Donald Hicks Joins Airbnb as Vice President of Trust Policy & Partnerships
At Airbnb, building trust between hosts, guests and the communities in which we operate is mission critical. In fact, it’s the foundation of our mission to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. That’s why we couldn’t be more thrilled to welcome Donald Hicks as our VP of Trust Policy & Partnerships.
Donald’s focus will be on building strong global partnerships with our hosts, guests and our overall community. He will lead Airbnb’s Community Policy, Ethics, and Crisis Management teams, including Airbnb’s policies and support pertaining to important issues like safety, content moderation, host and guest standards, anti-discrimination, and more. He will also lead Airbnb’s Trust Partnerships teams, who help foster partnerships with organizations that share in our commitment to building trust online and offline, such as the UN’s Tech Against Terrorism initiative which Airbnb recently joined as the first sharing economy and travel industry partner.
“Building trust and fostering safe communities has been the center of my career for more than 20 years, and I’m so proud to help oversee the vision for Trust and Safety at Airbnb,” said Hicks.
Donald joins us from Twitter, where he oversaw global customer service, content moderation enforcement, crisis management, vendor management, support engineering, data analytics, and more.
“We’re delighted to have landed such a premium talent in Donald,” said Tara Bunch, Airbnb’s Head of Global Operations. “Throughout his impressive career, he has demonstrated expertise in elevating online safety while providing exceptional care for customers in the real world — which is critical for a platform like ours that works to facilitate safe offline connections between hosts and guests.”
Prior to Twitter, Donald led operations teams at Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, building on the first chapter of his career as a consultant for Deloitte. He has a deep passion for and understanding of the work of operations teams and believes in the power of partnerships between technology and operations teams.