How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company

Re:How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company by calbear81 on Tuesday May 31, 2011 @05:08PM (#2604588)

I am slightly disturbed. I don't mind startups using Craigslist to market and heck, they might even be allowed to do this if they have an option on AirBnB to "market my property on my behalf" to just post the properties on CL every two weeks but what bothers me is this:

1) They explicitly violated the posters request to not receive "commercial" mail of any kind. This is basically the same thing as SPAMing. Would HN condone any type of unsolicited SPAM from a YC startup? I think not. The intent of the poster was to receive only credible inquiries from people interested in renting their property, not from competing services or people wanting to sell them on services, etc.

2) They tried to hide the fact that it was SPAM by using fake Gmail aliases and pretending to be normal folk just trying to help that vacation rental owner out. If you're going to push your service out there to people, be transparent about who you are and allow people to tell you to not contact them anymore.

I think startups are held to a looser standard and of course we all love to be "hustlers" but the idea that this behavior should be applauded regardless of it's ethnical nature seems wrong.

The analysis seemed to be from 2009, perhaps things are much different now.

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Re:How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company by freshfunk on Wednesday June 01, 2011 @12:37PM (#2608049)

What bothers me more is that Craigslist is one of the great Silicon Valley stories of something that grew from nothing (an email list that one person created). They weren't always big. Long ago they were a small, scrappy startup. It took years of perseverance, hard work and providing a useful service.

It's a story startups should aspire to. Instead AirBnb seems to get a pass because they are a YC company. I can't wait for irony to strike when another startup does this to AirBnb.

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