Yeah, I've never really had any luck getting stuff that is really cheaper than traditional options.

Ditto. IMHO their business model isn't hard to replicate, they didn't invent it, and their biggest asset is inertia-eyeballs. Although they are a YC darling, the fact is they scaled with loads of marketing dollar versus established competition (eg. in Europe) and what this shows us is huge financial backing and aggressive media engagement can create a sector-specific behemoth. For all intents and purposes in the current world it has already plateaued, though. There's a school of thought that they are probably one of the last paper-valuation giants to climb out of the centralized marketplace world.

In future, perhaps consumers won't use branded marketplace apps and will instead publish data independently, branded search engine apps will rank and return it and third party reputation services will assist with filtering. Why? Because nobody wants a damn middleman app demanding its own permissions/login/customer service loop for everything they do, and people are slowly ceding anonymity for promises of assurance as the resource-constrained, higher-density, more urban world moves toward the political right.

A cryptocurrency AirBNB clone could take a serious chunk out of their market, since so many hosts are flying close to or beyond the legal or strata relations radar and would prefer not to declare earnings.

I doubt that will take off purely due to the comfort of having someone to call if things go wrong. It may work in other industries where the cost of failure is lower (eg taxis/uber) but not for short term accommodation.

It's inevitable that a trust implementation outside of marketplace services eventually dominates. This removes most of their value add.

That’s not necessarily inevitable since a large part of what makes marketplace trust metrics hard to game is that it costs a lot of money to drive fake transactions through it, since the marketplace will be taking its cut each time.

There are clever solutions to this. Escrow works even in bitcoin. Then at a certain point you call the police. No reason to insert a hugely expensive third party in a 2 party transaction.

Edit: It's more than one hugely expensive third party if you consider each level of local government gets involved.

Looks like The Bee Token is already on it: https://www.beetoken.com/

Same, but there is the benefit that you can stay in places where there are no hotels. The city I just returned from in Belgium has no hotels in the historic district, but a few hostels and a number of whole-apartment airbnbs. I'm past the point in my life where I want to sleep in a room with 10 strangers who may steal my stuff, so airbnb it is.

The CFO's job is to balance the books, not do biz dev. That quote looks like backstabbing scapegoating.

Many cfo actually have the biz dev unit under them. Google and my current company both have the biz dev unit under the CFO. I also worked for CFO at a mobile telecom and he was actually a key executive in charge of the 3g expansion. The role is actually much more than accounting.

Certainly Corp Dev is under the CFO. Seems that this is a CFO who wanted bigger things (like Noto at Twitter) and AirBnB didn’t want it to be there. Someone who was CFO at Blackstone had to have big ambitions.