There are a lot of headwinds facing Airbnb. Cities around the world seem to be systematically making it more difficult to be a host. New York City, as many of you know, recently made it so that you need to be physically present while the dwelling is being rented. That is pretty limiting. Similar things are happening in non-urban markets too. North of Toronto in Muskoka, there's a draft by-law that will, among other things, limit short-term rentals to 50% of the total number of days within certain time periods. That eliminates the possibility of doing this as a business. So in many ways, it's easy to be pessimistic about the future of Airbnb.

But at the same time, if you step back and look at the bigger picture, there are over 7 million active listings on Airbnb. This effectively makes it the largest hospitality brand in the world. There are more accommodations on Airbnb than with Marriott, Hilton, Intercontinental, Wyndham, and Hyatt combined. (The below chart is from Scott Galloway.) It's also important to point out that while Airbnb doesn't own any of its own supply, the same is true of most hotel brands. They are, brands. The difference is that Airbnb created a more scalable platform and a more decentralized approach to aggregating supply.

The numbers also don't suggest that things are slowing down for Airbnb. (Here's their Q3 2023 shareholder letter.) Active listings on the platform grew 19% YoY in Q3 2023 (or by almost 1 million listings). Revenue is up. Free cash flow is up. And in Q3 of last year, the company repurchased $500 million of stock, bringing their one year total to somewhere around $3 billion. So despite all of the efforts to curb short-term rentals within our cities, the company, at least for now, seems to be holding up just fine. And if they can successfully diversify beyond their core business, there could even be reason to be bullish on the world's largest hospitality brand.

Full disclosure: I am long $ABNB.

A super-entrepreneur, according to the common definition, is a rich person who has amassed a net worth of at least US$1 billion dollars by either starting a company or taking a small company and growing it into a big one. A super-entrepreneur is, by definition, not someone who inherited their wealth. Though I'm not sure what the cut off is. If you inherited $1 million and then started a massive company, does that still make you a super-entrepreneur? What about if you inherited $100 million?

In any event, here is a chart from New Geography showing super-entrepreneurs by region:

The USA is in the lead in this chart at about 3.1 super-entrepreneurs per one million inhabitants. But the highest rate in the world, at least according to this data set, actually belongs to Singapore at 4.7 per million. Europe, as a whole, doesn't look all that great here. But again, if you get more specific, some European countries are actually doing quite well. Sweden, for instance, is sitting at around 2 per million, which is higher than Canada's figure.

Why this data is potentially interesting is that it tells you a bit about these countries. It tells you whether they have strong property rights, whether it's easy to conduct business, and whether it's supportive of new ideas, among, of course, many other things. There also appears to be a clear link between the presence of super-entrepreneurs and unemployment. Turns out that the more people you have starting wildly successful businesses, the lower unemployment tends to be.

For the full New Geography article, click here. In addition to what I just wrote about, it talks about Europe's "entrepreneurial paradox" and issues of gender equality.

Here’s an interesting graph I found on Businessweek that outlines retail sales growth in America over the past decade:

What’s interesting is not that furniture stores suffered during the housing crisis of 2008-2009 - this much is obvious - but that there seems to be a few other trends at work.

For one, warehouse club sales have gone from being the highest growth to the slowest growth sector (excluding, for a second, department stores). The urbanist in me wonders if this has to do with “The Great Inversion.” That is, the trend towards more and more young people choosing to live in inner city neighbourhoods - where warehouse club penetration is low - as opposed to the suburbs.

The other notable sector is department stores. It’s the only sector that seemingly hasn’t been able to rebound along with the rest of the economy. I think this points to another larger trend at play: there are structural problems with the department store model. They’ve been beaten up by category killers, the internet and the fact that individual retailers seem to want to manage their own brands and experiences from top to bottom.

I know that for me, personally, I rarely shop at department stores. What about you?