I saw a tweet comparing Airbnb’s stock price (founder mode) versus Booking’s (manager mode).

Airbnb has to be in founder mode because it is a seasonal business facing headwinds in terms of weakening consumer spend. They are generating more cash flow, but they cannot afford to be in peacetime mode. It is wartime for them. They have not been able to scale beyond their original short-term rental business. They tried to go multi-product, capture every transaction in the customer holiday cycle: announced flights (then did not launch), experiences (has not scaled), long-term rentals (TBD). Compare this with Booking, which has multiple portfolios and has (arguably) executed far better.

If you see tweets on Airbnb, it will mostly be people complaining about cleaning fees and how Airbnbs have become far more expensive than hotels.

Brian Chesky has no choice but to be in founder mode — or what Papa Horowitz calls wartime mode.

Instead of founder mode vs manager mode, it is better to frame it as wartime vs peacetime mode.

Low-margin businesses in terms of take rate with medium intent (food delivery, vacation booking) will probably always be in wartime mode. Deepinder will always run Zomato in founder mode.

While Google, one of the best businesses of all time thanks to ads, can afford to be in peacetime mode run by managers. Apple, which can launch the same products with different skins, can afford to be in manager mode. Facebook, in spite of Zuck, had somewhat turned into peacetime mode with high opex and huge employee bloat. Thanks to Apple making changes to ad tracking and thereby potentially affecting the Facebook ads business, and multiple public investors putting pressure on Zuck, Zuck cut employees and opex, got a whole PR makeover, and turned Facebook back into wartime mode.

And most companies, especially low-margin, execution-driven businesses, will follow this playbook now that ZIRP is over.