As the COVID-19 crisis brought travel to a screeching halt, the people that rent rooms, condos and all sorts of other abodes on Airbnb suddenly found themselves with little to no income.

What's more, Airbnb instituted cancellation policies that allowed guests to get full refunds, a policy that made sense given the situation but which left many hosts with the short end of the stick.

GoFundMe campaigns have sprung up across the nation to help small businesses like bookstores and restaurants survive until the virus recedes and people begin to roam about again.

And in that vein, Airbnb employees created the Airbnb Superhost Relief Fund, a program intended to help at least some of its highest-rated hosts, known as "superhosts" to survive. The fund is limited to superhosts who can prove Airbnb is their main source of income, have been on the platform for at least a year and have two or less properties (a nod to regulatory pressure to limit hosts building big hotel-like businesses on Airbnb, with multiple listings).

The fund is invitation-only; Airbnb chooses who can apply. Superhosts will get up to $5,000 apiece as a grant, not a loan, although they'll be responsible for their own taxes.

Airbnb's weathly founders put $9 million into this fund. Company investors put in $7 million.

And Airbnb's employees contributed $1 million from their own pockets, the company says. Airbnb has its share of highly paid engineers, but it also has an army of of hourly workers.

"While I can't be certain I will receive an invite to apply, I cried tears of gratitude for the @Airbnb superhost grant fund. Losing my sole source of income overnight was tough," one host posted on Twitter. 

The employees' $1 million-worth of contribution to the fund is especially noteworthy given that Airbnb employees thought 2020 would be a jubilee year for them, as the company was expected to go public in one of the biggest IPOs of the year. That IPO is now on ice, and their employer is scrambling until the travel industry comes back. Airbnb has had to obtain $2 billion in two new financing deals this month.

Such generosity by people who are facing their own uncertain future is beautiful. 

But it also shows a scary side of our the so-called sharing economy.

It's not really sharing.

You take the risk, I take the money

The so-called independent workers running their own businesses are beholden to the tech company that owns the platform.

The tech company assumes very little of the business's risk. In Airbnb's case, it doesn't hold the mortgages or clean the rooms or pay the utilities or the taxes. In Uber's case, it doesn't make the car payments or pay for the maintenance. For Amazon's third party sellers, the retail giant doesn't pay for the products.

These platforms are built on the backs of these small business owners who don't share the power. If the platform changes a policy (which they have been known to do), they can devastate the people who risk it all to provide the platform with the products it sells.

Because Airbnb has been so lucrative, some people have leveraged themselves to the hilt with many mortgages, an unwise risk in hindsight. Those people won't be helped by the Superhost Relief Fund, as one angry host points out in a tweet.

"@Airbnb I don't understand [the] superhost relief fund NOT including the hosts who have dedicated everything to being AirBNB hosts (those w MANY listings). We are the ones whose sole income is #airBNB and we are the ones with HUGE mortgage costs sitting on our necks during #COVID2019"

Airbnb says these hosts may have qualified for small business loans under the emergency funding CARES Act, but the $349 billion federal relief program for US small businesses ran dry on Thursday, the SBA said.

If there were no Airbnb, those landlords would likely have been renting their rooms and apartments to long-term tenants. Airbnb properties are now flooding onto the rental market, which could lead to falling rents and, some say, will exacerbate an impending real estate collapse. 

Power to the suppliers

Obviously, no one wants to go back to a world where there are no tech platforms and no opportunities to build a global small-businesses accessible with the tap of the smartphone. The platforms provide the software, hire the engineers and pay the bills for the big cloud services that link everyone together.

But we may not want to go back to a world where the economic risk is not shared more equally by everyone. Whatever happens to the Airbnb property owners or the Uber drivers or other gig workers, the founders of these platforms are already billionaires and the well-paid engineers will likely land on their feet at other jobs.

There may be two outcomes after COVID-19. We may see the rise of some form of a union for platform suppliers where suppliers can band together and, in essence, collectively bargain. The platform will be forced to consult with the suppliers before it tinkers with policies that could badly hurt them. We've already heard whisperings of tenant associations forming in some parts of the real estate world.

Another intriguing potential outcome of the current crisis is the emergence of a new type of tech platform in which gig workers — that is, the "suppliers" in a platform business model — have greater control of their individual business.

For instance, a startup called Dumpling is doing this for grocery delivery workers. It offers software that lets personal shoppers build a grocery shopping client base, independent of, say, an Instacart. 

Dumpling was named by VCs as one of the startups that will thrive in the post coronavirus world. 

Supply-side platforms like this would allow sharing economy workers to use the broader platforms — whether for grocery delivery, transportation or home rentals — while also building their own, truly independent businesses.

Are you an Airbnb employee or insider with insight to share? Contact Julie Bort via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or on encrypted chat app Signal at (970) 430-6112 (no PR inquiries, please). Open DMs on Twitter @Julie188.  

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced businesses all around the world to shut down their offices and tell employees to work from home. 

Amazon, Facebook, and Google are just a few of the biggest companies close down offices their offices all around the world, forcing senior executives to strategize the future of their firms while relying on video-calls and text messages. 

Perlego – an online library startup dubbed the "Spotify of textbooks"– has analyzed the most popular books ordered by more than 600 C-suite executives using its platform. 

Titles include bestsellers by the likes of Nike cofounder Phil Knight, Nobel Prize-winning economist Jean Tirole and Ben Horowitz, one of the best-known investors in Silicon Valley. 

"Many CEOs, executives and other managers are using our platform to access a great source of new information," said CEO Gauthier Van Malderen.

"They're reading books on leading in times of crisis, dealing with stress, engaging a remote workforce, preparing for a post-COVID world and many more topics."

We broke down the top 20 most popular books among C-suite execs stuck in isolation: 

Clubhouse founder Paul Davison. Image Credit: JD Lasica

Houseparty chart ranks via AppAnnie

Loom

Around

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Pragli

An unofficial mockup of High Fidelity’s early tests. Image Credits: DigitalGlobe (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Slashtalk co-founder Ben Rubin at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2015

Under quarantine, media is actually social

Scams seeking to capitalize on the coronavirus pandemic have exploded, and one company is warning it will only get worse.

Robocalls increased more than eightfold in the final weeks of March, as lawmakers approved the $2 trillion CARES act, which includes a $1,200 stimulus payment to Americans below a certain income threshold.

"The recent COVID-19 epidemic has opened a prime opportunity for scammers to find new victims," Hiya said, noting that the most popular scams involve asking for someone's banking information, claiming it's needed for direct deposit of the stimulus check. Others, not unlike those that existed pre-coronavirus, include asking for social security numbers.

To avoid getting scammed, people should be reticent to give out personal details on the phone. 

"Under no condition would anyone from the federal government call asking for bank account details, social security numbers, or other personal information," Hiya says. "There are no known cures or preventative treatments for COVID-19 at this time. Never give credit card or checking account information to anyone claiming to sell Coronavirus tests or remedies."

US officials warned that scammers could make off with more than $100 million by the time everything is said and done.

On April 12, the Federal Trade Commission said it had received 16,788 reports of robocall scams since the beginning of the year. Nearly half of those reports said they lost money, totaling $12.78 million.

"We will not tolerate businesses seeking to take advantage of consumers' concerns and fears regarding coronavirus disease, exigent circumstances, or financial distress," Joe Simons, chairman of the FTC, said in a press release at the end of March.

You can report a coronavirus-related scam to the agency here.

The Fix: Powerwall batteries

After Hurricane Maria knocked out power for Puerto Rico's 3.5 million residents in September 2017 and left them without basic resources like running water, Tesla pledged to help install battery packs and repair solar panels on the island. 

While the official death toll was 64, a study released in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2018 claimed that over 4,000 more people died in the three months after the hurricane, largely due to problems getting medical care or medicines. That total death toll is likely closer to 3,000, according to researchers at George Washington University.

Shortly after the hurricane, San Juan Mayor Carmen Cruz said that it could take up to six months to restore the electric grid, and Tesla sent hundreds of its Powerwall batteries to help residents in the interim.

During an island-wide blackout in April 2018, Musk tweeted that Tesla batteries were delivering power to 662 locations in Puerto Rico, and that employees were working to install hundreds more. Two months later, Musk tweeted that Tesla has "about 11,000 projects underway in Puerto Rico." But since then, much of the equipment delivered to Puerto Rico has fallen into disrepair, according to a May 2019 HuffPost report, which found home and businesses with solar panels using diesel generators instead.

Musk has successfully provided power to areas affected by natural disasters before. In 2010, Musk and what was then SolarCity donated a solar power system to a hurricane response center in the Gulf Coast village of Coden, Alabama. The project, built by SolarCity and funded by the Musk Foundation, provided residents with an alternate source of power in case of an outage.

The following year, the Musk Foundation donated $250,000 to build a solar power system in Soma, a city in Japan's Fukushima prefecture that was devastated by a tsunami.

The verdict: He's helping, but with mixed results. 

WeWork's maintenance outsourcing provider has cut some of its cleaning staff even as buildings stay open during the coronavirus pandemic, per an email reviewed by Business Insider. 

JLL, one of the biggest real-estate services companies, laid off its community service associates on Friday via a conference call, said a source with knowledge of the situation, who was not authorized to speak to media. Business Insider has verified their identity. 

It's unclear exactly how many staff were cut; all employees with the title "community service associate" were laid off, per the email. A source with knowledge of the business said it was not a majority of the 1,000 WeWorkers who were outsourced to JLL in December. 

According to past online job postings, community service associates assure "positive Member experience through quality cleaning practices" and are responsible for duties like cleaning and maintaining restrooms, kitchens, and phone booths, disinfecting phone handles, brewing coffee, and maintaining emergency stairwells.

In New York, only about 5% of WeWork's members are using their office space, Business Insider reported on Friday. But according to its website, WeWork has not shut any of its US locations, explaining that because some of its members are essential and WeWork provides mail and other services, they can remain open.

Still, members have told Business Insider they were still expected to pay WeWork April rent, even if they are nonessential businesses that cannot enter the space. 

Smaller flexible-space companies, including Convene and The Wing, have closed and waived members' rent payments.

According to media reports, WeWork itself is planning further headcount reductions next month. Those cuts would come on top of thousands of jobs the coworking company has slashed after its IPO imploded. 

The layoffs come as businesses across industries are grappling with unprecedented drops in business and a massive shift for white-collar employees to work from home, leading to record unemployment claims. 

JLL employees laid off on Friday will receive a paycheck and benefits through the end of the month, and they'll be paid out for accrued paid time off, but not for sick days, per the email. JLL's separation pay packages vary by clients, a source with knowledge of the business said. 

"We understand that this news comes at a difficult time when people are being impacted due to the global economic slowdown," the Friday email said, directing employees toward unemployment sign-ups.

In December, WeWork said it would outsource its maintenance staff in the US and Canada to JLL in a cost-cutting move executives said was planned well before its failed initial public offering. A WeWork executive who left earlier this year told staff at the time that the outsourced workers' overall benefits would be comparable, per a leaked email.

In severance, though, employees' benefits vary widely. WeWork employees who were laid off in recent months have typically received three months of salary and health insurance coverage, not the JLL employees' 13 days of pay and benefits. 

Have a WeWork tip? Contact this reporter via encrypted messaging app Signal at +1 (646) 768-1627 using a non-work phone, email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., or Twitter DM at @MeghanEMorris. (PR pitches by email only, please.) You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Most experienced startup founders buy commercial insurance as a standard part of establishing a business, but there are always "trigger events" like the coronavirus that spur latecomer startups and other companies to scramble for business insurance policies, according to Sam Hodges. 

Hodges is the founder and CEO of Vouch, a startup providing business insurance to other startups. Founded in 2016, the startup aims to disrupt the insurance industry by offering policies for a range of liabilities that it says go beyond the five areas of risk evaluated by more traditional insurance companies. 

Vouch currently offers 9 categories of coverage ranging from cybersecurity policies to business property insurance (which would cover the laptops, desks and chairs of an office). Its insurance is targeted toward the core risks that early-stage startups are likely to encounter, according to Hodges. The startup's mission to revolutionize startup insurance has helped it attract prominent backers including Ribbit Capital and SVB Financial Group, the parent organization of Silicon Valley Bank. 

Now, as the coronavirus outbreak brings devastation to significant swathes of the economy, Hodges says that Vouch's role is more important than ever. 

While insurance companies are telling customers that their standard policies don't cover the wide-ranging economic havoc wrought by the coronavirus outbreak, Hodges says that the virus has prompted his customers to begin thinking in more detail about the particular kinds of risks that their startups are running — and to purchase  insurance coverage for those specific liabilities. 

"This entire situation made people more aware of how risk and how enterprise risk impact their business," Hodges said. He called it an "eye-opening" experience for the generation of startup founders who have yet to steer a company through a recession. 

Hodges says that the experience has motivated startups to to look for vulnerable spots in their strategies, marketing, financing and operations. For example, as startups have shifted to remote work, they are growing more careful about their data security. Vouch's cybersecurity insurance has become more in-demand among customers as a result, Hodges said.

And given the number of companies that are laying off workers to cut costs, Hodges says that employee practice liability insurance has also grown more popular. 

"I think people are very aware of the fact that how they take care of the people in moments like this is really important,'' Hodges said. "So as part of that, frankly, having employment practice liability insurance is a really good idea."

As government measures to control the coronavirus pandemic keep workers home and many businesses closed, the insurance industry's reluctance to extend coverage for the resulting financial losses has become a point of contention between public officials and the industry.

A letter penned by 18 Congress members to different insurers last month asked insurance companies to define the coronavirus outbreak's financial wallop as a covered loss under their existing commercial property insurance policies.

"We urge you to work with your member companies and brokers to recognize financial loss due to COVID-19 as a part of policyholders' business interruption coverage," the letter said. 

The insurance industry has so far refused, arguing that the effects of the pandemic are so sweeping that the industry would go bankrupt. "You just can't underwrite risk like that, it's not affordable," one industry representative told the Washington Examiner.

Hodges agrees with the majority of insurance companies, telling Business Insider that it is "impossible" to insure broadly against all coronavirus losses because of the enormous scope of the damage that has resulted from it. 

So for now, he's counselling his startup customers to think about the massive changes that their companies could be going through in the coming months. They can then spot possible new areas of risk, and begin exploring their insurance options. 

A few days after purchasing Animal Crossing: New Horizons — the wildly popular Nintendo Switch game in which the player lives life and completes tasks on a tropical island — I got an invite to visit my friend Andy's island, Flavortown. Appropriately, Andy immediately gave me a pizza oven; I purchased matching sporty sunglasses from the blue hedgehog posted up outside Town Hall. 

Inside his house, one room was decked out like a club, and we ran around in circles and wiggled back and forth pretending to dance. Andy and I are both roughly 30 years old, but for a few minutes, I felt as happy as my small baby-proportioned avatar looked. 

But in the dozen hours I've put into the game so far, approximately 15 minutes have made me feel this way. Fourteen of them were spent on islands that are not my own, and one of them happened when my friend Dillon sent me a nice hat in the mail. 

The rest of the time has been frustrating, tedious, and immensely boring, mostly involving mashing buttons to get through endlessly repeating dialogue boxes with chibi animals mumbling gibberish and re-filling countless holes I dug in the wrong place. 

After a reasonable amount of casual play, here's what I'm left with: Animal Crossing New Horizons sucks, and I don't want to play it anymore. 

This is not a personal attack. I know and respect many people who love this stupid baby game. My friend Alexa described it as less a game than a "dopamine generator." If it makes you feel that way, please, do not let me spoil your soma. But thus far, my time on the game's sandy beaches has left me with far more complaints than compliments.

The user interface is slow, clunky, and infuriatingly designed.

It requires as many individual button presses as possible to accomplish the desired action, and you are forced to navigate it in order to perform basically every action required of you. 

Why is "put in storage" the second option on the list when I am operating the inventory inside my house, clearly trying to put things in storage? Why is it so hard to equip my net when I am being chased by a swarm of wasps? And why, for the love of Anthropomorphic Animal God, can I not eat the pizza in the pizza oven?

These are minor things, you might say. Fine. Let's get to more important things. Prior to this game, my exposure to Animal Crossing was largely through osmosis, with  Tumblr-era posts reminiscing about cute interactions with the lively denizens of their villages. (The game has several iterations dating back to 2001.) 

So imagine my surprise when I was placed on a deserted island with only two fellow residents, not counting our Tanuki landlord and his sycophantic offspring. My companions were an obnoxious purple rhinoceros with a tic for saying "yo" multiple times in a row and a gym bro tiger who was admittedly pretty dope. 

After I'd placed tents for my neighbors, they proceeded to do nothing.

I could talk to them, or give them gifts, but otherwise, they wandered around our little section of island taking up oxygen. Eventually, I got a barbell as a gift, but the buff tiger won't come lift it with me. What is the point of this if I cannot even lift? 

There are other tasks, but none are particularly rewarding. I could fish, although the mechanism is so basic it reduces the process to pulling the lever on a slot machine to see if the right critter comes out. I could collect fruit or plant trees, a time-consuming process that requires me to interact with the game's aforementioned atrocious UI. 

Consider Stardew Valley, another resource-management type game with an intricate internal economy and wealth of customization options. Stardew's sheer cosmetic variety is more fun, if slightly more limiting, than Animal Crossing. But what sets it apart is the compelling story and narrative at the heart of the game. 

This is thus far my biggest problem with Animal Crossing: I have no connection to any of the villagers or characters who come through the island.

The only saving grace is the option to visit your real life friends' islands.

But if I log on and none of my friends are playing, there is literally nothing that I want to do. The game relies heavily on its social aspects; without other human players its world is lifeless, dead, and repetitive.

Even those social aspects are hard to access. Playing with friends requires you to be in the same physical location, or have the Nintendo Online subscription, which costs an extra $3.99 per month. If your internet service is anything but flawless, it's also prone to booting friends off your island unexpectedly. And even if all those things go well, you still need to navigate several dialogue boxes and watch unskippable cinematics just to get one friend on land. 

My friend Chris, who has put so many hours into the game he refused to give me a definite count, says that at a certain point Animal Crossing becomes less of a resource management game and more of "a game about creativity/customization." That's fine if you're a zen hoarder or want to re-create weird rooms that appear in Twin Peaks, but for $60, I expected much more than a slightly more interactive Myspace page.

Also, Tom Nook is a capitalist overlord.

The entire setting and motivation of Animal Crossing is indentured servitude to an aggressive loan shark who appears to be selling a timeshare scam to the rest of the world's inhabitants. In Stardew Valley, at least you get to choose whether or not to side with the monolithic megacorporation that threatens to overwhelm the diverse and thriving small town you live in. In Animal Crossing, you start the game as a cog in the machine, and there is no way to escape. 

One of the first items I got was a hamster cage, complete with a tiny, proportionally-hamster sized rodent in it. As cosmetic items largely serve little interactive purpose beyond binary on-off switches, you cannot do anything with the hamster. But if you zoom all the way in, you can see it running on its little wheel for hours, making no progress and never changing course. I feel for that poor guy. He's doing the same monotonous garbage as me, but he can't even change the wallpaper.

Jack Crosbie is a writer who covers politics, culture and whatever else publications will pay him to cover. He is thinking of adopting a cat. Follow him on Twitter @jscros, unless you are going to be mean, in which case please do not.

Read more: 

The Nintendo Switch is sold out nearly everywhere — and the ones you can buy are being sold at 2x to 3x the price

I just started playing the wildly popular game 'Animal Crossing' that has taken over the internet, and I'm convinced it's the perfect way to escape COVID-19 lockdown life

Meet Nintendo developer Katsuya Eguchi, who created Animal Crossing after being inspired by the loneliness of moving to a new city

Amazon attempted to shut down a virtual event where workers spoke out about working conditions at the company's warehouses by deleting employees' calendar invites, organizers told The Seattle Times.

Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, two of the event's organizers who were fired by Amazon last week after publicly criticizing its coronavirus response, told The Seattle Times that the company deleted the invites from its internal calendar, though several hundred employees had already seen and accepted it.

"Amazon has shown they will not allow us to share details for how to join the meeting internally, so we are forced to gather externally," Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, the group behind the event, wrote in a Google form announcing the event.

"We want to tell Amazon that we are sick of all this – sick of the firings, sick of the silencing, sick of pollution, sick of racism, and sick of the climate crisis," Costa said Thursday during the event, which was attended by around 400 Amazon employees, according to Computer Weekly.

Amazon refused to comment on claims by Cunningham and Costa that it deleted calendar invites, but said in a statement to Business Insider: "We support every employee's right to criticize their employer's working conditions, but that does not come with blanket immunity against any and all internal policies. We terminated these employees for repeatedly violating internal policies."

The company has come under fire in recent weeks from workers who say Amazon hasn't done enough to protect them from COVID-19, with people testing positive for the disease in at least 74 of the company's facilities.

Workers have cited everything from conditions that make social distancing impossible to the company's limited paid sick leave policies, and have organized strikes in New York, Chicago, and Italy in addition to Thursday's virtual event, where employees called for a "sick out" on April 24.

Amazon has also faced scrutiny from lawmakers over its response to its workers speaking out. In at least four cases since the pandemic began, the company fired workers almost immediately after their involvement in organizing protests. A fifth told The New York Times he was terminated after giving the company notice that he would be resigning because he objected to the company's treatment of warehouse workers.

After Amazon fired warehouse worker Christian Smalls the same day he organized a walkout, New York City's human-rights commissioner opened an investigation into the termination. Later that week, a leaked memo obtained by Vice showed Amazon executives discussing efforts to mount a PR campaign against Smalls, calling him "not smart or articulate." Following news of the memo, Amazon told employees it may fire those who "intentionally violate" social distancing rules at work.

Amazon has been trying to balance the safety of its workers with increased demand for its services as coronavirus lockdowns worldwide fuel a surge in online shopping. The company said Monday it will add 75,000 more jobs on top of the 100,000 roles it added last month, which it said are now filled.

If you are lucky enough to not be among the 22 million Americans who lost their jobs this month, chances are, you are working from home.

And if you work for a tech company or live in a major metropolitan area, chances are you've been working from home for a month.

Tech CEOs have noticed that their companies are still running well and employees are still productive even with everyone working from home. For instance, just this week, Oracle founder and chairman Larry Ellison felt so moved by how well his 136,000-employee strong company had been performing, that he took to YouTube to praise the videoconference tech they are using, Zoom, and to say that the company will never fully go back to just in-person meetings again.

"If everyone can really work at home, why do we have all these big offices around the world?" says Rimini Street CEO Seth Ravin, a software technical support company based in Las Vegas that operates 30 offices worldwide.

"Maybe you don't need everyone having an office, right? Maybe you don't need all that real estate. Maybe you only need half. And it's just full of conference rooms and hotel-like spaces for those who come in and use it occasionally versus permanently based in the office," he says.

He predicts. "You're going to see so many companies rethinking real estate."

Flex is in, desks are out 

He says that Japan is providing the ultimate proving point.  The notoriously hard-working Japanese culture centers around office life and doesn't have much a remote work ethic. But at the urging of government officials major Japanese companies such as Honda, Toyota and Nissan have asked staff to work from home. And Japan's Ministry of Labor has offered grants to help small and medium-sized companies retool themselves to support teleworking, reports CNN.

Okta CEO Todd McKinnon agrees. His company grew from 1,561 employees at the start of 2019 to 2,248 employees at the start of 2020, most of them at its 207,000 square-foot San Francisco headquarters but also scattered among offices in 12 other countries.

His real estate team has not only secured the lease for that building, but had been working on grabbing more square footage in expensive and competitive San Francisco in preparation for more growth.

But now that his company has been successfully working from home for a month "this is going to lead to us having less square footage of real estate for sure," McKinnon says.

"Our growth plans were to add a bunch more square footage, but I think we're seeing with the productivity we're having, we probably don't need as much square footage," he said. Now his real estate team is talking about turning the office "into more flexible work environments, not dedicated desks, and moving to a more dynamic, flexible work space."

The idea is to allow employees and teams who are thriving working from home to continue, with no pressure to commute to an office every day, except for a specific need for an in-person gathering.

Not great for WeWork

To the extent that WeWork doubles down on its original, so-called "space-as-a-service" offering, where it offers companies very flexible short-term lease terms on smaller spaces, WeWork could fair well in the post-COVID-19 business world, McKinnon believes.

Prior to the COVID-19 WeWork was gravitating towards longer-term, more lucrative, and less-risky enterprise contracts, where it custom-designed offices spaces for large companies. Its current website is splashed with endorsements from companies like GE, BBC Royal Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, for instance.

But in the post-coronavirus world, larger companies won't need such a real estate middleman, especially when they're shrinking their real estate footprint.

"That's not going to be great for the real estate business, even the WeWorks, if this kind of culture holds. You would rent less space from them than you would before," says Ravin.

Interestingly, this could become a new business opportunity for both landlords and coworking companies, says New York venture capitalist Charlie O'Donnell, the founder of the seed-stage fund Brooklyn Bridge Ventures. Among O'Donnell's investments is some real estate startups including like The Wing, a coworking space designed for women. The Wing has been hurting during lockdown and laid-off nearly all of its staff last week.

O'Donnell has been vocally opposed to the way WeWork has been treating some of its struggling startup tenants.

He sees real the potential for a new business model, one that involves even more flexible space than coworking, or even The Wing-like clubs.

"Maybe flexible work space is an answer, but much more flexible than that's been offered by a coworking company," O'Donnell says.

Instead of a permanent desk in a room, multiple companies might use a room more like a timeshare, keeping their things in lockers when other tenants used the space. He points to an office furniture company like Heartwork, which designs easily moved furniture and office cabinets on casters, as being an example of how this might be set up.

"Spaces could be built with the assumption that the same people are not in every day. Maybe they're going to use this office only on Thursdays," he suggests.

The one thing that most business leaders can agree on is that now that workers have gotten a taste of home offices with no commute, and CEOs have seen the money that can be saved on real estate, the status quo will shift.

"It changes real estate," says Ravin. "It changes the way people think about what are the critical things we spend our money on."

San Francisco will start requiring people to wear a mask when they leave their homes for essential needs.

Based on guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the city's new order will require residents to have a mask covering their nose and mouth at essential businesses, public facilities, and on public transit. That includes waiting in line to enter a grocery store or picking up food from a restaurant. Essential workers are also required to cover their faces.

However, people are not required to wear face coverings while outdoors walking, hiking, bicycling, or running. They're instead recommended to have one on hand.

The mask does not need to be an N-95 or surgical mask — it can be a homemade mask, bandanna, scarf, or a towel. The order is part of the city's efforts in preparing for eventual relaxed shelter-in-place restrictions.

"As we look to a time where we can begin to ease the Stay Home Order, we know that face coverings will be part of that future – and we want San Franciscans to become more comfortable with this new normal," Mayor London Breed said in a press release. "We know it will take some time to get used to, but it will help save lives."

The order, issued by County Health Officer Tomás Aragón, is effective going into Saturday, but will not be enforced until April 22. A similar order was announced by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday. 

The coronavirus disease, known as COVID-19, is transmissible through respiratory droplets. Wearing a mask can help prevent sick people from infecting others as well as healthy people who aren't exhibiting symptoms from passing it onto others.

San Francisco was one of six counties in the Bay Area that enacted a shelter-in-place order on March 17.

There are probably few startup founders who are in as much need for guidance and direction from experienced leaders right now as Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky.

The online travel company's business — like others in the industry — has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic. But in addition to just trying to stay afloat, Airbnb has the tricky job of trying to balance that imperative with addressing the needs and interests of the travelers and property managers that use its online marketplace, and without which it wouldn't have a business.

Fortunately for Chesky, he's got an assembly of seasoned operators and financial experts on his company's board of directors. They include Kenneth Chenault, the former CEO of American Express; Angela Ahrendts, who was CEO of fashion retailer Burberry before becoming the head of Apple's retail division; Alfred Lin, who was chairman of and chief operating officer of shoe retailer Zappos; and Jeff Jordan, who served as the CEO of restaurant reservation company Open Table when it went public.

Until a couple of months ago, this board of directors would likely have been laser-focused on a planned IPO that was expected to value the company at $40 billion or more. Now, the directors must apply their business experience to navigating a crisis instead of a Wall Street debut.

Chesky, 38, now meets every Sunday with his eight fellow board directors, he told the Wall Street Journal.

In this crisis "you're only focused on this moment, and all I try to do is just get to next week," Chesky told the Journal.

Interestingly, Airbnb's board does not technically have an official chairperson or lead independent director, though Chesky effectively serves as the board leader, chairing meetings and handling other functions.

According to some media reports there has been flashes of tension between Chesky and certain directors as the company grapples with the crisis, though Airbnb spokesperson Nick Papas has denied the tensions.

The pandemic has crushed Airbnb's business

What's clear is that the board's ability to collaborate and to leverage its collective wisdom will be put to the test by the pandemic.

With governments around the world having restricted the movement of their citizens to try to contain the coronavirus outbreak, little leisure or business travel is taking place. Thousands of flights have been cancelled and hotel operators have laid off thousands of workers.

Some 90% of reservations with recent check-in dates at Airbnb — which dominates the market — were cancelled, according to industry research firm AirDNA. And new bookings in the United States have fallen by more than half in the last two months.

Several Airbnb directors have gone through experiences similar to what he's facing. Chenault, for example, took over American Express right before the dot-com bust hit in 2001. He then led the financial giant through the Great Recession. Ahrendts was in charge at Burberry during that downturn. Jordan was heading OpenTable and guided it through a successful initial public offering at a time when few companies were going IPO.

"If I was the CEO, I'd look at [Airbnb's board] and say, 'Hey, I've got a good, diverse group of people that have been through the ringer. They've had a lot of experiences in the past,'" said Harry Kraemer, clinical professor of leadership at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. "They'll help them get through that as best as any board I could think of."

Airbnb's directors have lots of varied experience

One seeming hole in Airbnb's board is its lack of someone with direct experience in the travel industry, running a hotel chain, say, or an airline, or another one of the online travel sites, such as Expedia. But that's maybe not as big a problem as it might seem, said Kraemer.

American Express, which Chenault ran for nearly two decades, is primarily a financial services company, but it does plenty of travel-related things. People can book trips and hotels through it. It has a corporate travel service. And it offers services such as travelers checks and travelers insurance.

"I think of Amex as a travel company," Kraemer said. "That's basically what they do."

But having direct experience in the industry in which a company operates is not necessarily that important for its board members, he said. Indeed, it can be a benefit to have directors who come from other industries, because they often have different ways of looking at problems, he said. And in many cases, the knowledge and experience they have from their own industries can translate to that of the company on whose board they serve.

Prior to becoming a professor, Kraemer was CEO of healthcare firm Baxter International. Among his board members was Fred Turner, who at the time was the CEO of McDonalds. Turner had no experience in the healthcare industry, but he did have experience managing a complex supply chain and operating internationally.

"He was incredibly valuable," Kraemer said.

The board and Chesky have reportedly been at odds

Crises such as the one playing out right now can lead to a wide range of negative emotions — stress, worry, fear, anxiety — all of which can hamper decision-making and lead to interpersonal conflict. Even companies with well-regarded directors aren't immune to such problems. Indeed, there has already been a report of tensions playing out at Airbnb in particular.

Airbnb operates a kind of accommodation marketplace, helping travelers who are looking for places to stay connect with property managers with apartments, rooms, and houses. Typically, the company allows property managers to set their own terms for reservations, including their cancellation policies. But after the coronavirus outbreak turned into a pandemic and governments started ordering their citizens to stay in their homes, Airbnb decided to override its hosts' terms and allow guests to cancel their reservations and get full refunds. The move infuriated many property managers.

It also ticked off some of Airbnb's directors, because Chesky didn't inform them before making the change, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Papas, the Airbnb spokesperson, has said Airbnb's board and management had "extensive discussions" about the cancellation policy change. 

But that's not the only area of reported tension. After being close to breakeven in 2018, Airbnb's bottom line dipped deeply into the red last year, long before anyone had heard of COVID-19. Chenault and Mather have been pushing Chesky and the company's management team to cut costs, and have picked up that effort in the wake of the crisis, The Journal reported.

Among the areas Chenault and Mather have been pushing Chesky to cut is Airbnb Experiences, according to The Journal. That offering, which helps travelers book tours, has lost $1 billion, The Journal reported.

Papas has said that instead of telling Chesky to cut the experiences services, Airbnb's board has encouraged the company to keep investing in it.

Airbnb reportedly told employees last month that it is cutting its marketing expenses and freezing most hiring to conserve costs. It recently raised $2 billion in debt financing — at a high cost — to shore up its bank accounts. Even so, the company faces the prospect of running out of cash in the near future if the travel business doesn't revive soon.

But tensions aren't surprising given what's going on

Some investors are unhappy with Chesky himself, according to The Journal, although it's unclear if their feelings have been echoed by any members of Airbnb's board. Those investors have pushed to have Chesky step down, give up some of his voting control over the company, or bring in an executive with experience in turnarounds to help guide him through this period, The Journal reported.

Papas has denied anyone communicated those demands to Airbnb.

Regardless, it's not surprising nor necessarily concerning for such tensions to be playing out in the company's board room, Kraemer said. Similar discussions are playing out at lots of other companies right now; they just aren't getting the same attention as what's happening at Airbnb, he said. Many companies are facing dramatic declines in their business and are having to make tough choices on how to best move forward. When jobs and product lines and the like are on the line, contentious discussions aren't unusual, he said.

"The discussion's going to get heated," Kraemer said. "I would be amazed if there wasn't a lot discussions on [how to react to the crisis] and a lot disagreements."

Here are the members of Airbnb's board and some of their relevant experiences:

The Canadian rapper Tiagz (Tiago Garcia-Arenas) is quickly rising up in the music world and he owes it all to TikTok. 

After having multiple songs go viral on the short-form video app, the 22-year-old producer landed a deal with the record label Epic Records, which represents artists like DJ Khaled, Mariah Carey, and Camila Cabello. His Spotify account now averages three million monthly listeners, and he's generated tens of millions of streams on his top tracks.

Tiagz is certainly not the first artist to recognize TikTok's potential for catapulting an artist or song into mainstream culture. Lil Nas X first rose to fame when his single "Old Town Road" blew up on the app and Drake recently released a sample of his new track "Toosie Slide" on TikTok so its users could learn to dance to it before it officially launched on music streaming services. TikTok's imprint on the music industry is undeniable as the app continues to shape the Billboard's Hot 100 singles chart each month.

But for Tiagz, TikTok has been more than just a promotional tool. TikTok trends and memes have defined the creative direction that he's taken as a music artist. 

Tiagz's strategy for growing an audience on TikTok has been to write songs that directly reference a phrase or idea that's become popular on the app. Since joining TikTok in August 2019, several of Tiagz's songs have gone viral through this method, appearing in over 5 million videos to-date. 

The artist's first successful song on TikTok was "Rise and Shine," a two-minute track that sampled a snippet of a video of Kylie Jenner singing the words "rise and shine" to her daughter. The song appeared in a few thousand videos on the app and Tiagz spent hours "dueting" and reposting the track in order to try to boost its popularity. 

"I tried to understand the platform," Tiagz told Business Insider. "I kept doing these memes because I saw that it worked."

The producer continued to grow his TikTok audience after posting a song that sampled a popular meme in India, "Chicken Leg Bis (Chicken Leg Piece)," which was used by the former Miss India, Ruhi Singh. Tiagz's next track, "I'm in the Ghetto (Ratatata)" (also referencing a TikTok meme), was used in over 9,000 videos, and encouraged the artist to continue leaning into trending topics.

Tiagz's surging popularity on TikTok caught the attention of Eric Parker of EP Music Group, who reached out about becoming the artist's manager. 

"He explained a little about the music industry and the business and he was also a lawyer," Tiagz said. "At that time, a lot of people were reaching out, so I was just really closed up. I thought that everyone just wanted to monetize stuff, or money, or this or that. But he reached out and said, 'Hey look, I can really help you.'"

Tiagz's popularity really exploded on TikTok once some of the app's top influencers began using his song, "My Heart Went Oops," which sampled an already trending 1951 jazz single "Oops!" that was first performed by the actress Doris Day.

"I told myself people aren't really going to jam to a jazz and blues song," Tiagz said. "I'm going to make a trap song with it. I'm going to twist it, and it's going to be super cool. I called it 'My Heart Went Oops' because I knew that people when they were going to search for the sound were going to search 'my heart went oops.' It was a strategy so that people could find it."

The TikTok user Troy Zarba, who has 3.2 million followers, added "My Heart Went Oops" to a video, and then TikTok's most popular creator, Charli D'Amelio, posted a video of herself dancing to the song at Dunkin' Donuts. 

"As soon as she used the sound, all the verified creators started using it, and I was like, 'Yo, this is crazy.' After that the label reached out. Then all the other labels started reaching out, and I was like, 'Whoa, I think now people are noticing.'"

After getting a manager and record deal with Epic Records, Garcia-Arenas quit his part-time job teaching kids' gymnastics and parkour at a local center in Ottawa to focus full time on creating music. He also began to go through proper channels to get approval to use samples in his songs, running them by his record label for clearance before posting.

"I didn't really know everything about clearance and all that stuff, so I would just release and that was it," Tiagz said. "I saw a lot of interviews of other artists and they were explaining, 'Don't ever let sampling stop you from your creativity.'"

Since its release, Tiagz's "My Heart Went Oops" has appeared in over 3 million videos on TikTok. His recent track "They Call Me Tiago (Her Name is Margo)" — which was also used in videos by Charli D'Amelio and her sister Dixie — has appeared in roughly 2 million TikTok videos. Tiagz now has 1.6 million followers on the app. 

Having TikTok's top users dance to his tracks has been the most effective way of getting noticed on the app, Tiagz said. The artist said he tried paying a creator to promote one of his songs in the past (paid song integrations are a fairly common way for TikTok influencers to earn a living), but it wasn't nearly as effective as having his songs appear in videos from the app's popular creators organically.

Even after signing with Epic Records, Tiagz said he's continuing to focus on producing music about current memes and trends since that's what's driven his success as an artist thus far.

Tiagz recently released a track called "Bored in My House (Quarantine)," and is working on collaborations with other creators like King Bach.

"The trends work, but the quality of the music matters too because a lot of songs that I made are flops," he said. "I think it's important to keep that same process and maybe evolve through time, but not really change the strategy completely."

For more stories on how artists and creators are building a business on TikTok, check out these other Business Insider Prime posts: