Re:Is This the End of Airbnb?
by betaby on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @01:46PM
(#22948199)
But why it's burning hole in the finances? AirBnB is all marketing. Scale down your cloud instances and don't spend on ads? What exactly burning money at the rate of 1B per month? It's not clear from the article at all.
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Current employee here. The burn rate is ~$100M/mo, not 1B/mo, after cutting marketing and reduced CS costs due to fewer bookings. You can see this in publicly available data from the WSJ and The Information. Not sure where people get these wildly inaccurate numbers.
My guess would be employees since we haven't heard of any large layoffs from them. The facade is that Air BnB is an engineering/technology company and the second they start cutting into that they "lose their magic".
They must pay lawyers an astronomical amount to help them skirt the law?
I'm sure it doesn't account for 1B a month, but paying employees is really expensive and airbnb has a lot of them
1B a month just in employees is over 100k employees making 100k a year. i know the tech ones make more but i assume the customer support makes less. that's a lotttt of employees
Re:Is This the End of Airbnb?
by davidwang34 on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @02:21PM
(#22948580)
it's not quite that simple. if an employee makes 100k a year in salary, they cost much more than that to the company - the company has to pay for payroll taxes, health insurance, any benefits like PTO or free food, not to mention all the infrastructure the employee uses like the office building, electricity, air conditioning, etc. according to a comment above, airbnb has 14,000 employees. that's a lot of office space and benefits to be paying for. and that's just the employee costs, not counting anything else
then the next question would be why in gods name have they so many employees. I just checked wikipedia and they have apparently twelve thousand workers? What do all these people do? I don't understand these sharing companies.
The Wikipedia number is incorrect. Actual number is ~7K with most being non-tech employees. About 1K engineers. If you break down the functions, the numbers start making sense. For example, Airbnb has a global payment processing platform, which is basically like mini-Stripe. That org is probably ~100 eng. Then there’s Homes, Experiences, Transportation, Lux, Plus, experimental projects etc. Each team owns a particular page in the flow. Each team needs a backend, frontend, iOS, Android person. Designer, PM, data scientist etc