Brian Chesky and Belinda Johnson (Credit: AirBnB)
FROM TRD New York: Laurence Tosi, the chief financial officer of short-term rental giant Airbnb, is leaving the company amid tension with Airbnb’s number one, Brian Chesky.
The former Blackstone Group executive was a proponent of Airbnb’s going public, and with Tosi’s exit, the IPO will be delayed until at least 2019, Bloomberg reported.
“We are not going public in 2018,” co-founder and CEO Chesky said in a statement on Thursday. “We will make decisions about going public on our own timetable.”
The company also announced that Belinda Johnson will assume the role of chief operating officer. Johnson has been with the company since 2011, most recently as chief of business affairs and legal officer. She previously worked at Yahoo and Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com.
Tosi, who joined the company in 2015, has been a known figure on Wall Street. He was once tapped by Steve Jobs to be CFO of Apple but declined to remain at Blackstone. Under Tosi’s reign, Airbnb became profitable — raking in $100 million in profit last year — but sources told Bloomberg that the executive’s financial discipline and cost-cutting ways clashed with Chesky’s ambition and Airbnb’s Silicon Valley culture.
According to the statement released by Airbnb, Tosi is leaving to spend more time on his personal investment fund Weston Capital Partners. [Bloomberg] — Chava Gourarie
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