They don't need the cash necessarily but the early employee options were expiring so they needed to go public

This. A large number of employees were granted RSU's and these have the stipulation that the company goes public at a certain time.

im not familiar with this, i havent read much about early employee stock options, what does this mean?

The stock options were written to expire after ten years and the ten year expiration date was coming up. Airbnb wanted to IPO to ensure these early employees got properly rewarded for their huge contributions. I’m not sure exactly why they couldn’t just grant replacement options but I believe this would cause issues with the cost basis / additional tax and they probably can’t issue equivalent options to some of those people who no longer work for them due to IRS regulations

Do they need an ipo to exercise them? What about private sale of shares?

It's kind of amazing that AirBnB requires that much money to operate but I guess I need to read the s1.

They don't need that much cash. The business is incredibly capital efficient and has great working capital dynamics because they collect the entire booking value up front and then pay the host once the booking occurs.

I have yet to read the S-1, but I'm assuming it's the same issue as Uber. Inflated overhead due to higher baseline operating costs.

Uber/Airbnb don't need near the amount of product/engineering they actually have.

Uber I can still believe due to their complex app (real-time tracking of drivers and riders, matching algorithms, route mapping, pooling, fare calculation, surges). Not to mention other divisions like food delivery, autonomous driving, freight etc.

AirBnb is...a database of static listings and a search engine on top. Their top technology problems were all solved by Expedia like 20 years ago.

I never understood why Airbnb (and even Uber for that matter) were seen as prestigious tech places to work at.

Expedia, hotels.com. booking.com and most airlines are handling more requests than Airbnb in more challenging environments.

Uber is not that difficult. There's work for hundreds of developers between the few products, the localization for tens of countries with different language/currency/culture, and maintaining the main applications in working condition 24/7 at global scale. That's about it.

They have thousands of engineers sitting idle or making pet projects, struggling to justify their existence, as regularly attested by internal employees when an article pops up.