Analysis of Legendary Pitch Deck: Airbnb
Analysis of Legendary Pitch Deck: Airbnb
About & Overview
Airbnb is a rental online marketplace company based in San Francisco, California, United States founded in 2008 by Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk and Joe Gebbia
Through the service, users can arrange lodging, primarily homestays, and tourism experiences or list their properties for rental
Asset-light (marketplace) - they do not own any of the listed properties
This slide is used during their seed round with YC & later - Sequoia Capital
Business Model
Commission (%) to the property/room owner from each successful booking
Current Valuation
USD 82.95B at of 17 Dec 2020
Previous Investment Rounds
2009 Jan - $20,000 in venture funding from Y Combinator.
2009 Apr - $600K Seed by Sequoia Capital & Angels
2010 Nov - $7.2M Series A by Sequoia & Greylock Partners
2011 Jul - $112M Series B/C by Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst Partners & Digital Sky Technologies
2014 Apr - $450M Series D by TPG Capital & existing investors
2015 Jun - $1.5B Series E by General Atlantic, Hillhouse Capital Group, Tiger Management, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, GGV Capital, China Broadband Capital, and Horizons Ventures
2016 Sep - $555M Series Unknown by Google Capital and Technology Crossover Ventures
2017 Mar - $1B Series Unknown by Goldman Sachs
2020 Apr - $1B Private Equity round by Silver Lake and Sixth Street Partners
Slide Analysis
Slide 1
“AirBed&Breakfast”, Book rooms with locals, rather than hotels.
Noticed how they pitch their entire business in an extremely simple & concise manner as though as you are explaining to your grandma (lol)
The first slide tends to be your intro; it is imperative for you to highlight your business here in a very-clear & straight forward manner
Another alternative is to put your current website/mobile app (if any) or you can also add your client’s logo to showcase some subtle traction/depth (if any)
Slide 2
Very clear problem statement and highlighting something that is relatable to everyone
Again - it’s extremely simple & concise for Airbnb
Pro tip: notice how they bold the key anchor problem for their users (price, hotels & no easy way exists)
Always make sure that your problem statement is clearly defined - I have seen some startups who highlight problems…. That isn't honestly one. Either back it up with real stats or talk to your customers
Slide 3
“A web platform where users can rent out their space to host travellers to”
Concise one-liner solution & bolded/capitalized value proposition for their users
What can be improved on:
Some of the words under their value proposition is relatively small, should make the font size bigger
Slide 4
Their market validation slide shows a huge opportunity
Noticed that they also mentioned their competitors (Couchsurfing) as a benchmark - smart way to leverage on the other market players & competitors success as a real validation
Slide 5
A typical market size slide which comprises of TAM SAM SOM
TAM, SAM and SOM are acronyms that represent different subsets of a market.
TAM or Total Available Market is the total market demand for a product or service.
SAM or Serviceable Available Market is the segment of the TAM targeted by your products and services which is within your geographical reach.
SOM or Serviceable Obtainable Market is the portion of SAM that you can capture.
Typically you’d want to highlight/focus more on your SOM during your early stage as it is a lot more “sexier” to have garnered 10-20% of the existing SOM rather than stating your ~0.001% of TAM :P
Slide 6
Since most of them are designers by education, it clearly shows that they care a lot about their user experience
This slides also show how they’ve thought through on how simple their users can actually make a purchase on their website (3 steps)
Alternatively (and in most cases these days), you can also show your product on the solution slides
Slide 7
A clear and straightforward business model for any investors to understand
What can be improved on:
Their projections and assumptions are considered “too-simple” for most VCs - whilst it is great for people to do mental calculations & rationale in their business model, these days it is a lot better for you to have a separate slide on your projection and potentially unit of economics
Why so - it’s a lot tougher to raise these days since a lot of people are constantly trying to replicate or have the same conceptual idea as you.
Slide 8
Market Adoption (or also known as go-to-market “GTM” strategy)
Relatively smart to showcase on how they want to growth hack their customer acquisition & capture as many leads (and in their case, also listing since it is a marketplace)
Thoughts:
While it is easy to conceptualise this GTM, it is very important for you and/or your co-founder to actually execute out these things
Sometimes showing multiple ways/thoughts could also be a double-edged sword as you might not actually able to acquire these leads and investors might question you later on
Slide 9
Showcases good insight about their competition knowledge but I am not a big fan of these competition quadrants - because it is almost always you’d put yourself at the most right/top of the quadrant, and I can safely say most investors know this *yawn emoji*
If necessary, you can put a table to showcase the unique and/or differentiating factor of your solution/platform compared to others
Slide 10
Similar to slide 9, if it’s reaaaaalllyyy necessary to put this slide on, then just bullshit your way through. I honestly think that these competitive advantages slide almost mean nothing these days since you will be covering about your product in the earlier slides (could be product slides in detail or solution slides in detail)
That’s pretty much about it - feel free to leave some comments/feedback at the comment section and I’ll respond and continuously update this page when it is more relevant as time goes by.
Thanks!
