{"id":152850,"date":"2025-02-28T04:06:08","date_gmt":"2025-02-28T04:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2025\/02\/28\/airbnb-co-founder-joe-gebbia-takes-wraps-off-his-first-assignment-for-doge-techcrunch\/"},"modified":"2025-02-28T04:06:08","modified_gmt":"2025-02-28T04:06:08","slug":"airbnb-co-founder-joe-gebbia-takes-wraps-off-his-first-assignment-for-doge-techcrunch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2025\/02\/28\/airbnb-co-founder-joe-gebbia-takes-wraps-off-his-first-assignment-for-doge-techcrunch\/","title":{"rendered":"Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia takes wraps off his first assignment for DOGE | TechCrunch"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p id=\"speakable-summary\" class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Almost two weeks after The New York Times <a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/02\/13\/us\/politics\/airbnb-joe-gebbia-musk-doge.html\" target=\"_blank\">reported<\/a> that Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia had joined Elon Musk\u2019s \u201cDepartment of Government Efficiency,\u201d Gebbia clarified his role on Thursday, <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/jgebbia\/status\/1895217230314410144\" target=\"_blank\">announcing on X<\/a> that as a starting point, he\u2019ll be leveraging his design expertise as part of a broader effort to overhaul the government\u2019s notoriously slow, paper-heavy retirement process.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The system could certainly use the help. Chuck Ezell, acting director of OPM, said in a <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/USOPM\/status\/1895216274407350428\" target=\"_blank\">video testimonial <\/a>released today \u2014 and republished by Gebbia \u2014 that one week ago, the administration challenged the agency to \u201cprocess a retiree, end to end, digitally, without printing anything to paper.\u201d The deadline? Just one week.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the same video, an agency employee tells the cameraman that they\u2019ve already managed to shrink the process to two days.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Whether that process is scalable or sustainable remains to be seen, but OPM has been under pressure for years to modernize its systems. Last summer, the agency launched a <a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/federalnewsnetwork.com\/retirement\/2023\/04\/pressure-builds-on-opm-to-fix-delays-backlog-in-retirement-services\/\" target=\"_blank\">pilot program<\/a> for a new online retirement application platform.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In 2023, several lawmakers issued a <a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.duckworth.senate.gov\/news\/press-releases\/duckworth-durbin-kelly-urge-office-of-personnel-management-to-address-delays-in-delivering-federal-retirement-benefits\" target=\"_blank\">press release<\/a>, urging the OPM to address the sluggish processing of retirees, who were sometimes waiting more than 90 days to receive their benefits.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Gebbia \u2014 a billionaire many times over thanks to his Airbnb holdings \u2014 still serves on the board of the short-term rental giant. Since September 2022, he has also been a board member at Tesla.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In his X post about his next steps, Gebbia wrote: \u201cSince leaving my operating role at Airbnb in 2022, I\u2019ve been looking for the next digital design challenge. And I can think of few more important ones than volunteering to improve the user experience within our government.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In addition to co-founding Airbnb, Gebbia is the co-founder of Samara, a spin-out of Airbnb that builds pre-fabricated homes that customers can customize, choosing layouts, colors, windows, doors, and decks, with Samara saying it handles the rest, including obtaining the associated permits.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Last week, Samara announced it would donate $15 million worth of the dwellings to support Los Angelenos who lost their homes in the fires of last month.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2025\/02\/27\/airbnb-co-founder-joe-gebbia-takes-wraps-off-his-first-assignment-for-doge\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Almost two weeks after The New York Times reported that Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia had joined Elon Musk\u2019s \u201cDepartment of Government Efficiency,\u201d Gebbia clarified his role on Thursday, announcing on X that as a starting point, he\u2019ll be leveraging his design expertise as part of a broader effort to overhaul the government\u2019s notoriously slow, paper-heavy [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":152851,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-152850","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152850\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}