175,000 Airbnb guests stayed for three months or longer in the past year.

Photo: Airbnb

As big tech offices begin to open back up, is working from anywhere here to stay? Airbnb sure thinks so.

Financially, Airbnb had its best fourth quarter in the company’s history, raking in $1.5 billion in revenue and $55 million in net income, a record for the company. Its annual revenue for 2021 was $6 billion, up 77% year over year and up 25% from 2019, with a net loss of $352 million for the year, compared to $4.5 billion in 2020.

Airbnb has continued to reap the benefits of “the new normal” this past quarter, with many workers taking long-term trips as remote work gave more people the opportunity to work from a Hobbit-esque “earth house” in Montana or take Zoom calls from a covered wagon in Nevada. The average trip length has increased by 15% over the past two years, and rentals lasting a week or longer represent close to half of all bookings in this past quarter. Bookings of 28 nights or longer held strong as Airbnb’s fastest-growing trip category by length, accounting for 22% of gross nights, compared to 16% in the fourth quarter of 2019. Nearly 175,000 Airbnb guests stayed for three months or longer in the past year.

“Remote work has untethered people from the need to be in an office,” said Brian Chesky, CEO and co-founder of Airbnb, in the company’s Tuesday earnings call.

Airbnb is betting on the continuation of this trend by making “Live anywhere on Airbnb” one of its 2022 priorities. It aims to attract more hosts by listening to the “obstacles, myths, and misconceptions there are to becoming a Host” as a way to meet demand.

“We want to design for this new world by making it even easier for guests to live on Airbnb,” the company said in its earnings release. “In 2022, we will accelerate our pace of innovation as millions of people live in Airbnbs for weeks, months, or entire seasons at a time.”

But working from anywhere might no longer be so easy as some tech companies begin their return to the office. Microsoft announced Monday that it will reopen its Washington and Bay Area offices at the end of February, and Meta announced in January that its return to in-person work would begin at the end of March. Meanwhile, companies like Twitter and Salesforce have already embraced in-person work in recent months.

The rise of the hybrid workplace is likely to affect the future of the work-cation, said Brian Kropp, chief of HR research for consulting firm Gartner. More and more businesses are adopting one of two hybrid models of work: either requiring multiple days in the office per week or allowing employees to come into the office “when it makes the most sense” for them, he said. As many begin to require some time in the office (including Meta and Salesforce), extended stays for weeks or months are likely to drop, while “four-day weekend and five-day weekend” trips pick up.

“You probably are going to see a shifting of what these bookings look like, but still have a fair amount as people take advantage of that longer time,” Kropp told Protocol. “I think we're still going to see a lot of demand for these short- to medium-term times spent at Airbnbs, but what we're not likely to see is, like, the three-month stay.”

If your office is still remote, maybe take that month-long trip to the mountains while you still can.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

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Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

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FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

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Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

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Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

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Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

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