Airbnb's CTO on the Battle for New York and IPO Rumours
Skift Take
The next six months will be interesting for the rental upstart, and fascinating to watch from the outside. Can it find a balance with regulators and can it keep the user growth momentum going?
At yesterday's TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin conference, TechCrunch writer Ryan Lawler interviewed Airbnb CTO and co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk about the service's rapid growth over the last year and the challenges that it is facing in large markets like New York City and San Francisco.
But Blecharczyk first used the event to announce a change to Airbnb's search functionality, making it easier for users to compare photos of rentals while also looking at a map of their destination. The CTO called it a solution to Airbnb's "unique search problem" of giving the user a map and photos at the same time.
Early on, Blecharczyk also confirmed a widely circulated yet unconfirmed report that Airbnb raised a large investment from PayPal founder Peter
