Why I Left Airbnb

I joined Airbnb in 2018 because I wanted to work on a genuinely hard technical problem at scale. I got what I came for. The data infrastructure we built handled billions of events per day across a two-sided marketplace with asymmetric supply, seasonal demand, and more edge cases than I could count.

By 2021, I'd learned something I couldn't unlearn: the problems I found most interesting weren't internal to Airbnb. They were upstream of it. The infrastructure problems, the tooling gaps, the primitives that every data-intensive company was solving from scratch, over and over.

That's a market. A boring, infrastructure-layer market — the kind I find most exciting.

Leaving a well-paying job at a brand-name company to start something uncertain is a decision I deliberated for longer than I'd like to admit. The pull of stability is real, especially when you've watched other founders struggle.

What pushed me over the edge was a simple question: in ten years, which outcome would I regret more? Not having tried, or having tried and failed? The answer was obvious once I asked it directly.

I don't think the Airbnb years were time spent waiting to start my "real" career. They were load-bearing. Every hard problem I worked on there is directly relevant to what we're building now. The path wasn't a detour — it was the education.