One evening in early 2008, I got the opportunity to meet Michael at an Austin hotel during SXSW. I pitched him on the idea for Airbnb, and he took us under his wing. For the rest of the year, we would visit his office every Friday night for hours on end. Each session, Joe and I would demo our latest site and report on our progress. Michael taught me about fundraising, product growth, and building the basics of a startup culture. He kept reminding us to take just a few more steps. If we had known just how many steps there were, we may have been discouraged, but Michael always made progress feel within reach. The most important thing Michael did was believe in us. Had it not been for Michael, there might not be an Airbnb today.
This was not a "company town" in the way that is being referenced in the comments. It was quite literally a prototype community where residents would only live for about a year. It was primarily funded by other companies to showcase their products and develop R&D labs. Walt's stated goal was to inspire cities around the world to develop their urban centers in this model. Before he died, he said, "I don't believe there's a challenge anywhere in the world that's more important to people everywhere than finding solutions to the problems of our cities." Whether this design would have succeeded is the subject of much debate, though there were many elements that were radical in their time (wedway people mover, airport of the future with oval runway, tiered transportation levels).
Of course, the problems you solve for a transient resident that's required to be employed (by the company that runs the town) and is only going to spend one year of his/her life there are much different than the problems a real-world city faces.
It's easy to make a town that's livable for those that are relatively affluent and relatively young.
Congrats Sam! Starting with even before we joined Y Combinator in the summer of 2008, you were always a very important advisor to us. I remember when we were first trying to raise money, no investor would talk to us. In our fundraising deck, we had our total addressable market at something like $100M, which was ridiculous considering our vision was just airbeds. We wanted to make it smaller. You told us to opposite - switch the m's to b's. I asked why, and you said that "investors want b's, baby." Ok, I may have added the "baby" part of the quote, but more importantly, you mentored us to think bigger, and you were (alongside the Justin.tv guys) an inspiration for us to join Y Combinator. Since then, you have been super helpful with showing us how to hire and scale a company. Congrats on this next part of your journey. Many startups will be better off because of you.
I am sorry you did not get better support from Airbnb. That is a bad experience. You can email me at brian.chesky@airbnb.com if you would like to elaborate further.
hey everyone, I have looked into this and a few things are going on here.
(1) Turns out there was a bug in our system where a guest was actually allowed to double-book this host's listing, so this was our fault. The host did not cancel, we double-booked. We are fixing this bug now, and I haven't heard of any other guests being affected by this.
(2) I just want to note this is a statistically rare event (though by reading comments some of you have experienced this), which is why we probably haven't spent enough time trying to solve this, but we should.
(3) I agree with the author that our cancelation policy is not adequately balanced on both sides of the transaction. Our team has actually been developing a better system for some time, and we should have a more balance policy soon - unfortunate this happened though. Right now, when a host cancels a booking, there is an automated review left on their listing saying this happened, a penalization in their search rankings, and if they chronically cancel, they are removed from our platform; but I agree we could do more here. The changes we are making will hopefully lower the frequency of these instances occurring going forward. Open to feedback here, and if a host has canceled on you I would love to get your feedback on how we handled it.
(4) In the event that a host does cancel, I think we can do more to provide protection and peace of mind to the guest for their trip. We have a Guarantee for hosts, so we are looking at what an equivalent version would be for guests. If you have any ideas, please let me know.
Your cancellation policy, as well as others are not balanced on either side.
I'm a host -- and I've been a guest. Once.
As a host, I get to choose the verification level I will accept; as a guest, I'm basically forced to hand over my government issued identification to AirBnB (to "verify" myself)
Now, I'm sure that if this was pre-Snowden, there might be some justification for this; but given that AirBnB has already had over 10,000,000 million night booked with them, it seems fairly arbitrary to require guests to provide this information.
On the other side of things, as both a host and a guest I've had exemplary support from AirBnB; perhaps when you are dealing with Europeans, you are just nicer?
On #3 it may be worth penalising those who do it during annual events like the Boston Marathon, Wimbledon, etc.
Accommodation is extremely hard to find and highly competitive at this time and the host should factor this in.
If it becomes an annual thing that hosts cancel and allow gazumping ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazumping ) then it will seriously damage the AirBNB relationship with renters as AirBNB will become an untrusted place for accommodation during such events.
It is so hard to find replacement accommodation during such events that the inconvenience is greatly multiplied.
(And annual things go for conferences too, SXSW for example)
I would go so far as to suggest that during events the relationship be inverted and the renter be given more weight than the host. Once the host has priced fairly, they should be penalised harshly for causing great inconvenience to a renter. The extra money during such events already more than compensates the host side.
This is a very good insight. Thanks for the suggestion. You are definitely right here. In the past during events (e.g. SXSW), we have actually booked Airbnb's ourselves, and some hotel rooms, just in case a guest got canceled on last minute and all Airbnb's and hotels were sold out, but we should definitely go further.
>Turns out there was a bug in our system where the guest was actually allowed to double-book this host's listing, so this was our fault.
The way you worded this suggests it was the same guest, and not two separate guests (which is what the author's experience would suggest). Is this correct?
If it is a statistically rare event then offering a full refund shouldn't be much of a hit to you. If that's not the case then you should let renters know up front that there is a statistically significant chance that despite reserving a room, they may not actually get a room.
You are correct that there are some hosts that list multiple properties, thus skewing the listing breakdown. It depends on the city. In most cities, room nights and revenue for "primary dwellings," meaning the homes people live in, are around 70-80%. We are in 34,000 cities, so this really varies quite widely. I would like to see the breakdown to be skewed much closer to primary dwellings for two reasons - (1) they have much higher review scores from guests, and (2) they don't typically enrich cities the way ordinary hosts do (though there are always exceptions. We are actually working with cities and our community to remove corporate rental companies that don't meet the above.
What is acceptable varies by market too (IMO). In Bali, the "owner lives in a house with 3-4 rental houses attached" is totally fine, and just as "authentic" as sharing a single house, since it's common for an extended family to live like that.
Hey, this is not actually what we are saying. Here is what we are saying. The vast majority of people in these cities (~85-90%) are renting the homes that they live in (also know as their primary dwelling) - either a living room, bedroom, or their whole home when they are gone. 60% of them depend on the money they make to pay their rent or mortgage - this according to the surveys we have done for our economic impact studies. These people were living in these homes before Airbnb, so they had a choice to either move out and find a cheaper place (presumably in a different neighborhood or out of the city) since they cannot afford the vacant space, or put it on Airbnb. Many of these people are self employed or under employed. A classic example are artists. This was my story when I moved to San Francisco. If these people moved out, the likely new tenants would be people who could afford to move in without renting on Airbnb. Now, of course some people could move in with the intention of renting on Airbnb. We are not saying this never happens. What we are saying is that more people are using Airbnb to keep their homes than using it as means of displacing people. The property manager issue is a real problem that we are dealing with.
By increasing the value of extra rooms and allowing people to monetize their vacancies, AirBNB necessarily increases the demand for rooms and the ability of people to pay more rent. This must push up rent. It is impossible for it not to.
Laws restricting short term rentals may partially be to protect the hotel industry, but they are also to encourage the environment and pricing necessary for longer term residency.
There are widespread stories, including some friends of mine, of people running large networks of properties leased expressly for subleasing on AirBNB. This reduces the supply of housing units substantially, and increases their prices. AirBNB needs to actively limit such usage in order to be defensible. Right now AirBNB rewards users who are obviously abusing the system and violating the law.
If your studies were conclusive, I'd expect you to release actual data instead of whitewashed PR like this.
Are you also planning on addressing the numerous factual misrepresentations in the post? Because your [edit:AirBnB's (Brian is CEO is AirBNB)] already poor credibility is taking a real beating: see pretty much all of the comments on this page.
