Airbnb Hires Amazon Veteran as New Chief Financial Officer

Airbnb will have a new chief financial officer in 2019, just in time for its anticipated initial public offering.

The company, which saw former CFO Laurence Tosi depart in February of this year after a reported disagreement with CEO Brian Chesky, has appointed longtime Amazon executive Dave Stephenson as its new CFO.

Stephenson will begin his new role in January, reporting directly to Chesky.

For more on Airbnb's road to going public, read A Deep Dive Into Airbnb 2018: Tackling Roadblocks on the Runway from Skift Research.

Stephenson most recently served as vice president and chief financial officer of Amazon's Worldwide Consumer Organization, which oversees the e-commerce giant's Amazon Prime program, its Whole Foods and Zappos business units, as well as its global website sales. In his 17-year career with Amazon, Stephenson also served as vice president of Amazon's International Consumer business and handled finance for North America Retail, Merchant Services, and Amazon Web Services. Prior to that, he was president and CFO of Big Fish Games.

Stephenson is not the only longtime Amazon veteran to find himself at Airbnb. In March, the company hired Greg Greeley to be its new President of Homes.

Both Greeley and Stephenson have previous experience working on Amazon's loyalty program, Prime. Greeley was an architect of the program, and he hinted that his previous experience in working on Prime would influence the development of Airbnb's own loyalty program, Superguest, which Chesky announced in February. Greeley, however, confirmed that the launch of the new loyalty program would be delayed from its original proposed launch date of later this year at the Skift Global Forum in September.

As CFO, Stephenson's responsibilities will also include overseeing the $31 billion company's much anticipated IPO, which Chesky has said may begin as early as mid-2019. Earlier this month, Airbnb also reported that it had had the "strongest quarter" in the company's history during the third quarter, with revenues of more than $1 billion.