Dave Stephenson is the CFO of Airbnb where he is responsible for Airbnb’s financial management, planning and reporting, accounting, tax, treasury, investor relations, corporate and business development, real estate, and procurement.
Dave played a critical role in helping Airbnb navigate the challenges brought on by the COVID pandemic. In the span of less than 12 months, Dave and his team raised $2B of debt in the depth of the crisis, supported the realignment of Airbnb from a divisional structure to a functional structure, reduced operating expenses by several hundred million dollars, led Airbnb to have the largest IPO in 2020, and refinanced the $2B in debt with the best priced convertible debt offering in history for its size. Airbnb also established a Host Endowment ahead of the IPO of 9.2 million shares to ensure that Airbnb Hosts would share in the company’s success, a Directed Share Program that allowed thousands of Airbnb Hosts to participate in the IPO and proudly included twelve minority, women, and veteran-owned firms as co-managers in the IPO process.
In his time at Airbnb, Dave led the financial and strategic planning efforts that resulted in significant improvement in both the topline growth and bottom line profitability of the company throughout late 2020 and early 2021. Dave continues to build and scale Airbnb’s Finance organization to support being a public company, including building teams and developing processes supporting Internal Audit, Sarbanes Oxley compliance and other public company requirements. Dave is also co-executive sponsor and ally for Airbnb’s [email protected] affinity organization. Airbnb’s revenues were $4.8B and $3.4B in each of 2019 and 2020.
Dave joined Airbnb in January, 2019, after spending 17 years at Amazon, where he was most recently Vice President and CFO of their Worldwide Consumer Organization. Dave also served as CFO of Amazon’s International Consumer business and during his tenure led the finance function across many areas of the company, including North America Retail, Worldwide Merchant Services and Amazon Web Services (AWS). He also held roles as the President and CFO of Big Fish Games and started his career as a manufacturing engineer and later finance manager at Procter and Gamble.
Dave holds an MBA from the University of Iowa and a BS in Industrial and Management Engineering from Montana State University.
Dave is an Airbnb Host for a cabin on the edge of Mt Rainier National Park, and when he is not at work, you will find him skiing and boating with his wife and two daughters. He and his family are passionate global travelers and enjoy live music concerts whenever possible.