Maybe this isn't really a founder mode problem. Airbnb has a two-sided marketplace, so improving the experience for guests can sometimes hurt hosts, and vice versa. Some of the recurring complaints about customer service may therefore come from incentives built into the marketplace rather than from a lack of founder involvement.

I'd say "founder mode" (if we must use such silly terms) did pretty well for them to IPO at over 100 billion for a single segment of the travel market Booking Holdings could easily have done themselves (and to an extent actually does) in the middle of the pandemic though. But all the growth since then was priced in to the market's expectations for them to deliver upon, as were expectations that AirBnB might expand into other markets...

Booking Holdings generates more revenue and profit from having more products in more markets, and was underpriced rather than overpriced in 2020. People moan about them at least as much as AirBnB, but ultimately people moan about their websites or policies because they're using them...