G'day, how are you going? My name is Tech and welcome to my channel Bootlossophy. I acknowledge the widget people who are the traditional custodians of the country that I live in here in Perth in Western Australia. In this video, I'm going to review the brown flex chucker boot from Italian makers Astor Flex. This pair of chucker boots is called the brown flex from Italian makers Astor Flex based in Northern Italy. This particular pair of boots was provided to me for review by American online men's gear retailer Huckbury. Now I've made no commitments to say anything special about these boots, so I'm going to review them in my normal way. I will though put a link to the Huckbury website where you can buy these if you like them after my review. You can find that link below. It is an affiliate link and you don't pay any extra, but I get a small kickback to help me defray the costs of this channel. Now, I've already reviewed a couple of Astor Flex boots and in fact one of my first reviews in this channel was of their combat star lace-up model called the boot flex, which you can see up here. Astor Flex is an Italian company founded by the Travanzoli family in the 1890s in a small town that had a lot of family-run boot and shoemaking workshops much like the Indonesian town of Bandung. After the First World War, the company grew into an industrialised factory setup. And they continued making traditionally stitched-down shoes from there. Today, the family ownership is into its sixth generation and the current owners have embraced an eco-conscious mission to their bootmaking, ensuring that they use vegetarian leathers to avoid the chrome salt runoff as well as natural rubber for their soles, water-based dyes and non-solvent glues. They've had a partnership with Huckbury for about eight or nine years and apart from the lace-up boot flex I bought a couple of years ago, they also make loafers, Chelsea boots and other chakas and they're all called something flex. This pair is a chakaboot design called the brown flex. It does look like the original Clark's desert boot, which is also a chakka. All desert boots are chakas, but not all chakas are desert boots. Chakaboot are a simple low-cut ankle boot that's made from three main pieces of leather with either two or three pairs of eyelets for the laces and a thin sole. Chakaboot originated in India where they were created by British Army units playing polo. The name chakka came from the polo chakka or the six playing periods in a game, each of seven and a half minutes in length. A desert boot is a form of chakaboot. While a chakka is traditionally made with a thin dressy sole, good year welting and full grain uppers, a desert boot is made of thicker rubber crepe sole and with soft suede or nubuck. James Bond, for example, wears smooth grain Crockett and Jones chakkas with a dressy outfit, while the sturdier desert boot version of the chakka was worn by British officers in World War II in the North African campaign. This particular brown flex is in the desert boot half of the ledger. It has the three main pieces of leather, the vamp and the two rear quarters. It is very low-cut to just up to the ankle bone. It has two blind eyelets and a sturdy stitch down construction. And it's made of tough casual nubuck leather on top of a chunky crepe rubber sole. The look is so relaxed yet sturdy that it can only be worn as a casual boot. With the thicker crepe rubber sole and the nubuck leather, it's hard to wear this with a suit which many English gentlemen would wear chakkas with smooth grain good year welting chakkas. So jeans and a button down or button up shirt with the collar peeping above a crew neck relaxed jumper will work. You can also go all Steve McQueen and wear a relaxed neutral colored chino, a polo shirt and throw a herrington jacket over it, just keeping all the colors earth toned and neutral. In this dark brown it would go really well with navy. So a navy chino, a t-shirt and a leather bomber jacket gives a mix of relaxed but hardiness in the look. This color brown goes with a whole load of colors and shouldn't be hard to pair it with something in your closet. As for construction, Astolflex have always used the traditional stitch down construction method, which was also used by Clarks in copying the desert boots used by the British army in North Africa, which they copied from their South African comrades felt-shown shoes used by officers of the South African regiments also stationed there. The upper panels are stitched together and lasted and then the bottoms are flared out in the lasting process. The flared out uppers are sewn onto a leatherboard midsole. This is intended for some water resistance since the water outside the boot should roll off the flared out uppers but it works equally well for sand and dust. The leatherboard midsole is made up of scrap pieces of recycled leather that's chipped up and mixed with glue and then formed into sheets which are cut into midsole. They will not wear anything as long as real leather midsole but they serve a purpose of better breathability, drying faster when wet and to meet a price point. The crepe rubber outsole is then glued onto the leatherboard midsole securely and the crepe rubber heel is glued on top of the outsole. It truly is a simple but reliable construction. Okay, it won't last as long as stitch down on a leather midsole and using a hard rubber composite outsole like daylight but it suits the easy comfort and fit of a desert boot chaka. The crepe rubber is raw rubber that's been coagulated and pressed or crepeared into sheets that are used for the sole. As an aside that's how rubber is transported from plantations to factories where the crepe rubber is chipped and mixed with chemicals to make vulcanized rubber. As an outsole it's remarkably soft and forgiving and so it's very shock absorbing. It's also very grippy being almost pure rubber but it does wear quicker than hard rubber compounds and it really picks up dirt and becomes quite unsightly after a while because it's so grippy. The midsole being leatherboard means that the boot probably isn't resollable without being a lot of trouble however as a lower price boot you'd probably decide to replace it than to re-sole it when the time comes. It doesn't feel like there's a shank but the heel and outsole is so flat and low so maybe you don't need one. Inside the boot is a removable leather comfort insole backed by foam. It's really quite comfortable and does provide a decent amount of internal arch support. Once you take the insole out and if you look directly into the leatherboard midsole you can see the stitching through the uppers into the midsole on the edge. Now that surprises me because sometimes that exposed stitching can wear and sometimes it can even be more uncomfortable. On the inside the uppers are lined with a soft veg tanned lining leather which makes it feel quite luxurious.  The uppers leather is an Italian oiled newbuck leather. Now newbuck is a heavily corrected leather. The height is tanned and then the top grain is sanded quite heavily until the surface becomes nappy. Running your hands over newbuck it feels velvety except in this case it's an oiled newbuck which means that they pack it with oils which tend to smooth out that velvety feel. They haven't named the tannery but the feel and suppleness of the leather is good. You can see that it is oil infused because the variation moves as you walk and gradually builds up into a nice distribution of light brown and dark brown. The colour is called Ibane which is Italian for Ebony but it's not black it's definitely a dark brown. I like this oiled newbuck it feels supple and it looks good. I don't feel much reinforcement in the toe but there is a heel counter and to me it feels like leatherboard again. It's very light in touch and it flexes easily under pressure. Finishing it off at the top there are two eyelets unfinished without hardware front and back. Now that may wear through in time. AsterFlex provided two sets of laces this flat cotton pair and a round cotton pair and there it is. It didn't take me long to explain how it's constructed because it's pretty simple and straightforward. Now to leather care it's a rugged newbuck so I think leather care is pretty simple as well. It's quite an oily newbuck so I wouldn't rush to condition it. When you do unlike dry newbuck which needs a light spray on conditioner I'd use an oily but less waxy conditioner like Neitzfoot oil or even something like Big Four. Otherwise I'd really largely leave it alone and only brush it from time to time to keep the dust and dirt off if necessary wipe off stuck on dirt with a damp microfiber cloth. In this case less is more I think especially as it's a very casual boot that would look better for a less polished look. As an Italian product this is sized as an European 41 that equates to a US 8 or a UK 7. Now my Brannock size measurement is a US 8 and a half and in most boots I size down by a half so it was no different here. In comparison to Thursday boots Red Wing, Grant Stone, Alden, Alan Edmonds I take all their boots in an 8 same as these. So if you're a D width taking half size down from your true size should be good. Unfortunately though they don't do half sizes and they don't do different widths. I think if you have wider feet you probably need to size up but you should check with customer service at Huckbury. In a size 8 these fit me really well in thin or no show or even no socks.  The right one often giving me trouble on other boots but not this one. The midsole and rubber outsole is immediately bendy and flexible so there's no heel slip even though inside the heel pocket there's no sway to grab your heel. The comfort is very good. There is a surprising amount of median arch support. Nothing like well-made supportive work boots but enough for your feet not to get tired during the day. The softness of the crepe rubber means that footfall is well absorbed and feels comfortable and walking. I can't say it's like a slipper but you know it is a low boot so almost. Size and comfort is 8 to 9 out of 10 for me. How about value? On the Huckbury website this is listed at 195 US dollars and what do you get for that? You get a pretty good Italian oil new buck that feels supple yet looks reasonably tough. You get a good standard of construction with full leather lining okay you get cheaper leatherboard instead of real leatherboard midsole sorry real leather midsole and you get crepe rubber which is also a cheap material. You do pay more for the conscious decision of choosing greener materials that often costs more. You do get comfort you also get style so all in all I think it's a reasonable balance for the price. A Clark's desert boot can be bought for about 150 160 US they come in different versions and a Clark's original is at least another 100 more depending on the outlet but an interesting comparison would be to the Thursday scout which sells for 160 US dollars but Thursdays are the masters of lower price brackets aren't they? So what's my conclusion? Look I think it's probably worth the price but looking at the competition maybe I'd wait for a sale but if you wanted a softer more relaxed desert boot and you didn't want to wait it's certainly cheaper than Clark's original desert boot and it looks less structured than the Thursday scout so go for it and here we are at the end of the review. What do you think? I hope you liked it and found it useful and if you did please click on the like button below and if you haven't already don't forget to also click on the subscribe button it will help me to grow my channel and if you like content like this about boots and footwear subscribing will mean that YouTube will let you know when I load new videos and you can go down the rabbit hole for a bit of weekend entertainment. Until then people look after yourselves take care and I'll see you soon.


Thanks for having me it's fun to be here a very packed room What's that? Well, we had we had a little trouble with another sharing economy company I'm not gonna name any names, but anyway, I apologize that we're late. Thanks. Thanks for hanging in there Wait for me. I'm really excited to be here and talk with all of you. Thanks so much All right, sit by the fire It's pretty warm. It is pretty warm Cool, thanks Mike for coming so we can get started by first question will be I'm sure a lot of us here curious so could you share with us a little bit on your Engineering journey your career journey and also how how you join a B&B? Sure. How far back do you want me to go? As far all the way all the way to the beginning like the early days are you? Well, all right, I'll share I'll share like an abridged story because my you know my path in engineering is maybe a little bit different than the most I was a very fortunate along the way of my career, but the way that I got into Engineering was pretty not standard. So I was in high school I guess my junior year of high school in Virginia on the east coast of the United States and I was working in a coffee place making lattes, you know like as coffee people do I could make a pretty good latte back then anyway, and I got to know some of the customers really well that came into this place into this coffee shop and One of them this guy Jason Had a little tech company across the street that he was working on so my senior year of high school rolls around It turns out that there's an internship program with my high school And so if I get an internship I can go to school in the morning and then in the evening or in the afternoon I can go to work instead of going to school. I get paid for it, and I was like that sounds pretty good So I started talking to Jason, and I'm like hey What what about you give me an internship at this company across the street, and he's like no way You don't know anything about computers. Why would I do that? And so I was like, oh, that's a bummer and Then and then I kept after him and I kept after him and I kept after him and finally I got him to agree to give me the internship and The way I got him to agree is I said if you hire me I'll do computer programming stuff and learn that but I'll also be the receptionist I'll answer the office phone for you, and so he wouldn't have to hire a receptionist and pay for that So I got the internship so I'd answer the phone, and I learned about computers I got really lucky at that place that I worked I worked alongside a bunch of really great computer programmers, and I was able to pick up programming from them take on bigger and bigger tasks over time Then before you know it that company turned into a startup company. We were called I Atlas. I know It's strange, and then that company I Atlas got in 1999 We got acquired by the like hottest Technology company in the world, but it was an acquisition. We got acquired you might have heard of them They were called Alta Vista Yeah So company got acquired I moved to California. I was like 21 years old barely I had a job at Alta Vista and Sort of picked up my programming career from there Alta Vista sort of you know had a difficult fate when Google came along Then later I went to Yahoo. I went to Facebook after that and So I just covered a lot of yours in like a few words there Then I was it I was at Facebook. I was leading the growth engineering team there And having a great time. I had some amazing experiences at Facebook I was there the day that we crossed a billion monthly active users, which was like an incredible thing I was there on IPO day, which was like six o'clock in the morning when the market opens in helicopters over I mean it was crazy right like really fun Facebook was fun But then I got introduced to this guy named Nate Blacharsik Who was one of the co-founders of Airbnb and I'm like well I've got to talk to him right because I've been paying attention to Airbnb is really exciting company I went and had coffee with Nate and Had a conversation with him about the impact that Airbnb was having out there in the world and how it was touching people's lives Really directly and their need for a technology leader Because at them at that time there were 40 engineers working at Airbnb and they all reported directly to Nate And it was managing like 40 people and So I got excited then I started talking to Brian and Joe and I realized that like this was the opportunity that I've been waiting for And so so I left Facebook. I went to Airbnb and that was a little bit over three years ago now Nice So a lot of us here are engineers designers entrepreneurs ourselves So we're curious like just share a little bit more about some interesting projects that you have done at your time And at Yahoo Facebook Airbnb Sure Let's see what's interesting work that I've worked on. What are you most interested in hearing about Facebook? Yahoo Airbnb. What do you want to hear about the most? Facebook One Facebook one Yahoo Let's see Facebook was really interesting because it was like Facebook was like an education in how to use data to make decisions and an education How do you use data to make decisions and then how to do attribution of the work that you do to driving business results? Like Facebook's growth team is probably like the best team in the world at doing exactly that How do we make sure that every hour that we spend working on engineering is like directly attributable to the business impact? That we're actually driving with that work and Facebook is like this incredible education in that for me A lot of which I'd like to think that I've helped bring to Airbnb What are interesting projects? What is the number one growth driver for Facebook? Can anybody tell me Seven friends and seven days Friending yes seven friends and seven days is like is like the the indicator So the more friends that you get in your first week or two the higher likelihood probability that you'll be a monthly active user So probably one of the most interesting projects That we did at Facebook and you know this predates me quite a bit But we worked on iterating on it and everything is that feature called people you may know You know what I'm talking about. Yeah, so who wants to tell me how people you may know is ranked Like how do we decide which people to show you as a friend request? Nobody Mutual friends. All right. That is what it was It was mutual friends for a long time because the way that we ranked people you may know was What do you think are the most likely people that you're going to connect with and friend, right? Like that was the ones we wanted to show you the first because then you generate the most friend connections and everybody It's like super right But one of the things that we learned is that it's more impactful to rank people You may know based on not who you're most likely to friend But based on who needs a friend request from you the most to be engaged on Airbnb Sorry on Facebook But who needs a friend request from you the most to be engaged on Facebook And so we would take like the people that like had some intersection with you the ones who needed more friends to become more engaged on Facebook And then we would surface those and people you may know so you click on them You get them engaged and bring them back and that was a pretty cool project that we worked on for Facebook group Yeah, you basically find the people who are like they're only coming you know coming to Facebook four out of seven days That's not enough. They need a friend request from you to bring them back all the time So that I don't know that was a pretty cool project at Facebook and just like the the depth of the science that goes into that that problem space is Is really pretty profound of what they work on there? I think at Airbnb. It's been kind of like It's just so different when you're leading like an entire organization from when you're leading a part of it You know and so much of the project work that I think about that's interesting at Airbnb is like Building how we do all of our recruiting and hiring like how we think about talent and performance management How we think about like incentives for engineers and how we get engineers to feel agency and ownership over their work Like so much of everything that we do on the technology side like comes out of how we manage people So I think about that when I think about my main project work at Airbnb I'm happy to talk about any of that by the way if it's helpful for folks in the room So speaking about growth there's a lot of talk about growth hacking and stuff So how do you kind of what's your approach to growth at Airbnb? Yeah, I think that we really look at kind of a couple main areas right now, so We have one team Well, all right. Let me back up a little bit. Why do people why does Airbnb grow at all? Like why are people interested in using Airbnb? They're interested in using it because the number one the number one reason people say is because they want to experience a better or More authentic type of travel they actually want to connect with the destination that they go to so the number one growth driver for Airbnb is providing a Like more authentic travel experience through our hosts that people love and so they come back and use Airbnb again and again Like that is actually like I'll talk about a whole bunch of technical stuff that we do in funnel analysis and data and everything But the reality is it's like the quality of the experience at the other end the offline experience You have on Airbnb is what ultimately leads to our growth and we see that the majority of our first-time users Like the first-time usage that we got on Airbnb comes from word of mouth. It's like organic growth Which is exactly how you want it to be Like you should actually keep track of that and you know, whatever Starts you're working on if your consumer focused like especially if you're early stage You really want word of mouth to be a huge driver of your business because that means that people are out there saying good things about you right and so one of the things that I think the founders did really Really smart about early is that they found the earliest users of Airbnb The early adopters the first hosts out there even the first guests out there and they went and talked to them and learned about like What do you love about this? What can we make better? They really understood the earliest users of Airbnb and have that inform their decision-making So I think that that led to a lot of the quality and the growth that ultimately they saw down the line So that is like the high-level like you have to have a great experience if you're gonna have good growth Then when you have a great experience and you're getting Some growth out of that good experience then you can start to optimize it, right? And you can start optimizing it get better growth curves like sort of you know channel The energy in the right way to get to get your growth rates go in the right way and for us There's probably two major optimization tracks that we work on So one is around conversion So how do we take people who are already coming to Airbnb are already searching are already viewing You know listing pages and get them incentivized and encouraged to book and so some of the most impactful things that we've done on that is Increasing the number of listings that are instant bookable turns out it's much easier to instant book and Airbnb listing than go back and forth We've done a huge project around Pricing so price sensitivity is really important in the marketplace and hosts don't necessarily know how to price So we've done better pricing and then something that we call Urgency which is basically giving information to potential travelers about how many listings are available left for this date And how many people are looking at this listing so you understand that like it's a little bit fleeting Like you might want to hurry up and book that listing if you really want it those things are incredible for conversion Like they help get people through the funnel. We've got all of that Instrumented and tuned so that anytime we tweak anything on Airbnb we can tell how it affects those conversion metrics so that's like one big category of growth and then Then there's like a second part So even if you have a perfectly converting product, right like let's say you've got a hundred percent conversion everybody uses a convert That's fine unless you get so you start getting less visitors over time Right because if you have less visitors over time even if you're converting perfectly your growth is going to start slowing down Right unless you've got people coming to the top of the funnel So the second major area that we think about for growth is how do we drive visitors to Airbnb so that can be through Brand marketing campaigns through more sophisticated targeting Pig growth marketing virality engagement emails all that kind of stuff And then when they land on every be how do we onboard that new user to get them ready to search and book So that's like the other big category of growth work that we do So retention is key as well in terms of growth. Yeah I mean one of the things that's We're very fortunate like you know engagement which was You know at Facebook was something that we talked about is like how do you keep bringing people back and like giving them reasons to come back? We're very fortunate that an Airbnb our natural retention rate is incredibly high So like once we get you to try Airbnb for the first time You're very likely to come back and try it again So we do some work around engagement, but a lot of our effort is actually focused on getting people to try it for the First time because the retention rate is so strong already So we're pretty fortunate that way So a lot of us here look up to Airbnb and of course yourself as well. I'll try your career To where you are today. So are there any mistakes they make try your career and what do you do in those situations? Like what kind of mistake like like engineering mistakes or Oh Well, I'll tell like I'll tell one funny story and then maybe something like like around like Like I'll tell you one funny story from Alta Vista when I was really young I one of the projects I was tasked with when I when I worked at Alta Vista was to create an internal search So like you could basically search altavista.com for whatever you wanted to find right to remember what how this thing worked It like had like a no nobody remembers like if you go to like the the way back machine like you can find it but Basically, it was like to index all the pages that were internal to altavista.com so that users could come in and search within the site and so, you know, I'm building a search thing right like What do you do you build a crawler to crawl all the pages, right? And then stuff them into a text index so that I converted text index so that you can search against them And they go match to the URL right and so I built this like really fancy crawler and Pearl Yeah Old school and what it would do it ran on my laptop. Oh, man. This is a long time ago. Anyway And it would fork like a hundred workers that would go out and just hammer altavista like scraping all these pages Like pulling out all the end of indexable content and then stuffing it into an index And so this thing is working well like I'm indexing the site. I'm like cool I've got this thing running I can probably turn through it and like, you know In the next couple days as I plug my laptop into the ethernet at work and I leave it on my desk and I go home for the day Meanwhile, it's like crawling altavista So the problem was that all of the pages that I was crawling were actually dynamically generated and we're hitting a database Behind the scenes and so my laptop sitting there turning away It's like pounding on altavista and then somewhere around maybe like 1 a.m Pagers start going off and like operation starts getting called and before you know it all of altavista is down And then it was down. It was down for eight hours Because my crawler was running and hitting it and and the reason so I basically did a denial of service attack Yes, and well exactly right why didn't any of the denial of service filters catch it because it was coming from an Internal IP on my desk. So I come into work the next morning.  I don't know how that was a pretty big mistake I don't know I can talk about some other stuff, but that was just a more of a fun story So having done pro what is now your favorite programming language actually Actually, hold on can I tell one other thing just not a mistake because I sort of I told a fun story But I think there should also be something like a little bit a little bit deeper to share there You know I I Think you know, I really value the time that I spent at Yahoo. I spent I was there for seven years and the entire time I was at Yahoo I I felt like I was just being very successful, you know, like I was probably you know an individual contributor engineer for probably You know three of those years and I was working on like mostly infrastructure engineering I thought it was super cool and like the work was really rewarding And then I got into management and started managing small teams and then mid-sized teams and bigger teams and bigger teams and I felt very successful internally at Yahoo, you know, but You know over that seven-year period from 2004 ish to 2010 like Like while I was going the right direction inside Yahoo, right? Like my career trajectory was very good inside Yahoo Yahoo itself was kind of going like this and And I guess like that sort of like the realization after the fact is that, you know, whatever you're doing You should make sure that you know, the company that you're working for is working as hard for you as you are for it You know what I mean like you want to be on a company that's like on the right trajectory And I think in hindsight like career when I left Yahoo I was a VP of engineering. I was managing about 200 engineers at the time for Yahoo Mail and Messenger And when I went to join Facebook, first of all, they made me go through 16 interviews to get the job at Facebook over about three months Seriously, they weren't they weren't sure because they hadn't hired anybody like that from from Yahoo before and when I joined Facebook I was a VP of engineering at Yahoo I joined Facebook as an engineering manager They wouldn't even give me a director title and I realized like how much the job that I had felt so strong and passionate about Hadn't really been working as hard for me as I needed it to in that time And I think that that was kind of a mistake So just something to like keep in mind that you know, always make sure that what you're doing is working really hard for you Cool. Wait, what was the other question? So we're just asking about what is your favorite programming language after you're done So there was no quote on the day-to-day bases. I definitely don't still code on a daily basis the last Well, let's see. I guess I've got like sort of three projects in recent memory One was between Yahoo and Facebook I was also tinkering around with the idea of starting a company myself And that was around the time that Node.js was just starting to pick up steam and I got really excited about Node And so I spent I spent a whole bunch of time writing You know, basically like a real-time messaging system not designed for chat But for something else using Node.js when Node.js was still like kind of early It's matured a lot since then but that made me, you know Learned a lot more about JavaScript and you know, a lot of people hate JavaScript, but I thought it was pretty cool I liked it Then I guess Jumping forward to most recently. This is actually just a few weeks ago. I I started tinkering around with something called React Native Yeah I see at least one Facebook t-shirt in here React Native is like I mean, you know, it's just like such a promising interesting technology Like it could open the doors for a lot of people to be able to develop on native mobile apps I didn't have that opportunity to do it before it has this idea or like this concept of being able to refresh an App on the server side without having to go through a whole app store deploy and release and so and Like with basic JavaScript skills right JavaScript in like and like web skills You can actually develop code that's gonna that's gonna run native on them on the mobile device. How cool is that? It's cool. So I got like really excited about it So I got my ex code all set up and I got react native set up and I've been sort of tinkering around an app So that's that's maybe the other one. I'm excited about How many people in here have tried you building something with react native? Two all right three. All right, everybody else check it out. It's cool So we wanted to open up the questions to the floor, but maybe just one one more questions So a lot of things that we were trying to do here at Carousal is also Trying to build a very strong engineering core engineering culture here. You're getting so what's what's your kind of take on? What is a strong engineering culture? Do you and how do you keep engineers engaged and happy? Well, I mean I think that like I think that like engineer like that The perception of like what is a great engineer has changed so much even in the last ten years Like I think that there was there was a time where you know, that's ten years last ten twenty years There's a time where it was kind of considered like, you know You'll have a bunch of business people come up with a bunch of requirements and like, you know They call them like a marketing requirements document or whatever like all that crazy stuff And then like you come up with like these really like great requirements And then you'd have designers design something and then you'd hand it to engineers and say engineer write the code to do exactly that thing right and you know That's not really what great engineers do anymore What great engineers do now is that they're part of a team that is like ideating like from the very beginning of like Given a problem statement. Here's our problem statement How are we gonna work backward from the problem statement to a bunch of tactics that we can do that are actually gonna get us to our goal and the great engineers now the ones who really want to you know Be involved in technology companies are the ones who have a voice in that strategic conversation about What are we gonna work on and why and what problem statements are we solving for and so I think that you know one of the things that we try to do at Airbnb is Make it so that every engineer has agency over what they work on they have some say over what they work on and they're part of that That process of figuring out basically how to have impact towards the company's goals And so if you say to any engineer like you know the thing that you're ultimately gonna be evaluated on here You know at this job is how much impact did you have towards the company's goals? But how you achieve that impact and how you move those goals is really up to you you need to find that out You know you've got managers to help you've got peers to help you whatever But ultimately it's up to you to find the impact then suddenly you're not just somebody who writes code Suddenly you're like a business owner and you're working on it and that is like the exciting stuff Like that's where the creativity in the field comes from and when you're writing that code on the screen You want to know why you're writing it. It's not just because it was handed to you It's because you know how this is gonna actually drag the business that you feel passionately about and so a lot of What we do and how we think about management of engineers and everything comes down to that fact like you have to have Engineers have a lot of say over what they do and I can talk about the mechanics of that at length But that's the overall philosophy and principle Thanks. So we want to open up for your floor to ask questions. So we'll start taking questions from the floor anyone has any Burning questions that one asks burning question It's not so burning Geez man, I haven't even really thought about that I don't I don't know. I mean like you know titles are just such a Strange business anyway, you know, I guess you know my job My job is is VP of engineering is to you know manage the engineering team and make sure that the engineers Have what they need to be successful and that they are managed in a way that allows them to be business owners and be You know involved strategically the way I just talked about like that's a lot of it's like the mechanics of that like actually driving running that team I think a CTO role You know is it means something different in almost every company, you know It's in some cases the CTO is the person who manages all of the engineers in some cases CTO is an individual contributor who takes on like Big projects that are you know strategically important to the company and I think both of those can work at the end It's just kind of like a title game But I think that you know VP of engineering typically means you're the person who sort of like hands-on managing all the Engineering team and the CTO and in a lot of cases has a little bit more space and freedom to take on like longer term View projects, and they can do that either in a management role or in an IC role Yeah, Nick Latrasik, he's a co-founder in CTO of Airbnb He was the first engineer who worked at Airbnb and Nate does kind of what I'm describing like he will take on Big projects about like how do we run the company then they might not even be technical projects They might be like how do we set goals like how do we think about that and Nate has an incredible mind for being able to go And set up processes like that that the entire company can follow and that's actually like a great use of time for a strong CTO like me Yeah, good question. No, maybe think about it What are some things that can make or break kind of like a marketplace type of business like you guys? Well, I mean What makes a marketplace business is getting to like the critical mass of supply and demand where you have enough balance. I mean if you Look at Airbnb's history, right? It's like eight years About give me honest about that one and you look at the growth curve on Airbnb You see that for the first three or so years of Airbnb's existence Basically nothing happened, and that was because there wasn't enough supply In the marketplace to drive the demand, but there wasn't enough demand to drive the supply So in the early days of a marketplace business, you have to be like on the ground Like really really tightly managing the community and like getting it off the ground generating enough supply and demand until the flywheel Effect starts to kick in and then you get that that nice exponential growth curve I think that so one aspect of it is like the balance of supply and demand the other is It's just the quality of the service like it's sort of like I was saying like I think bringing a marketplace off the ground means that you have to have You know high quality experiences enough balance is applied to man to be able to drive both sides of the marketplace and Maybe a little bit more distinct to our marketplace than any other one is a sense of trust so like the other thing that makes or breaks the marketplace in our case is Is trust you have to be Incredibly confident that if you're going to you know get matched to somebody online for a travel experience And you're gonna show up in another country at somebody's house That they're you know that there's something you can trust right and so when I think about like the fundamental building block behind Airbnb Success it's things like you know the reputation system like the review system It's incredibly powerful to say that this person has been here and traveled here before and gotten positive reviews Or this host has a whole bunch of positive reviews because that builds this baseline of trust that then you can you can build on I get a successful business You know things that will break down a marketplace I think it's just generally like if there's too much friction. We've invested a huge amount For example in the payment system a lot of people don't think about Airbnb as a payments company But I mean we're gonna move a lot a lot of billions of dollars through our payment system this year I mean it's actually completely massive But why do we even have that because you don't want anybody to have to even worry about it? like you might be paying in with a credit card and You know the host might be getting paid out in Western Union You know and going and picking up cash at a Western Union location That should all feel completely seamless and transparent to you So I think like having very little friction is is really important for a successful marketplace as well Yeah, there's a few thoughts All of all of our payments flow through us we have our own payment system But we work with a whole bunch of third-party vendors for things like credit card processing and you know Pants and payouts and banks and everything like that But yeah, our payment system at the core the thing that stitches all that together is our own technology Hey How's it going? All right good So One aspect of building that trust is the review and verification system So how do you incentivize like users who have used like Airbnb to actually go back and How do we incentivize them to do it? Yeah well It's kind of an interesting thing because Because every V is a very like human interaction You know you actually like go and meet your host and look them in the eye people feel very sort of like Compelled to leave a review because of that personal interaction It's sort of different from like buying something from a seller on on eBay where you know They might ask you to leave a review and you feel like okay fine, you know, I'll do it It's like you actually met somebody and you stayed in their home, right? Like that I think has always led us to have an incredibly strong review rate I think like more than 80% of trips on Airbnb or review But we did another cool thing last year that that helped as well, which is We wanted to get or we wanted reviews to be more Honest because the other thing about like you you met somebody you looked them in the eye and you stayed with them Is that you're not gonna feel very good about saying like well? I didn't actually have a great time or You know they didn't leave me a towel or something you know what I mean like you don't feel it and good about that And you especially don't feel good because you know that if you click the Submit button first on the review they might read it and then they might leave a bad review for you Like that's retribution, right? so Yeah, so that light bulb went off in our heads, you know, I guess it's like a year and a half ago or something And so one of the things that we want is Now reviews have a simultaneous reveal So as a guest you'll leave a review for the host as a host You'll leave a review for the guests and then on the same day those reviews are are revealed It's usually about two weeks post-a and that actually turns out to drive people to want to leave reviews even more And so you know you want to make sure that you know you have your say It's doing the review and it's been really good because it's created like more transparency in the review system more honesty in the reviews That are left which is great and an even an even higher review rate. So so, yeah If even if we even if we don't get a Even if we don't get a public review We'll still get on the feedback from the from the reviewer and then we also We do like a quantitative thing as well Like how would you rate this experience on a whole bunch of different axes that makes it easier than a set of typing in like a I had a wonderful stay like we can say like on these just different attributes. How good was your stand? How would you rate it overall so that can still be even if you're kind of shy and you don't want to write something you can Still create some value from your stay and the reputation of that poster of that guest Come state Maybe try simultaneous reveal Take note of that I see Yeah, I think I was in February they were like For all Connect to the other things. Yep. So I'm just In order to go against this That's how we will is it how we advise new startups to take security seriously because it's not priority when it comes to Yeah Well, I mean like we're we're at a stage now, you know pretty You know, I mean, you know, I still think of this as a startup or a pretty, you know We're a pretty advanced startup where you know, we have an entire security program We have you know an entire staff that supports that the crosses engineering and IT and like all these different areas because you know We're at that point of company where we've reached You know a level of notoriety where there's a lot of bad guys who would love to come in and defraud us Right or come in and sort of access our user data I think in general you should just like the way you should think about security I think is It should always be an evaluation of like risk versus moving fast and That that calculation changes as you progress as a company, right? Like if you're really early as a company, you know You probably want to take on a little bit more risk Because you can kind of overdo it on on the security side and it slows you down so much that your idea doesn't get off The ground in the first place and then who cares if you're secure, right? So I think you have to always be thinking about like what is the spectrum of you know risk Tolerance versus moving fast and then just you know do your best to do it You're picking the right point along the way. I think you know the the one thing I would say to think about early And your security program is just Being able to detect if something bad is happening like one of the one of the big flaws in a security program is that people worry a lot about like perimeter defense and like making sure that a hacker can't get through the perimeter and you know the reality is that a Determined enough hacker can always get through your perimeter like you just have to assume that if like somebody really targets you They're gonna find an exploit they can get in the important thing at that moment is if your perimeter is You know Compromised for some reason like you can detect it and you can tell that somebody's in so that you can respond to it And that's actually where a lot of people get get lost somebody You know penetrates the perimeter they get in they get access to something they build a back door Nobody knows about it and then two months later. They use it to really like exploit your user data. So yeah, those are a few thoughts Ideally you start building your fences before people are attacking you The way that we do it is we look across It's hard with security because there's no like one metric that you look at that's like are you secure or not like the secure score So we just look across like a whole bunch of different attributes of what we do in terms of our ability to like Isolate and protect data intrusion detection intrusion response We run sort of what we call like red teams like teams that will come in an attempt to hack us Then we see what they do so we're constantly sort of benchmarking where we stand against our standards And then we have a quantitative scoring system that we use for that to get to a grade on how we're doing But it's actually like the grade is really a summary of a whole bunch of different attributes that we look at for security, but you know as a startup like You know just just always again be thinking about the trade off between risk and moving fast Like and it really start up you need to be moving really fast like don't do anything cavalier with user data, certainly But you know I would buy us a little bit more towards moving fast and narrow it is So we're running a bit short of time so we'll take two more last questions, and then we'll finish up with one more question Okay, great. Well you pick Yeah No, it's very hard to get a dog So Let me just rephrase the question make sure I heard it right It's the question is why are the really successful Chinese technology company is not expanding outside of China? Western country Well, I would maybe challenge the second part of that statement in that there have not been very many Western companies that are successful in China I think one of the only examples I can think of is Apple has been successful in China But not a lot of the other technology companies have made We're getting there we're getting there we aspire to a lot more in China It's an incredibly exciting market, but you know that I guess maybe the The thought that I have on that is that you know There are these incredible businesses in China that are like as big as these global Western businesses That only need to be in China to be that successful, right? Like you've got you know a company like Xiaomi or Alibaba or Tencent. I mean they have So many potential Users just in China and so much opportunity just in China that they probably have to make a strategic decision about do we just capture more of the market here in China where there's you know Billion people that we can go after or do we exert a bunch of energy on the harder problem of attempting to get Outside of the country and like penetrating to other markets And I think it's only a matter of time before that becomes the strategic priority for a lot of these these companies And I think they're they're already thinking about it thinking about it through partnerships and stuff But but that is a strategic question. I'd be asking myself because like Building up a really powerful company in China You actually don't have to go outside of China right now because there are so many potential users and so many more people coming online Every day, so that's just one that's just one thought of like you know if I were you know running Tencent Which I'm very much not That's something I might be thinking about Last question maybe from there that site I haven't heard any women ask a question yet Yeah, do you have a question? Engineering I'll give you one one more question for you Go ahead So after I asked about there are a lot of people who are wearing like just coming out of these And frameworks and I know that I gave you what you were thinking about Yeah Has it like detected you guys and how do you know like See how to extract new technology to like to take the technology of key visitors on a daily basis Oh, like how do we think about adoption of new technologies? Yeah We try to be pretty disciplined about it these days like it's very easy to get excited and sort of swept up by the new technology That's really fun and cool and hot at that moment But then you sort of get down that path a little ways and you realize that like the tooling and the frameworks and everything else hasn't really been sorted out And then suddenly you have a new technology stack and you have to support and that your operations team hates and whatever else So we try to be really disciplined about it. We've decided that Ruby on Rails is fine for like our presentation layer and our API layer That's just fine for us. It works okay. It's not the most scalable. It's not like the fastest. It's not the most memory efficient It's okay. We can get some more machines to handle that stuff For like the services layer behind the scenes behind the scenes we decided to standardize on JVM languages So we use Java and Scala And the reason that we It was actually like you know three years ago when I came in there was a lot of exploration for different technology stacks Like some people were writing things and languages like Go which is super cool But we decided to standardize a little bit more because what we wanted to do was build a like kind of scaffolding around a technology stack Such that each time you build something new with that technology stack it gets a little bit easier You don't have to like reinvent things over and over again and at this point our ability to develop in JVM and the services layer is actually pretty robust And so when you start a new JVM service at Airbnb or a new Java service or whatever You already you get things built in like the containerization, how you're going to do monitoring, how you're going to do logging Like all the things that the operations people know how to do So I think there's some advantage to standardizing on a technology stack And if you decide to adopt a new technology it should be a really like big decision for you About like I really am not able to accomplish my goals with whatever technology stack I'm using So therefore I have to use this new thing not just that seems cool so I'm going to go use it So you know that's my opinion on that One more question? Oh two in one You know finding a technical talent I think that So we're in a very fortunate position where there are a lot of people who want to work in engineering at Airbnb It's very flattering I feel great about it and I don't take it for granted I think that you know the challenge that we have honestly is finding like a diverse group of people that want to work in technology In general and when I say diverse I'm talking about things like gender, racial background I'm also talking about diversity of what kind of job you had before It's actually extremely hard to find the kind of people that you want to bring into a team to end up with the team that you want to design And for us that is like a huge focus in recruiting because we're lucky We've got this opportunity where a lot of people want to work at Airbnb So we can be selective about who comes in and then we really focus on trying to like create the team that we want to have at the end of the day And we believe that if we create a highly diverse team of people, diversity in thought as well as diversity in who they are That we will be a better company like that we'll actually be able to better represent the community out there I know that's probably not what you were asking But that's like something that we really spend a lot of time on And I think it's one of our biggest challenges that we have in how we do technical hiring in general at Airbnb So that's probably like my overall answer on that one How do you get a job at Airbnb? I think first of all, you apply Step one, apply And then when you get that call back and somebody wants to talk to you Make sure that you prepare I think that the people who do great in our interview processes are the ones who take it really seriously Who do a bunch of legwork and preparation in advance and come in very well prepared for the technical interviews And for how they're going to talk about how they think about Airbnb's place in the world And those are the folks that do really well who really take it seriously and prepare And I will tell you that when I was interviewing at Airbnb, I prepared a lot And that really shines through in the interviews And we get some people who come through who are coming out of a well-known company or something And they don't have interviews at like five different companies at the same time And they don't prepare a lot for Airbnb because it's not that important to them They don't do well in the interview process So it seems like kind of an obvious answer like prepare for an interview But it really shows the people who do and the people who don't But I encourage you to apply We'd love to work with you One minute has a question Last question Oh, we got one more You know, another reason that, you know, I, and I think I would say For a lot of people, it's after the new design changes You know, two years ago You know, a lot of my friends tried Airbnb after the new logo came in So how well do you see the integration of design and engineering working together To actually build an awesome product like Airbnb and be a design powerhouse Yeah, I actually think that the way we work with design at Airbnb is a huge strategic asset For the company because in a lot of places design is not considered like a first order participant in the discussion And it really is at Airbnb, which is so, so powerful, I think We have an incredible design team and they put so much passion behind them what they do How we actually operationalize it, right Is it for any major area that we're working on like You know, I'll think of an area that I talked about earlier, like conversion Remember I was talking about conversion, like driving growth and everything You know, when you look at the leadership team of the people that are working on conversion And are working on hitting their goals A great leadership team in our engineering product group contains A product manager, product management lead, an engineering lead, a design lead, and a data science lead And if we have those four groups working together Then we have the right counterbalance of sort of incentives and personalities and everything else To form a great leadership team that can actually lead to an awesome product down the line And what we find is that when we have a great leadership team of people who spend a lot of time working together Most of the time, they're not even really playing that functional role of like I'm a designer right now or I'm an engineering lead right now They're being strategic, working together, figuring out and solving problems And then they go off when they're done solving problems and go, you know, do their functional roles But really, they kind of get to step out of their functional role and just think about how do we hit the goal Yeah, so it's cool, I love working with a designer at Airbnb With that, we want to please give a big thank you to my staff That's right We're a team, like a really large team of really the best engineers in the world What project will you start? What project would I start if I wasn't doing this? What? Wait, what? You will have two best engineers in the world What project will you start? Oh, interesting question And I assume it can't be just start Airbnb again, right? I will tell you something that I find, a space that I find really interesting Is like urban efficiency and automation Like I actually think there's a huge amount, like if you look at sort of the industry trend of The cost and like ubiquity of sensor technology Like the cost dropping and the ubiquity of sensor technology like rising all the time And then the cost and ability to process big data in real time also dropping Like these two things like sort of converge and you can think that if you're able to monitor And keep track of more things in an urban environment There's so many efficiencies that you could find in that If you knew how things were happening And that could lead to sort of like a more sustainable life for people in urban areas So that's something that I think is really cool So if you have a really smart team of engineers You know, maybe you should think about that Cool Yeah, thanks everyone