Airbnb announces Gus Fuldner as Global Head of Operations

Airbnb Co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky shared the following email with employees around the globe today:

Hey team,

I want to start by thanking Tara.

Tara, it’s hard to overstate what it meant to me when you joined Airbnb in May 2020. You left a secure role at Apple to join a travel company in the middle of a pandemic. We’d lost 80% of our business, and people were questioning whether Airbnb would survive. You stepped in at the moment when we needed you most.

Over the next six years, you didn’t just help us get through the crisis; you rebuilt our operations. Today, Global Ops is stronger than ever. The major wins you highlighted across NPS, fraud, and AirCover represent a massive step change in how we serve and earn the trust of our guests and hosts.

That kind of progress took great leadership, and an incredible team that was willing to do the hard work day after day. You built that muscle across Global Ops, with a leadership team that will carry it forward.

Tara and I have been talking about this transition for some time. There wasn’t a fixed timeline, but we always knew that when the right leader became available, we’d be ready.

I’m excited to share that we’ve found that leader in Gus Fuldner.

To understand what makes Gus so unique, you have to go back a few decades.

In high school, he started a one-person computer consulting business because he loved fixing things. In college, he helped build a financial services company for students that later went public. He then worked in fintech and payments before joining Benchmark as an investor. One of their portfolio companies at the time had ~20 employees, no real payments system, and needed help. That company was Uber.

When Gus later joined Uber full-time in 2013, it was still a true startup. He was brought in to solve problems no one else had figured out. When Uber expanded from black cars to everyday drivers, insurance became a critical challenge. Without solving it, ridesharing wouldn’t have worked. Gus built the first insurance models for ridesharing, enabling Uber and others to scale globally.

Over time, he became one of the key architects behind how Uber scaled, building the operational systems that powered hundreds of millions of rides and deliveries every week. As Senior Vice President of Core Services, he led global teams across Safety, Support, Payments, Insurance, and Identity. Inside Uber, they had a saying: “In Gus we trust.”

What impresses me most about Gus is how he leads. Most people are either detail people or big-picture people. Gus is both. He lives in the details but can also zoom back out to drive strategic decisions. And most importantly, he’s a power user of his own product. He would regularly drive for Uber and pushed leaders to do the same. Since 2016, Gus has spent every New Year’s Eve behind the wheel driving for Uber! He chose the busiest night of the year because it was the most efficient way to see the system under pressure and hear directly from as many riders as possible. He knows you can’t lead a global operation from a spreadsheet. You have to be on the ground, in the weeds, experiencing the service alongside your community.

That mindset shapes how he thinks about operations and how he’ll lead at Airbnb. He doesn’t see it as a collection of support tickets or manual tasks. He sees it as a system that, when designed thoughtfully, can elevate the entire guest experience. He understands that behind every safety issue and every support interaction is a real person.

I’ve asked Gus to be our chief problem solver. His mandate is to take on Airbnb’s hardest challenges and help make this one of the best-run companies in tech.

Today, operations are spread across teams and systems that don’t operate as one intelligent platform. We need to unify them into a single, AI-powered service platform so every time someone interacts with Airbnb, we instantly understand who they are and what they need. That intelligence becomes the foundation for trust, personalization, quality, and scale. This requires a leader who can bring clarity to complexity while protecting what makes Airbnb special—someone who can fuse operational excellence with our soul. That’s why Gus is the right person for this next chapter.

Gus’s first day is March 16.

Please join me in thanking Tara and welcoming Gus to Airbnb.

Brian