EJ writes: "And I was - but no longer am - scared of Airbnb’s reaction, the pressure and the veiled threat I have received from them since I initially blogged this story."
"...don't look good." is quite the understatement.
If he tried to manage the fallout, it totally backfired, and now they have a full-blown PR nightmare to deal with, which could've been avoided.
>>Once our host’s safety was secured, our attention moved to further strengthening our system.
In the context of this article, this sentence from their PR statement takes on a new and depressing overtone-- that of "Okay, we think the guy is arrested, so you're fine, right? We don't need to pay attention to you anymore, right? By the way, can you take down that blog post now?"
I know Brian personally and he is one of the nicest persons I've worked with in the valley. He also sincerely cares about his customers. I am surprised that anyone would think of him in that way.
I'm making this analogy extreme for the sake of clarity not because I think it's legitimately comparable:
Charles Manson's friends and followers were pretty fond of him too.
Leadership of a company tends to attract rather extreme personalities in all kinds of directions. One of the tendencies that is extremely common is sociopathy. Sociopathy is usually found is charismatic, likable people, but those people don't actually care about your welfare.
I don't know if Chesky is a sociopath or not, I can't say one way or the other, but the way he spoke to EJ smacked of the single-minded self-absorption of one.
But that doesn't mean a sociopath can't be charming as hell at a party. That's how they succeed.
Definitely not a sociopath (he and Joe are great guys; the AirBnB people I've met have all come across as much more social and friendly than most other startups).
Actually, a sociopath with $5b at risk over $10-20k might actually do a better job managing this kind of thing than a genuinely good guy who doesn't constantly think about how to defraud of hurt people and then lie to cover it up.
I'm sorry, but how could you be surprised? If the facts are as laid out in the post, he doesn't always care about his customers enough. That wouldn't be opinion, but objectively true. I don't see any room for surprise here, especially given that most people here don't personally know Mr. Chesky and are likely more even-handed in their assessment than you are.
As I noted in another comment, the way he spoke to EJ smacked of the way a sociopath speaks to someone in pain when they're really interested in something else.
Or it might just be that the guy is under a lot of stress and making bad decision. Watching your company potentially go up in flames with one incident is probably not an easy situation in which to make decisions.
We don't know the whole story. I understand the host stance also, basically on both sides they see things they've invested a lot into (her personal life and belongings, the company) be destroyed.
I'm not saying they are on the same level here (Her personal life and stuff is not easy to fix and she can't fail with that, at least not as easy as doing another company to me).
I understand what you are saying. You are completely right, people can act and claim to have ethics but it's only under major situations where those ethics are challenged that they can be judged. But currently we have tidbits of information about the situation, we don't know how it's being played out inside AirBnB or exactly what was said to whom and who's pressuring who (inside AirBnB I mean, not the cofounder pressuring the host) and what not. I just don't like this internet justice vibe going on. It feels very much like what Nancy Grace would do.
I agree. I can't even start to imagine the pressure. It's easy for us to say "he should have done like that" because we can think clearly from a distance.
This guy was one of us reading HN and hoping to make it a couple of years ago.
Now he's managing millions.
Nobody really prepared him for that.
I can imagine phone calls from people above him counseling to kill the story.
He may even had wanted to take a different approach but bend to pressure for what we know.
Money talks loudly.
I don't like the was he's dealing with it, I just want to say that it must be very hard to take good decisions in such a situation.
If managing millions robs you of the empathy that is necessary in this situation then there is something very wrong in the whole situation.
A user of your service had their life upended as a direct result of loopholes in your vetting model.
The LEAST you can do is reimburse them in full for their loss, take the monetary hit, and plug the holes in your model. If you are managing this in any other way you deserve to have your job forfeited.
Brian Chesky is not a douche. Whatever he did regarding this situation, he did with one billion dollars worth of pressure on him. If he made some kind of mistake, then it was much more likely due to the pressure of the moment than a flaw in his character.
He's actually one of the few truly good people that I've ever met. When I read the other day that he had reached out to the woman with support and money, I figured the issue was settled. I'm sure that he and the entire AirBnB team feel horrible about this and are willing to do whatever is necessary to make it go away.
You, indeed, should not have been vulgar. Particularly here on hn.
he did with one billion dollars worth of pressure on him
The amount of money at stake is not an excuse. Sorry.
[…] and are willing to do whatever is necessary to make it go away.
It's not going to go away, and he and ABnB have massively compounded the problem by wanting to "make it go away", instead of dealing with it in a humane and sensitive manner.
"are willing to do whatever is necessary to make it go away."
I think you're right. But seriously, while it's not his job to be her counselor it's also pretty bad he tried to roll her. I'm sure he's charmed many people but good for her to call him out on this. He'd have been better off letting the CS reps handle it.
'Veiled threat' is strong language not yet supported by the other details provided.
It's not surprising that communication became colder after the initial blogpost. As soon as a company knows something is likely to be played out in the court of public opinion (or actual courts), there are new risks for them to consider in every interaction.
A photo op at a $10,000 check presentation would've short circuited all this shit anyway. AirBnB has blundered dramatically here. In no way have they handled this appropriately at any step.
edit: I say this even if the blog author is not representing the truth 100% accurately. A check and some photos of that check would've at least given people some positive news to latch onto. Instead we've just got her out here shooting AirBnB in the face.
This is the kind of story PR people put in slideshows at conferences and use to justify their existence to their boss. Absolutely classic public relations nightmare that has been handled in exactly the wrong way.
They must have totally messed this up for her to write a rebuttal post like that. This post absolutely torn apart all positive points from Chesky's response. I just still can't believe airbnb didnt see this coming, and stomp on the problem as hard as they can to get EJ on their side. If everything she said is true here, airbnb truly screwed up and deserve the negative PR coming their way.
Isn't this why you give up equity to have advisers on your team? Shouldn't they have predicted this?
In fact, they could've turned their until then awesome goodwill into MORE goodwill and karma by really going out of their way to help her. Things like put her into a hotel until her place is livable again, setup credit monitoring ASAP, etc. Whatever they would've had to pony up as expenses, it would've been way cheaper than what they're implicitely paying now.
1) dive in help her, pay up make it all good get good PR. BUT if they are thinking that this is going to be a common problem and going to happen a lot then they may be making rod for their own backs…
or
2) Ride the storm - which again you would only do if you thought this was going to be an ongoing issue
or
3) they are idiots and have no idea how to handle PR (just like I wouldn't hire a project manager who hadn't been on a serious failed project I wouldn't hire PR who hadn't weathered some sort of shit storm)
None of those choices speak well for Airbnb's value - either this is going to be a problem for their business model or they aren't experienced enough to run something like this…
to be fair if it's (3) I'm sure they are getting some pretty good learning in right now
I honestly think that there's three proper responses:
1. Work on your system to help prevent something like this doesn't happen again.
2. Add a couple dollars of "insurance" to the cost. If the PR statement is accurate and there's been "2 million nights stayed" before an incident like this, having a couple bucks per renter would have more than covered the cost of this theoretically isolated incident.
3, which is far more important, figure out a way to reimburse her. This is already far overdue, and I realize there's a couple lawyers that'll say "But it opens the door for a fault-based civil suit", but that's an issue for the lawyers. It seems like human decency here, and it would be a transparent PR tactic to have waited 5 weeks to do it, but it really does seem like it's something they'll have to do to recover from this, especially if she keeps blogging about it.
I would add onto 3--however the reimbursement is done, make sure she doesn't publish the actual numbers. One of the AirBnB guys blogged about this and included the maximum on his insurance policy for his east coast cabin. The first comment was "if you publish this number, everyone and anyone who sues will sue for this amount". Likewise with any future settlements.
I would guess there's some of (3), but I'm surprised that a company with their level of funding, in a market with this kind of potential risk, didn't already have someone on staff with expertise in handling such a contingency. I can accept that the founders aren't experts in what to do in such an event, but surely someone hireable is.
Maybe it's encouraging from one perspective, because it shows that even big startups are still pretty ad-hoc affairs, run by the founders without the kind of tight PR-management that big corporations do. But past some point, especially in some businesses, it probably does make sense to copy some of the BigCorp approach of having a dedicated crisis-management team who are experts in what to do about major negative events (i.e. the mixture of the substantive angles, legal angles, and PR angles).
Part of the reason I intrinsically trust start ups over BigCos is because they do not have such teams. Instead, I would expect the start up to be more personal, hands on, response and human. AirBNB, as much as I love them, seems to be falling flat on its face in this regard.
I tend to have the same view, yeah. I think there are situations where less bureaucracy in that regard can actually produce a more paralyzed response, though, depending on the personalities of all involved. For example, if you have a legal team but not a crisis-management team, the founders can be receiving far too cautious advice, and a not-legally-knowledgeable founder might not feel confident ignoring it. A good crisis-management advisor would instead give advice that balances legal risks with some sort of assessment of which of the legal risks are worth taking, while the legal department is more likely to tell you to avoid anything risky.
1) Does not have to involve taking on the whole burden, but it does have to involve drawing a line in the sand. "If this happens, we will do these steps" - steps might be provide proof that they've submitted information to the police (though privacy prevents the actual information, of course), provide case workers in serious cases like this that are familiar with social services in the area, and in this particular case, an admission that they've really dropped the ball, that they will go further in this case because they dropped the ball and didn't follow through, and add something about 'but in future the policy will be more realistic'. They can do something without doing everything (of course finalising any such policy needs legal eagles and fine tooth combs...). The author's problem seems not to be that airbnb was faceless, but that offers of assistance were only to secure good internet commentary.
Yeah this seems like it would have been a really easy opportunity for them to get some positive PR? Why in god's name would they stop contacting her and then have a co-founder pressure her? It seems easy enough to offer $5k or $10k to restore the apartment at least.
I mean the only thing would be that they might be concerned about setting a precedent. But honestly, the PR alone would have been worth $5k (or $100k) and they could weasel their way out of the next incident. It seems a bit incompetent.
I recently signed up for my first AirBNB experience, as a guest. And yeah, seeing the amount of screening done (zero, you just need Paypal or a fake credit card), it's really risky for hosts.
Here's hoping that "press blog users to take down negative reviews" is one they don't try and follow up on. This had "Streisand Effect" written all over it, even before this post.
To be fair we've only heard their side of the story on that. This is a very distressed individual and maybe their account is only one side of the story.
>Yeah this seems like it would have been a really easy opportunity for them to get some positive PR?
or "Don't Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste" ((C) Rahm Emanuel ?)
It is how one rides a crisis what separates winners from losers.
>And yeah, seeing the amount of screening done (zero, you just need Paypal or a fake credit card), it's really risky for hosts.
well, one can make a case of how it can be risky for guests - just for starters, how can you be sure that the "host" has any rights or any traceable connection at all to the place s/he rented to you
This time her blog title is direct and to the point, and mentions Airbnb by name. It seems she's learning some SEO tactics during the course of this ordeal. Personally I'm glad as it seems obvious this story didn't deserve to be mostly unnoticed for most of a month after the first blog post went up.
True it's from two days ago. But the title is 'AIRBNB HORROR' (yes in all caps). I wouldn't want that showing on a Google's first results page when googling my companies name.
As they say, there's no such thing as bad publicity. Many more people who have never heard of Airbnb, who can't imagine such a concept possible, will now know it exists.
As of today, July 28, I have received no confirmation from either the San Francisco Police Department or the District Attorney that any culprit is in custody for my case.
I received a personal call from one of the co-founders of Airbnb. We had a lengthy conversation, in which he indicated having knowledge of the (previously mentioned) person who had been apprehended by the police, but that he could not discuss the details or these previous cases[sic] with me, as the investigation was ongoing.
Too much about this case remains unknown and unresolved, and according to both the District Attorneys and the police, it could be many more months before the criminal investigation moves forward.
Edit: This is clearly a problem with a thief, with society, with criminal behavior. This woman wants to throw her story and passive aggressive attitude around to destroy Airbnb, and it is blatantly obvious. Come on people.
I have been robbed. I have been a victim. I didn't flee to the internet to write a story about the gas station parking lot where it took place. Why? I would have gotten no attention for it, no sympathy, and the gas station would have not been to blame at all and everyone knows that.
Not to be insensitive, but this is reminiscent of the type of people that sue McDonalds for spilling hot coffee all over themselves. Not entirely the same, but it feels oddly familiar.
Airbnb tries to offer a good service. That doesn't mean they can keep the murderers out of Disneyland. She made a good point that craigslist makes warnings of scams more obvious on their website than Airbnb. She should have honestly just left it at that. Because at this point she is just doing more damage on the perpetrator's behalf and I think she knows it.
The knee-jerk reaction to this story is showing itself to be very far from this, so go ahead and downvote me, but nonetheless my opinion here is valid. Your next stay at Airbnb may very well be a scene out of the movie Hostel. It is just as likely however that it may happen at the next apartment you rent, the next hotel you stay at, or the next ski lodge. It doesn't matter that it was Airbnb.
I understand that she feels the reaction piece to her initial post was disingenuous, but with writing like this, it is clear she is just out to watch Airbnb burn. She should go hire a private detective and find the guy if she is so hell bent on revenge. She is after the wrong people. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. This woman has no target and her anger is entirely misdirected.
This is what insurance in our society is for. Get some. Be happy for what didn't go wrong and could have. She should be happy she didn't get raped when she got back to her apartment, as she obviously crossed tracks with a very bad person. Seriously. Shit happens in life. Everyone in this world has to deal with deceit, robberies, theft, and lies. She is no different, nor are you. She is playing out the sympathy excuse far too well. Her reaction is more similar to that of the McDonald's hot coffee victim than that of a robbery victim at this point. And like I said previously, I'm pretty sure she knows it.
The notion that she is somehow out to get AirBnB or "hell bent on revenge" is ridiculous. She saw the facts being misrepresented by AirBnB for their own benefit, and she wanted to set the record straight. If someone is skewing facts about their interactions with you in a public forum to make themselves look good, wouldn't you be a little bothered?
I would be bothered and I believe I addressed that. But it's like I said. She is now "passing along" the same torment that the perpetrator inflicted upon her onto Airbnb.
Setting the record straight is one thing and she has every right to do that.
EDIT: Being the little guy is tough and I empathize with that, and I also empathize with the fact that she had something very bad happened to her apartment in by proxy herself whether or not I explicitly stated it above doesnt really freaking matter. I did not show any empathy in my original post because I was trying my best to show an objective counterpoint.
I didn't really speak anything to what she is going through other than, in so many words, offering that she toughen up a bit. I've been in a bad place or two myself and I could have used that advice at that time in my life, to focus on what is still good and move forward, rather than trying to inflict pain on another.
EDIT: downvotes for trying to explain myself diligently for you guys, thanks...
If you just crossed tracks with a criminal known for killing, then raping and torturing their victims. Then YES, you should be very happy that you avoided more terrible things. I thought this was common wisdom among people, but perhaps it is not shared by everyone.
So, given that the woman in question has not crossed tracks with someone known for raping, why should she be happy that she hasn't been raped.
Honestly, at this point, why not just admit you're not a particularly empathic person, and other people's problems don't bother you. That would at least be better than this rather facile attempt at backing up an untenable position.
> This is what insurance in our society is for. Get some.
No homeowner's insurance will cover an Airbnb rental. Hell, finding a lease which permits an Airbnb rental would be tough, let alone finding someone to insure an apartment where strangers show up and pay you for it. You must know this, because it's been discussed to death all over this issue.
> Your next stay at Airbnb may very well be a scene out of the movie Hostel. It is just as likely however that it may happen at the next apartment you rent, the next hotel you stay at, or the next ski lodge.
This logic is incredibly faulty. This is the same as saying "you might get ripped off meeting a stranger on craigslist. It is just as likely however that it may happen at a Best Buy." The structure of airbnb lends itself toward antisocial behavior far, far more than a hotel. That kind of comparison is just deceitful.
In fact, to turn your "point" around, I find it more likely you're an airbnb employee/pg fanboy shilling than EJ being out to destroy airbnb. You've demonstrated complete disregard for logic and facts to defend airbnb in this situation. She's just told a story.
edit: I just read her blog & she said she had no contact w/ the CEO, Brian Chesky so far. It was another co-founder who asked her to take down the blog it seems.
What's telling is not that AirBNB tried to manage her, but that a company allegedly valued at billions managed her so very incompetently. I am devastated to find that they are doing such a bad job at what arguably is the single most important thing for them right at the moment.
Just be a good company and take care of the customer. This isn't rocket science. Hire someone who is her personal assistant through the process until the process is over, help as much as possible.
Concerns for setting a cost-inefficient precedent? BS. Not helping her has become the real cost-inefficient precedent set in this case. I had no idea this had been going on for a month now.
This is a shame. Take care of your customers, so much more when they're in your backyard.
I would change personal assistant to agency. People in these type of situations tend to not deal as well with being assigned a person. A single person in an agency is fine as the office and desk lends to creditability and doesn't give the "another person invading my space" problem.
So somewhere between, "we need to appear to have taken responsibility for this and done everything in our power to help the victim and prevent future incidents", and "we need to take responsibility for this and do everything in our power to help the victim and prevent future incidents", Chesky et al went seriously off the rails. If there's anything worse than doing nothing, it's saying you've done the right thing when, in fact, you clearly haven't.
I know pg isn't likely to talk about this while the situation is still ongoing, but it'd be nice to hear his thoughts on the matter. This is the kind of behaviour you expect from a major airline or telecom, not a YC startup. It certainly doesn't speak well of the character of the founders.
He then addressed his concerns about my blog post, and the potentially negative impact it could have on his company’s growth and current round of funding. During this call and in messages thereafter, he requested that I shut down the blog altogether or limit its access, and a few weeks later, suggested that I update the blog with a “twist" of good news so as to “complete[s] the story”.
If this is true it is downright appalling. Does he really think this woman that just had her life turned upside down gives a shit about his next round of funding?
"Note: a second co-founder did email me for the first time around 2am yesterday, suggesting we meet for coffee as he 'would enjoy meeting' me. He made no inquiry into my current emotional state, my safety or my well being."
Speechless. The lack of compassion for another human being here is staggering. Utterly oblivious — or indifferent. How does this happen to people?
Writing well is extremely hard. It could be that the "second co-founder" is bad at writing rather than oblivious or indifferent. He did want to meet her in person, perhaps to lend assistance, after all. If he was oblivious, this is probably not the action he would have taken.
Writing like Michael Chabon or Aaron Sorkin is hard. Having some basic compassion in how you interact with people is not. This email didn't need to win any awards — it just needed to have some minimum level of sensitivity. As I said in a cousin:
"he 'would enjoy meeting' me"
I don't think she really gives a damn in her current state what this guy would "enjoy" doing, is really the point here.
If someone falls over in the street, you probably ask if they're okay. If someone worse happens to them because your website failed to make someone safe, then you don't tell them you'd "enjoy meeting" them.
However, I at least, find writing about emotional matters to be extremely difficult. When I sit down with a goal of saying something nice, to show some compassion, to show what I'm actually feeling - what I usually end up doing is twisting the knife.
So in general I write less, and see the people face to face ASAP. Any other way is just harder for us both.
Well, isn't that what he would probably talk about over coffee? We don't know how the conversation went. He may have said something like:
We're very sorry about what's happened to you and seek to
resolve it. Let's have coffee as soon as possible to see
what we have to do to resolve the situation for you.
Would that justify the criticism that he should have asked about how she was at that moment, when it would seem from the conversation that there was every intention to do so only moments later?
Apart from jrockway's explanation: it may also be the way she currently construes and represents the email and is not a literal quote. Given 'her current state', you can't really trust her to be an honest judge of peoples' intentions. Nor should you fault her for that, but that doesn't mean her statements can be taken at face value.
EJ has demonstrated a keen grasp of English language, punctuation and rhetoric. I think regardless of her state communication is clearly her strong suit.
What I'm saying is that I'd bet good money she knows what quotation marks mean.
True, but the rest of the point remains: you don't know the rest of the message and how well she's presenting it. That particular quoted phrase may have annoyed her so much, that it doesn't really matter anymore what the rest of the email said. Even though an objective outsider would say the email was otherwise decent and acceptable.
What I'm saying, and why I'm responding, is that I'm seeing classic lynch mob behavior: people are out with their pitchforks, making all kinds of sweepings statements about what is happening, based on very little actual information. You are making rather bold assertions about someone based on only that quote. Doesn't that strike you as perhaps a bit rash?
But what you're missing is, it's not rash to be extremely upset in this situation. A woman's house was destroyed. Airbnb's response was to worry primarily about how she might impact their funding.
Personally, I don't want to live in that kind of world.
Now this part I think is overdramatic. I agree with jrockway. Criticizing a person for stating he would "enjoy meeting" a person is more than a bit pedantic imo. I'm sorry if she "doesn't care" about what anyone else may "enjoy", but seriously, I don't think it indicates any lack of sympathy. It's not like EJ is bleeding all over her keyboard while people nonchalantly schedule appointments later in the week or something, the crime is over now and it's a reasonable way to request a meeting. What do you want him to say?
Really a silly thing to make a fuss over, and fussing over trivial matters just weakens an otherwise strong case.
Not disagreeing with you, but just wanted to point out: this is why there are such things as trained spokespeople and customer service reps. I know these jobs aren't looked upon with much respect by those of us in the engineering and development community who would rather say things directly to the customer...but here, an innocent attempt to cut through the redtape and get to the bottom of things may have been misinterpreted by the customer to look much worse than it was...
I can totally see how the co-founder had the best of intentions and in his mind, was thinking "She'll be grateful to see me cutting through the layers of BS and giving her a straightforward invitation to meetup". Unfortunately, she saw the terse message and interpreted it in the worst light possible...and then reposted it to the world, with her interpretation.
When my car got wrecked by someone else's poor driving, I dreaded making the call to my insurance company to deal with it, even though all I had to do was report it to get my reimbursement.
The very first thing the customer rep said to me after I said why I was calling was, "Are you OK? How are you doing?" I was totally fine, and though this is most likely a script that they teach to anyone qualified to answer the phones...even if I were angry, it'd be difficult for me to rip on the customer rep (at that particular point).
In the airbnb case, if the co-founder had taken the five seconds to go through the motions of expressing the empathy that he felt, at the very least, this disgruntled customer couldn't claim on her blog that he had expressed no empathy for her situation and just wanted to get to deal making...which was probably quite the opposite of how he felt.
But yeah...it is a trivial bit in the big picture. It's a shame it could taint the discussion between her and airbnb regardless.
What's the problem? Co-founder wants to meet with person who was harmed by using his company's service? Or the fact that he didn't phrase his request for a meeting appropriately?
You must have a lot of trouble walking down the street if you find such trivial things staggering.
Once the mainstream press is going to pick this up (probably a WHEN, not IF the way it's going), they might not have another round of funding to give a shit about in the first place.
It's depressing, because AirBnB is a solid idea, if they can work some of the minor (ha!) kinks, like this, out of the system.
But after falling flat on their face like this, I wouldn't be surprised to see the idea of "social housing" go the same way as the Zeppelin did after the Hindenberg. It's going to be forever tied to every homeowner's worst nightmare.
It's certainly going to be interesting to see how AirBnB handles this going forward. So far, it's pretty much been a textbook version of how not to handle it, and given the HN audience, there are a lot of lessons to be drawn from this.
The problem is that this is AirBnB's 2nd to worst case scenario and it doesn't look like it is going to turn out well for them or that they gamed the possible problem scenarios out before hand and created a set of responses. No one died, so there is no "AirBnB Killer" in the headlines, but it might make the host side a little more scarce.
Hysteria and PR can both overcome facts. Heck, look at the people in the articles comments quoting the McDonald's coffee incident and believing the "common wisdom" it was a lawsuit happy lady. McDonald's PR did a heck of a job on that one given how absolutely, positively wrong they were and how bad their behavior and actions were.
I just cannot believe they didn't think this might be a consequence of the scaling of their service. It happens to every community based service as soon as it gets out of the initial, early adopter group. Startups need to take the time to figure out how to deal with "bad actors" in their business model, particularly when the potential damage is high and of a new type.
I had doubts about whether this was just a misunderstanding or that EJ was blowing it out of proportion, but after reading that in her post, that's all that needs to be said. Dreadful.
So bad, she's traumatized and he's trying to steamroll her just like he has everything else probably in the last couple years...Ooops! It was time to be a human. Should have let the CS rep keep talking to the woman.
Edit: bring on the downvotes! That's right, downvote a difference of opinion, and forget about logical or reasoned counterargument. Next time the internet lynch mob will come for your startup; hope that someone takes your side when they do.
----
Don't you think the CEO has to worry about the people he's paying? Who knows what their burn rate is; that funding could have been a life or death event, and in the event of death then a bunch more unemployed people would be hitting the streets.
And that wouldn't help anyone, least of all this woman.
AirBnB reported this to the police. They said they had someone in custody. What more do you want them to do? Go after them like Dirty Harry?
Dollars to donuts this woman is planning a lawsuit and looking for a payday. Not against the drug addicts who trashed her apartment, but against AirBnB. She rents out a room to people she's never met in person and then acts surprised when sometimes it goes wrong.
It's depressing to see the mob mentality here on Hacker News, and the extent to which Arrington delights in playing the organ grinder.
A pedestrian is hit by a DUI driver, does he sue or blame Honda? No? So why all the hate on AirBnB when it was a bunch of drug addicts who committed the crime? Sell them into old school bondage and send the income to her, by all means, but let's be real: it was the criminals' fault first, her fault second, and AirBnB in a distant third.
I think you're missing the point--the CEO asked the victim to take down her blog because it was bad press. If you were considering funding the company, wouldn't you want to know about potential issues?
Putting aside the questions of blame, and the eventual intent of the individual. Putting aside the question of culpability, and whether anyone acted inappropriately.
Thinking about this entirely from the perspective of AirBnB. Doing what a company is supposed to do, by law, and considering only the shareholders.
Given what they've done, do you think it's the best thing to have done to give the company the best chance of long-term survival?
I don't.
Leaving out the morals and the ethics, assuming we only care about the company's survival, this issue has to be dealt with in an open, transparent, and above all seen by all to be fair manner.
Providing for the short term care of this customer is vital. Whether it's right or wrong, ethical or moral, if they don't do it, people will say "That might have been me."
Above all else, that will kill AirBnB, and they are seeming to do nothing about it.
Leaving aside the moral and ethical considerations, working only according to the game theoretic standard of doing right by the company, what they are doing is clearly not in the best interests of the company.
Please don't bait other users by
inviting them to downmod you.
FWIW - I didn't down-vote you. I think you're wrong, and I don't think you've thought it through enough, but I didn't down-vote you. I took the time to reply because I think your view is common enough, and you had the courage to say it out loud.
But as I say, the current actions (as we understand them to be) are not in the best interests of the company or its employees - really, they're not.
Well, ok. While being entirely rational, let's also think about a related angle. The woman is out quite some money. She wants it back. The most coldbloodedly rational act on her part would have been to wait till they closed the round and then sue. Which, if you read her post carefully, is almost certainly what will happen in terms of timeline.
A billion dollar co is a real juicy target, much more so than the actual bad guys.
a. She's in a fit state to be cold-bloodedly rational
b. She knew AirBnB was about to close a round
c. That closing was within a few weeks, and hence worth waiting
d. In the meantime she has no home, and has to deal with
d.1. the police,
d.2. all the credit card issues,
d.3. all the banks,
d.4. AirBnB themselves
Seems unlikely to me that she planned that. <shrug> You call them as you see them. I'm saying that I think AirBnB did the wrong thing to start with, and continues to make it worse, even discounting the ethics and morals. Add those in and it's even worse still.
| Rock | AirBnB | Hard place |
The real issue, again ignoring ethics and morals and just concentrating on optimal course of actions for the company - where is their risk assessment and contingency plan? If they don't have one, that's tantamount to negligence. And you can't claim 20:20 hindsight, because people have been expressing concerns over this issue ever since they started.
As a director of two companies, one of which is involved in safety and security issues, I watch the unfolding - and perhaps unravelling - drama with interest (in both senses of the term).
> I think your view is common enough, and you had the courage to say it out loud.
Thanks, I guess.
Philosophical: seems to me that the tone of HN has shifted. Not in the standard way, it's not less intelligent per se. Rather, there is a greater proportion of big-co employees, academics, and college students. People without profit/loss responsibility, who don't deal directly with customers, who've never been through a media firestorm like what AirBnB is experiencing now.
While it's usually hard to pinpoint any particular change, it's safe to say the tenor of this thread would be very different if this was still Startup News.
YC alums need not say AirBnB has handled this well (i concur that the mere existence of this thread shows that they made objective errors, though in my opinion not normative ones). But they would not be so quick to trash the startup.
Considering the interests of the shareholders means that, if the shareholders want Airbnb to buy her a new house, they should buy her a new house. "Interests" doesn't always mean "more money."
Don't you think the CEO has to worry about the people he's paying? Who knows what their burn rate is; that funding could have been a life or death event, and in the event of death then a bunch more unemployed people would be hitting the streets.
Well, how bad is bad PR? Their service has this major flaw that your home can get royally trashed & there is no backup. If they let this stand AS-IS, all it's going to take is a couple news networks to pickup on the dangers of social housing & down the toilet a lot of their potential customers go.
And that wouldn't help anyone, least of all this woman.
AirBnB existing & doing nothing isn't any better than AirBnB not existing and being unable to do anything. Why should she really care about their livelihood if they don't seem to really care about her livelihood?
AirBnB reported this to the police. They said they had someone in custody. What more do you want them to do? Go after them like Dirty Harry?
Recoup her losses or at least make an effort to. Then instigate a plan to cover their asses the next time this happens, because if they continue as a service this probably will happen more often. If they are going to leave the homeowners wholly responsible for any damages without offering some sort of insurance or protection, then they're going to remain niche & their word is as good as dog poo. "Yeah, we provide a safe way to do this, we just won't guarantee it, because that's not really exactly true."
Dollars to donuts this woman is planning a lawsuit and looking for a payday. Not against the drug addicts who trashed her apartment, but against AirBnB. She rents out a room to people she's never met in person and then acts surprised when sometimes it goes wrong.
So AirBnB has a flawed business model. They can't vet people properly, their word is not guaranteed. Why should I ever trust AirBnB again? Let's play roulette with my housing.
A pedestrian is hit by a DUI driver, does he sue or blame Honda? No?
Terrible analogy. If Honda advertised that their cars were safe, but in some cases under normal operation their cars had catastrophic failure despite the owner not doing anything out of the ordinary, then yes, Honda would have a major issue on their hands.
You seem to be pointing at how EJ was a fool for lending her house out to strangers, which just so happens to be the business model for AirBnB. So if she is stupid, what does that make AirBnB? "Social Housing For Stupid People", could win a lot of customer's with that slogan.
I am not down entirely on AirBnB, but when I first heard of them I thought "ehh, sounds risky, what happens if someone trashes your place?" Well now I know what happens & it ain't pretty.
If Honda advertised that their cars were safe, but in some cases under normal operation their cars had catastrophic failure despite the owner not doing anything out of the ordinary, then yes, Honda would have a major issue on their hands.
If you look at the advertising for cars, it's always along the lines of safer instead of safe. A LOT of lawyer-hours went into protecting them from exactly this scenario.
But recall the Toyota "brakes not working" debacle from a year ago. Even if there are no assurances of safety in the marketing, people expect their cars to be safe under normal conditions. Breaking that implicit contract is still very expensive in both PR and money.
I think the most disturbing part is how they tried to get her to take her blog or limit access to her blog post. The reason? Because it would hurt their funding round. So instead of a $5 billion valuation they now get $4.5 billion.
Please. The fact is this incident happened on their watch. Trying to pretend they are the hero in this mess and spin it their way bothers me tremendously. I mean, she got robbed as a consequence of using their site. That stuff happens and honestly I don't think anyone really believes they can stop all bad things from happening. But this whole let's try to hide this under the rug deal makes them look 1000x worse I think than her getting robbed (which still sucks!)
I really believed they're doing their best to help EJ. I trusted in that.
Yes, I liked AirBNB to the point of talking about it with friends and pretty much advertising it all around as a great idea and a great company - just because I liked them. They looked trustworthy and like a really nice company.
If what EJ wrote is accurate[1], then I find the way they handle this situation outraging. It hurts my feelings and right now completely destroyed my trust in AirBNB. If they won't fix it soon and start behaving like a real human beings, theny I'm no longer caring about them, and will advice my friends against them.
[1] - I try to not jump into conclusions too fast.
What I don't get is how AirBnB vets the people leasing in the first place. I have to get a background check when I get a job, when I rent an apartment...does AirBnB really just let people sign up under pseudonyms without doing any one-time identity or background checks? I realize a background check may not have helped at all in this situation, and I don't know how much personal info AirBnB has stored on the guy that did all of this-- but how often is something like this going to happen when you know you're going to be tied directly to the aftermath of it?
Is there anyone on HN who runs a hotel that can say how often you have trashed rooms when you have accurate information on the people renting the room?
It's not just the issue of accurate information. Hotels have a security infrastructure in place and the rooms are checked regularly.
Had the criminals who did this tried it in a hotel there is a very good chance they would have been arrested straight away. They also have an agreement with the guest that the guest is liable for damages.
To be fair. I'd think a guest-liability thing wouldn't be too hard to work into AirBnB's infrastructure, although keeping the hosts honest is another question entirely.
Thinking about it as a whole, I have to wonder if the proper response would be to have a host-to-guest feedback system. As a host, you can request that guests have a certain "level" of feedback, with the drawback of receiving a reduced amount of money. Then on the other side, guests can get that as discounts-- as they travel and get good feedback from the hosts, they then can bunk at with the people who are, in essence, charging less.
Or maybe the whole system is untenable and couldn't possibly work without webcams set up in every room of the host's house. I guess we'll find out where it goes in the next week or so.
They already have host and guest reviews and feedback. Granted, most people are new to the system, and don't have feedback. As an AirBNB host, I screen potential customers all the time, and definitely seeing positive reviews from others is helpful.
I'm not familiar with how the booking on airbnb exactly works, but given the fact that they shield both parties from each other throughout most of the process, shouldn't airbnb have some information* about the fraudulent party involved here? Email address? IP address from their logs? Phone number ? Credit card? Anything to assist to get a hold of the perpetrators...
I'd think so, assuming they're not blatantly lying about the police "having a suspect in custody" (I really, really, really hope they're not lying about that, just for the sake of how spectacularly stupid that would be.)
Same feeling here. There's a lot "social" can do to improve the accommodation industry, but it may have gone a bit too fast.
However it ends for airbnb, the idea is sound and will survive/come back, but I always had the feeling that was going too fast and too smoothly.
Back to reality.
I think this proves that the model of cheap, social housing will not work. The only way to provide the level of security that this woman is demanding is to dramatically increase the cost of the service or the housing to cover the risk.
Over time AirBnB will probably just become a listing and booking service for established holiday apartments. Places that are furnished accordingly, have suitable insurance and are properly managed by the owner or a agent.
Bringing amateur operators into a sector with potential massive downsides with no education is extremely risky for AirBnB and the hosts.
I thought one of the reasons this was possible is that Airbnb keeps the parties from learning each other's identity in order to ensure they get their fee. They are an intermediary.
Given how much information is available online, why cant airbnb use, eg facebook, data for identity verification. There are face recognition softwares available now which work well in controlled environment. Of course a persons online identity may be compromised as well. But that does not mean we can not device ways to protect against such incidents using multiple checks. Eg facebook account used to create person profile of guest & host and using face recognition of facebook training dataset and real photo via webcam along with perhaps social security number we should be able to devise ways to protect against such incidents at not very high engineering costs.
We've had the initial blogpost and Brian Chesky's response on Techcrunch. I would love to read what Airbnb CEOs have to say about the second blog post.
I think they should take credible steps as soon as possible to improve the author's situation. While they're at it, an explanation of how such incidents can be stopped from happening again would also be good.
If trust is so important for their business model, they have to demonstrate that Airbnb is trustworthy.
"...keep the money and use it to book yourself into a nice, safe hotel room the next time you travel. You’ll be glad you did."
Statements like this certainly fuel the hotel industry conspiracy theories from yesterday for me. It doesn't even make sense, as she claims the hotels will be safer for the travellers. The travellers safety was never at question here was it?
Does it encourage them to remove valuables and non-replaceable items from the apartment being rented?
Does it tell them that any damages incurred will probably not be covered by their homeowners insurance? Does it provide information on how to attain extra insurance?
Does AirBnB hold the guest liable for any damages to a hosts property?
The internet is moving really fast, I've already seen non tech people I know commenting about this on Facebook. They might have lost already. When something like this happens I think you probably have hours to sort it out, rather than weeks. Remember that it was less than 24 hours from the story breaking that News Corp decided the best course of action was closing a business with ~7 million repeat customers. Of course there may be other reasons they did this but still...
Noone has commented this yet. What are the chances this is all in some way a PR play (possibly gone bad) to get on the news during a round of funding? (The "there's no such things as bad publicity" kind)
Not saying it is .. but I do wonder. The only thing that would make it doubtful is that part where she says he told her about _the impact on Airbnb round of funding_. But then again, if your mind is twisted ...
> And for those who have so generously suggested a donation fund be set up to help me recover, I thank you from the bottom of my heart, and suggest that instead, you keep the money and use it to book yourself into a nice, safe hotel room the next time you travel.
It's a sad state of affairs, to be sure. But the answers are simple, although it's going to be a real pain for AirBnB's "frictionless" transaction model.
1) You MUST put down a CREDIT CARD. Not a bank card, not a debit card, not a prepaid card. No plasticky no rentee. A major credit card to make a transaction. No bitcoin, no cash, no BS. Airbnb then puts a hold equal to transaction cost + 20% for the duration of the stay. That 20% can be put toward insurance on both ends, paid out when satisfactory closeout of the transaction on both ends occurs. If renters balk at the 20% hold, they shouldn't be on vacation. If owners balk at the "hold" instead of cash in hand, they can take their business to craigslist or wherever.
2) AirBnB must then become an arbitrator, a mediator, a guarantor, and/or (unless they want to outsource this) an insurer.
How do you do #1? The card you get with many bank check accounts is a bank card, is a debit card, and will auth through your payment gateway as a credit card just fine. AFAIK, you don't know what backs the number someone just gave your web form, only whether your auth/capture on it worked or not. Would they need to require a faxed copy of the card?
We're not on the same wavelength here... as I said, you can authorize (pre-approve an amount to charge) on bank cards, debit cards with the Visa/MC logo, Visa/MC gift cards, etc. Since that's true, an auth doesn't tell you that the person presented a credit card.
That's actually fairly easy. Host should declare coverage limits. Does not make sense to artificially lower the limits, since insurance will not pay for what's not declared. Thinking somewhat similar to insurance that FedEx and UPS are happy to sell.
Do you think in this instance putting down a credit card would have helped? The vandals were obviously criminals intent on abusing a renter through the airbnb service. Wouldn't they have simply used a stolen credit card number?
They could only do it once, I suppose. But then that's why there's the "total cost + 20%" hold placed on the card. That way, if it is stolen and reported during the stay, AirBnB calls da cops and yay justice; if they leave scott free, well at least there is some recompense to the owner.
I really don't see people running robbery scams on Airbnb with any frequency. I mean, if they have that many stolen credit cards, why waste time robbing people's houses when they could, you know, buy stuff with those stolen cards?
While that is true, robbery is not the crime EJ is describing.
They did steal things from her, but they also set out to totally destroy her apartment and take things of sentimental value to her. I'm not sure what that sort of crime would be called, but it's clearly more sociopathic than a regualr robbery.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadWow. That sounds quite different from what Brian Chesky claims here: http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/27/on-safety-a-word-from-airbn...
In the context of this article, this sentence from their PR statement takes on a new and depressing overtone-- that of "Okay, we think the guy is arrested, so you're fine, right? We don't need to pay attention to you anymore, right? By the way, can you take down that blog post now?"
Is anyone here really all that surprised Chesky is a douche?
Charles Manson's friends and followers were pretty fond of him too.
Leadership of a company tends to attract rather extreme personalities in all kinds of directions. One of the tendencies that is extremely common is sociopathy. Sociopathy is usually found is charismatic, likable people, but those people don't actually care about your welfare.
I don't know if Chesky is a sociopath or not, I can't say one way or the other, but the way he spoke to EJ smacked of the single-minded self-absorption of one.
But that doesn't mean a sociopath can't be charming as hell at a party. That's how they succeed.
Actually, a sociopath with $5b at risk over $10-20k might actually do a better job managing this kind of thing than a genuinely good guy who doesn't constantly think about how to defraud of hurt people and then lie to cover it up.
This is certainly making me rethink that stance, at least in this specific case.
Pretty jarring.
We don't know the whole story. I understand the host stance also, basically on both sides they see things they've invested a lot into (her personal life and belongings, the company) be destroyed.
I'm not saying they are on the same level here (Her personal life and stuff is not easy to fix and she can't fail with that, at least not as easy as doing another company to me).
Incidentally, the same is true of moral character.
This guy was one of us reading HN and hoping to make it a couple of years ago. Now he's managing millions.
Nobody really prepared him for that. I can imagine phone calls from people above him counseling to kill the story.
He may even had wanted to take a different approach but bend to pressure for what we know. Money talks loudly.
I don't like the was he's dealing with it, I just want to say that it must be very hard to take good decisions in such a situation.
A user of your service had their life upended as a direct result of loopholes in your vetting model. The LEAST you can do is reimburse them in full for their loss, take the monetary hit, and plug the holes in your model. If you are managing this in any other way you deserve to have your job forfeited.
He's actually one of the few truly good people that I've ever met. When I read the other day that he had reached out to the woman with support and money, I figured the issue was settled. I'm sure that he and the entire AirBnB team feel horrible about this and are willing to do whatever is necessary to make it go away.
You, indeed, should not have been vulgar. Particularly here on hn.
[…] and are willing to do whatever is necessary to make it go away. It's not going to go away, and he and ABnB have massively compounded the problem by wanting to "make it go away", instead of dealing with it in a humane and sensitive manner.
I think you're right. But seriously, while it's not his job to be her counselor it's also pretty bad he tried to roll her. I'm sure he's charmed many people but good for her to call him out on this. He'd have been better off letting the CS reps handle it.
It's not surprising that communication became colder after the initial blogpost. As soon as a company knows something is likely to be played out in the court of public opinion (or actual courts), there are new risks for them to consider in every interaction.
edit: I say this even if the blog author is not representing the truth 100% accurately. A check and some photos of that check would've at least given people some positive news to latch onto. Instead we've just got her out here shooting AirBnB in the face.
This is the kind of story PR people put in slideshows at conferences and use to justify their existence to their boss. Absolutely classic public relations nightmare that has been handled in exactly the wrong way.
Isn't this why you give up equity to have advisers on your team? Shouldn't they have predicted this?
1) dive in help her, pay up make it all good get good PR. BUT if they are thinking that this is going to be a common problem and going to happen a lot then they may be making rod for their own backs…
or
2) Ride the storm - which again you would only do if you thought this was going to be an ongoing issue
or
3) they are idiots and have no idea how to handle PR (just like I wouldn't hire a project manager who hadn't been on a serious failed project I wouldn't hire PR who hadn't weathered some sort of shit storm)
None of those choices speak well for Airbnb's value - either this is going to be a problem for their business model or they aren't experienced enough to run something like this…
to be fair if it's (3) I'm sure they are getting some pretty good learning in right now
1. Work on your system to help prevent something like this doesn't happen again.
2. Add a couple dollars of "insurance" to the cost. If the PR statement is accurate and there's been "2 million nights stayed" before an incident like this, having a couple bucks per renter would have more than covered the cost of this theoretically isolated incident.
3, which is far more important, figure out a way to reimburse her. This is already far overdue, and I realize there's a couple lawyers that'll say "But it opens the door for a fault-based civil suit", but that's an issue for the lawyers. It seems like human decency here, and it would be a transparent PR tactic to have waited 5 weeks to do it, but it really does seem like it's something they'll have to do to recover from this, especially if she keeps blogging about it.
Maybe it's encouraging from one perspective, because it shows that even big startups are still pretty ad-hoc affairs, run by the founders without the kind of tight PR-management that big corporations do. But past some point, especially in some businesses, it probably does make sense to copy some of the BigCorp approach of having a dedicated crisis-management team who are experts in what to do about major negative events (i.e. the mixture of the substantive angles, legal angles, and PR angles).
I mean the only thing would be that they might be concerned about setting a precedent. But honestly, the PR alone would have been worth $5k (or $100k) and they could weasel their way out of the next incident. It seems a bit incompetent.
I recently signed up for my first AirBNB experience, as a guest. And yeah, seeing the amount of screening done (zero, you just need Paypal or a fake credit card), it's really risky for hosts.
Well, they sure have set one now.
or "Don't Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste" ((C) Rahm Emanuel ?) It is how one rides a crisis what separates winners from losers.
>And yeah, seeing the amount of screening done (zero, you just need Paypal or a fake credit card), it's really risky for hosts.
well, one can make a case of how it can be risky for guests - just for starters, how can you be sure that the "host" has any rights or any traceable connection at all to the place s/he rented to you
As of today, July 28, I have received no confirmation from either the San Francisco Police Department or the District Attorney that any culprit is in custody for my case.
I received a personal call from one of the co-founders of Airbnb. We had a lengthy conversation, in which he indicated having knowledge of the (previously mentioned) person who had been apprehended by the police, but that he could not discuss the details or these previous cases[sic] with me, as the investigation was ongoing.
Too much about this case remains unknown and unresolved, and according to both the District Attorneys and the police, it could be many more months before the criminal investigation moves forward.
Edit: This is clearly a problem with a thief, with society, with criminal behavior. This woman wants to throw her story and passive aggressive attitude around to destroy Airbnb, and it is blatantly obvious. Come on people.
I have been robbed. I have been a victim. I didn't flee to the internet to write a story about the gas station parking lot where it took place. Why? I would have gotten no attention for it, no sympathy, and the gas station would have not been to blame at all and everyone knows that.
Not to be insensitive, but this is reminiscent of the type of people that sue McDonalds for spilling hot coffee all over themselves. Not entirely the same, but it feels oddly familiar.
Airbnb tries to offer a good service. That doesn't mean they can keep the murderers out of Disneyland. She made a good point that craigslist makes warnings of scams more obvious on their website than Airbnb. She should have honestly just left it at that. Because at this point she is just doing more damage on the perpetrator's behalf and I think she knows it.
The knee-jerk reaction to this story is showing itself to be very far from this, so go ahead and downvote me, but nonetheless my opinion here is valid. Your next stay at Airbnb may very well be a scene out of the movie Hostel. It is just as likely however that it may happen at the next apartment you rent, the next hotel you stay at, or the next ski lodge. It doesn't matter that it was Airbnb.
I understand that she feels the reaction piece to her initial post was disingenuous, but with writing like this, it is clear she is just out to watch Airbnb burn. She should go hire a private detective and find the guy if she is so hell bent on revenge. She is after the wrong people. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. This woman has no target and her anger is entirely misdirected.
This is what insurance in our society is for. Get some. Be happy for what didn't go wrong and could have. She should be happy she didn't get raped when she got back to her apartment, as she obviously crossed tracks with a very bad person. Seriously. Shit happens in life. Everyone in this world has to deal with deceit, robberies, theft, and lies. She is no different, nor are you. She is playing out the sympathy excuse far too well. Her reaction is more similar to that of the McDonald's hot coffee victim than that of a robbery victim at this point. And like I said previously, I'm pretty sure she knows it.
Good luck Airbnb.
Setting the record straight is one thing and she has every right to do that.
EDIT: Being the little guy is tough and I empathize with that, and I also empathize with the fact that she had something very bad happened to her apartment in by proxy herself whether or not I explicitly stated it above doesnt really freaking matter. I did not show any empathy in my original post because I was trying my best to show an objective counterpoint.
I didn't really speak anything to what she is going through other than, in so many words, offering that she toughen up a bit. I've been in a bad place or two myself and I could have used that advice at that time in my life, to focus on what is still good and move forward, rather than trying to inflict pain on another.
EDIT: downvotes for trying to explain myself diligently for you guys, thanks...
Perhaps people are just passing along the torment.
This should absolutely be AirBnB's marketing pitch.
Basically, nothing should ever bother me, because there's always something worse that could happen.
EDIT: Look at the bright side of things.
Honestly, at this point, why not just admit you're not a particularly empathic person, and other people's problems don't bother you. That would at least be better than this rather facile attempt at backing up an untenable position.
No homeowner's insurance will cover an Airbnb rental. Hell, finding a lease which permits an Airbnb rental would be tough, let alone finding someone to insure an apartment where strangers show up and pay you for it. You must know this, because it's been discussed to death all over this issue.
> Your next stay at Airbnb may very well be a scene out of the movie Hostel. It is just as likely however that it may happen at the next apartment you rent, the next hotel you stay at, or the next ski lodge.
This logic is incredibly faulty. This is the same as saying "you might get ripped off meeting a stranger on craigslist. It is just as likely however that it may happen at a Best Buy." The structure of airbnb lends itself toward antisocial behavior far, far more than a hotel. That kind of comparison is just deceitful.
In fact, to turn your "point" around, I find it more likely you're an airbnb employee/pg fanboy shilling than EJ being out to destroy airbnb. You've demonstrated complete disregard for logic and facts to defend airbnb in this situation. She's just told a story.
I thought the whole point of being a startup is you don't need to fall in line with the dehumanizing bullshit that you find in big corporations.
That's why I'm in a startup at least and it works for me on that level.
But there's such a stench of insincerity about the Airbnb approach that I will never use their site now.
Concerns for setting a cost-inefficient precedent? BS. Not helping her has become the real cost-inefficient precedent set in this case. I had no idea this had been going on for a month now.
This is a shame. Take care of your customers, so much more when they're in your backyard.
I know pg isn't likely to talk about this while the situation is still ongoing, but it'd be nice to hear his thoughts on the matter. This is the kind of behaviour you expect from a major airline or telecom, not a YC startup. It certainly doesn't speak well of the character of the founders.
If this is true it is downright appalling. Does he really think this woman that just had her life turned upside down gives a shit about his next round of funding?
"Note: a second co-founder did email me for the first time around 2am yesterday, suggesting we meet for coffee as he 'would enjoy meeting' me. He made no inquiry into my current emotional state, my safety or my well being."
Speechless. The lack of compassion for another human being here is staggering. Utterly oblivious — or indifferent. How does this happen to people?
Please.
Writing like Michael Chabon or Aaron Sorkin is hard. Having some basic compassion in how you interact with people is not. This email didn't need to win any awards — it just needed to have some minimum level of sensitivity. As I said in a cousin:
"he 'would enjoy meeting' me"
I don't think she really gives a damn in her current state what this guy would "enjoy" doing, is really the point here.
If someone falls over in the street, you probably ask if they're okay. If someone worse happens to them because your website failed to make someone safe, then you don't tell them you'd "enjoy meeting" them.
However, I at least, find writing about emotional matters to be extremely difficult. When I sit down with a goal of saying something nice, to show some compassion, to show what I'm actually feeling - what I usually end up doing is twisting the knife.
So in general I write less, and see the people face to face ASAP. Any other way is just harder for us both.
I could have easily made this mistake.
I don't think she really gives a damn in her current state what this guy would "enjoy" doing, is really the point here.
What I'm saying is that I'd bet good money she knows what quotation marks mean.
What I'm saying, and why I'm responding, is that I'm seeing classic lynch mob behavior: people are out with their pitchforks, making all kinds of sweepings statements about what is happening, based on very little actual information. You are making rather bold assertions about someone based on only that quote. Doesn't that strike you as perhaps a bit rash?
But what you're missing is, it's not rash to be extremely upset in this situation. A woman's house was destroyed. Airbnb's response was to worry primarily about how she might impact their funding.
Personally, I don't want to live in that kind of world.
Really a silly thing to make a fuss over, and fussing over trivial matters just weakens an otherwise strong case.
I can totally see how the co-founder had the best of intentions and in his mind, was thinking "She'll be grateful to see me cutting through the layers of BS and giving her a straightforward invitation to meetup". Unfortunately, she saw the terse message and interpreted it in the worst light possible...and then reposted it to the world, with her interpretation.
When my car got wrecked by someone else's poor driving, I dreaded making the call to my insurance company to deal with it, even though all I had to do was report it to get my reimbursement.
The very first thing the customer rep said to me after I said why I was calling was, "Are you OK? How are you doing?" I was totally fine, and though this is most likely a script that they teach to anyone qualified to answer the phones...even if I were angry, it'd be difficult for me to rip on the customer rep (at that particular point).
In the airbnb case, if the co-founder had taken the five seconds to go through the motions of expressing the empathy that he felt, at the very least, this disgruntled customer couldn't claim on her blog that he had expressed no empathy for her situation and just wanted to get to deal making...which was probably quite the opposite of how he felt.
But yeah...it is a trivial bit in the big picture. It's a shame it could taint the discussion between her and airbnb regardless.
You must have a lot of trouble walking down the street if you find such trivial things staggering.
But after falling flat on their face like this, I wouldn't be surprised to see the idea of "social housing" go the same way as the Zeppelin did after the Hindenberg. It's going to be forever tied to every homeowner's worst nightmare.
Hysteria and PR can both overcome facts. Heck, look at the people in the articles comments quoting the McDonald's coffee incident and believing the "common wisdom" it was a lawsuit happy lady. McDonald's PR did a heck of a job on that one given how absolutely, positively wrong they were and how bad their behavior and actions were.
I just cannot believe they didn't think this might be a consequence of the scaling of their service. It happens to every community based service as soon as it gets out of the initial, early adopter group. Startups need to take the time to figure out how to deal with "bad actors" in their business model, particularly when the potential damage is high and of a new type.
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Don't you think the CEO has to worry about the people he's paying? Who knows what their burn rate is; that funding could have been a life or death event, and in the event of death then a bunch more unemployed people would be hitting the streets.
And that wouldn't help anyone, least of all this woman.
AirBnB reported this to the police. They said they had someone in custody. What more do you want them to do? Go after them like Dirty Harry?
Dollars to donuts this woman is planning a lawsuit and looking for a payday. Not against the drug addicts who trashed her apartment, but against AirBnB. She rents out a room to people she's never met in person and then acts surprised when sometimes it goes wrong.
It's depressing to see the mob mentality here on Hacker News, and the extent to which Arrington delights in playing the organ grinder.
A pedestrian is hit by a DUI driver, does he sue or blame Honda? No? So why all the hate on AirBnB when it was a bunch of drug addicts who committed the crime? Sell them into old school bondage and send the income to her, by all means, but let's be real: it was the criminals' fault first, her fault second, and AirBnB in a distant third.
Thinking about this entirely from the perspective of AirBnB. Doing what a company is supposed to do, by law, and considering only the shareholders.
Given what they've done, do you think it's the best thing to have done to give the company the best chance of long-term survival?
I don't.
Leaving out the morals and the ethics, assuming we only care about the company's survival, this issue has to be dealt with in an open, transparent, and above all seen by all to be fair manner.
Providing for the short term care of this customer is vital. Whether it's right or wrong, ethical or moral, if they don't do it, people will say "That might have been me."
Above all else, that will kill AirBnB, and they are seeming to do nothing about it.
Leaving aside the moral and ethical considerations, working only according to the game theoretic standard of doing right by the company, what they are doing is clearly not in the best interests of the company.
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ADDED IN EDIT: From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html :
FWIW - I didn't down-vote you. I think you're wrong, and I don't think you've thought it through enough, but I didn't down-vote you. I took the time to reply because I think your view is common enough, and you had the courage to say it out loud.But as I say, the current actions (as we understand them to be) are not in the best interests of the company or its employees - really, they're not.
A billion dollar co is a real juicy target, much more so than the actual bad guys.
a. She's in a fit state to be cold-bloodedly rational
b. She knew AirBnB was about to close a round
c. That closing was within a few weeks, and hence worth waiting
d. In the meantime she has no home, and has to deal with
d.1. the police,
d.2. all the credit card issues,
d.3. all the banks,
d.4. AirBnB themselves
Seems unlikely to me that she planned that. <shrug> You call them as you see them. I'm saying that I think AirBnB did the wrong thing to start with, and continues to make it worse, even discounting the ethics and morals. Add those in and it's even worse still.
The real issue, again ignoring ethics and morals and just concentrating on optimal course of actions for the company - where is their risk assessment and contingency plan? If they don't have one, that's tantamount to negligence. And you can't claim 20:20 hindsight, because people have been expressing concerns over this issue ever since they started.As a director of two companies, one of which is involved in safety and security issues, I watch the unfolding - and perhaps unravelling - drama with interest (in both senses of the term).
Thanks, I guess.
Philosophical: seems to me that the tone of HN has shifted. Not in the standard way, it's not less intelligent per se. Rather, there is a greater proportion of big-co employees, academics, and college students. People without profit/loss responsibility, who don't deal directly with customers, who've never been through a media firestorm like what AirBnB is experiencing now.
While it's usually hard to pinpoint any particular change, it's safe to say the tenor of this thread would be very different if this was still Startup News.
YC alums need not say AirBnB has handled this well (i concur that the mere existence of this thread shows that they made objective errors, though in my opinion not normative ones). But they would not be so quick to trash the startup.
Well, for starters: company officers shouldn't be using weasel words to try and take credit for things they haven't actually done.
Well, how bad is bad PR? Their service has this major flaw that your home can get royally trashed & there is no backup. If they let this stand AS-IS, all it's going to take is a couple news networks to pickup on the dangers of social housing & down the toilet a lot of their potential customers go.
And that wouldn't help anyone, least of all this woman.
AirBnB existing & doing nothing isn't any better than AirBnB not existing and being unable to do anything. Why should she really care about their livelihood if they don't seem to really care about her livelihood?
AirBnB reported this to the police. They said they had someone in custody. What more do you want them to do? Go after them like Dirty Harry?
Recoup her losses or at least make an effort to. Then instigate a plan to cover their asses the next time this happens, because if they continue as a service this probably will happen more often. If they are going to leave the homeowners wholly responsible for any damages without offering some sort of insurance or protection, then they're going to remain niche & their word is as good as dog poo. "Yeah, we provide a safe way to do this, we just won't guarantee it, because that's not really exactly true."
Dollars to donuts this woman is planning a lawsuit and looking for a payday. Not against the drug addicts who trashed her apartment, but against AirBnB. She rents out a room to people she's never met in person and then acts surprised when sometimes it goes wrong.
So AirBnB has a flawed business model. They can't vet people properly, their word is not guaranteed. Why should I ever trust AirBnB again? Let's play roulette with my housing.
A pedestrian is hit by a DUI driver, does he sue or blame Honda? No?
Terrible analogy. If Honda advertised that their cars were safe, but in some cases under normal operation their cars had catastrophic failure despite the owner not doing anything out of the ordinary, then yes, Honda would have a major issue on their hands.
You seem to be pointing at how EJ was a fool for lending her house out to strangers, which just so happens to be the business model for AirBnB. So if she is stupid, what does that make AirBnB? "Social Housing For Stupid People", could win a lot of customer's with that slogan.
I am not down entirely on AirBnB, but when I first heard of them I thought "ehh, sounds risky, what happens if someone trashes your place?" Well now I know what happens & it ain't pretty.
If you look at the advertising for cars, it's always along the lines of safer instead of safe. A LOT of lawyer-hours went into protecting them from exactly this scenario.
Please. The fact is this incident happened on their watch. Trying to pretend they are the hero in this mess and spin it their way bothers me tremendously. I mean, she got robbed as a consequence of using their site. That stuff happens and honestly I don't think anyone really believes they can stop all bad things from happening. But this whole let's try to hide this under the rug deal makes them look 1000x worse I think than her getting robbed (which still sucks!)
Methinks these super-hot startups may be reaching critical mass before they develop business maturity.
I really believed they're doing their best to help EJ. I trusted in that.
Yes, I liked AirBNB to the point of talking about it with friends and pretty much advertising it all around as a great idea and a great company - just because I liked them. They looked trustworthy and like a really nice company.
If what EJ wrote is accurate[1], then I find the way they handle this situation outraging. It hurts my feelings and right now completely destroyed my trust in AirBNB. If they won't fix it soon and start behaving like a real human beings, theny I'm no longer caring about them, and will advice my friends against them.
[1] - I try to not jump into conclusions too fast.
Foxy move on his part.
Looks like he just got busted though or the victim would surely know of the existence of a suspect.
Is there anyone on HN who runs a hotel that can say how often you have trashed rooms when you have accurate information on the people renting the room?
Had the criminals who did this tried it in a hotel there is a very good chance they would have been arrested straight away. They also have an agreement with the guest that the guest is liable for damages.
Thinking about it as a whole, I have to wonder if the proper response would be to have a host-to-guest feedback system. As a host, you can request that guests have a certain "level" of feedback, with the drawback of receiving a reduced amount of money. Then on the other side, guests can get that as discounts-- as they travel and get good feedback from the hosts, they then can bunk at with the people who are, in essence, charging less.
Or maybe the whole system is untenable and couldn't possibly work without webcams set up in every room of the host's house. I guess we'll find out where it goes in the next week or so.
And they have much much less to lose if you trash the room. Hotel rooms aren't filled with a person's prized possesions.
Bringing amateur operators into a sector with potential massive downsides with no education is extremely risky for AirBnB and the hosts.
I think they should take credible steps as soon as possible to improve the author's situation. While they're at it, an explanation of how such incidents can be stopped from happening again would also be good.
If trust is so important for their business model, they have to demonstrate that Airbnb is trustworthy.
Statements like this certainly fuel the hotel industry conspiracy theories from yesterday for me. It doesn't even make sense, as she claims the hotels will be safer for the travellers. The travellers safety was never at question here was it?
Does it encourage them to remove valuables and non-replaceable items from the apartment being rented?
Does it tell them that any damages incurred will probably not be covered by their homeowners insurance? Does it provide information on how to attain extra insurance?
Does AirBnB hold the guest liable for any damages to a hosts property?
Not saying it is .. but I do wonder. The only thing that would make it doubtful is that part where she says he told her about _the impact on Airbnb round of funding_. But then again, if your mind is twisted ...
Will do.
1) You MUST put down a CREDIT CARD. Not a bank card, not a debit card, not a prepaid card. No plasticky no rentee. A major credit card to make a transaction. No bitcoin, no cash, no BS. Airbnb then puts a hold equal to transaction cost + 20% for the duration of the stay. That 20% can be put toward insurance on both ends, paid out when satisfactory closeout of the transaction on both ends occurs. If renters balk at the 20% hold, they shouldn't be on vacation. If owners balk at the "hold" instead of cash in hand, they can take their business to craigslist or wherever.
2) AirBnB must then become an arbitrator, a mediator, a guarantor, and/or (unless they want to outsource this) an insurer.
1) A dedicated holiday apartment with little valuables and suitable furnishings
2) My primary residence full of my own furniture, valuables and sentimental items
Who is going to do that appraisal? AirBnB?
I really don't see people running robbery scams on Airbnb with any frequency. I mean, if they have that many stolen credit cards, why waste time robbing people's houses when they could, you know, buy stuff with those stolen cards?