The long-awaited submission of Airbnb documents for its Initial Public Offering (IPO) showed the company's impressive resilience, despite the pandemic that severely affects the travel industry.
In the IPO documents, however, there is something remarkable: the company will market 9.2 million shares to "fund" a fund in favor of the owners - property owners, which aspires to see it "grow" and above $ 1 billion.
The above could be a model for the future of the sharing economy.
At present, Airbnb operates like most companies in its industry: it offers a "marketplace" that allows users (in this case, travelers) to trade with service providers (people who rent their premises).
The platform receives a share of each transaction in return. It is a relationship that does not "develop" from one transaction to the next.
By creating a grant fund for property owners, Airbnb is investing in ongoing partnerships with its hosts, making it the focus of its corporate business. An advisory board consisting of their representatives will guide how the amount in the fund will be spent.
At first glance, the idea may sound like a corporate "trick" of impressions - or even worse, an unnecessary blow to the company's stock.
However, the fund's creation will reassure the hosts that if there is a recession (like the one the company faced last spring), there will be a sum of money that can help them stay alive.
When the economy is booming, funding can allow hosts to innovate and grow their businesses. This benefit is beneficial as it provides the most value to the most active and business-minded hosts.
This means that Airbnb customers will logically also benefit from the sponsorship of the hosts. The more top hosts invest in improving their experience, the better the overall quality of service that Airbnb can offer.
The Japanese company Raksul, for which I wrote - among other things - a study last year, has had similar success in its printing services market.
The company has helped its top suppliers improve their operations and invest in better equipment. As a result, suppliers increased their profits, improved their customer experience, and increased their performance, all at the same time.
In the same way, Airbnb can continue expanding its services and offerings without owning and maintaining real estate itself - a focal point of the company's original logic. It is a natural next step for the sharing economy: to turn the service providers who use the platform into partners who will "invest" passionately in its success.
Other platforms should also start treating their suppliers as partners - even if they cannot fund a "here and now" grant.
As Drizly's Ian Macomber and I argued in the Harvard Business Review over the summer, it would make a lot of sense for product delivery companies to start investing in restaurants, retail stores, and carriers, which are critical to their success.
So far, however, most product delivery platforms have taken the opposite path, "squeezing" suppliers to offer more significant discounts to customers. It is short-sighted logic because it means that suppliers have little incentive to develop and improve delivery operations.
Sharing companies have revolutionized the way we travel, shop, and move around the city. Many of the above, however, is based on an unstable relationship between supplier and platform.
The grant fund that Airbnb will create is a test of a different logic - a long-term commitment to helping the hosts succeed to grow alongside the company.
The potentially equates to a severe investment in Airbnb's future business.