Airbnb cofounder Nate Blecharczyk at the home-sharing giant's San Francisco headquarters — Photo by JAMEL TOPPIN FOR FORBES

In the spring of 2020, Nate Blecharczyk, the cofounder and strategy boss of home-share giant Airbnb, was walking a tightrope. The covid pandemic had rocked the foundation of Airbnb, one of the world's fastest-growing and most valuable private companies. Overnight, millions of customers canceled bookings. New reservations vanished. Airbnb's revenue dropped some 80%. To keep the lights on, the company raised $2 billion in emergency funding from existing investors. Now Blecharczyk's cofounder and CEO, Brian Chesky, wanted him to turn around and give away $250 million to Airbnb's hard-hit hosts. "Brian is a bold leader who's always pushing you past your comfort zone," Blecharczyk says and laughs. "He wanted to do something super substantial for hosts and felt that $250 million was the right magnitude."

The magnitude did not sit well with Airbnb's financial team, who were wary of unforeseen problems that could arise from Chesky's version of economic stimulus. So once again, Blecharczyk, Airbnb's tech-savvy cofounder, had to turn Chesky's big idea into a workable plan.

Giving away $250 million to a potential 4 million hosts was trickier than it sounds. Airbnb needed a policy to deploy funds in a balanced way that didn't concentrate the cash to too few hosts nor spread the money so thin that the gesture was meaningless. Optics for investors and the market—Airbnb was plotting an IPO—mattered too. After all, the company was handing out more than 10% of the money it had just rushed to raise. "How do we design a program that takes care of hosts and also has the right controls, so we don't get over our skis in this time of great uncertainty?" says Blecharczyk.

Read the full article at Forbes