The second blog post (linked above/below) is the problem. Before that, I thought this was a major crisis, but could be survived. After that (and the FT article), I really think they will be incredibly lucky to survive, much less continue their growth trajectory.

People who use startups early do so because of the human interactions. AirBnB destroyed that by not being humane with the woman (EJ?). Sure, she has culpability, but I guarantee making her "right" would have cost one or two orders of magnitude less than this is costing.

I would also expect the board to replace the CEO as a symbolic gesture. Somebody has to take the blame or they will not be able to get the next round raised.

The victim has updated her blog with a new post in which she explains how some of the public statements made by Airbnb's ceo are not true:

http://ejroundtheworld.blogspot.com/2011/07/airbnb-nightmare...

Wow guys, sorry 6 hours when this news was a few hours old, I hadn't seen it yet.

A totally great reason to dogpile and downvote. Do you people even take HN guidelines into account when voting these days?

Fwiw, you got an up vote from me. Your comment was out of date, not trolling. I'm really wondering if down voting needs to be removed from most people.

Oh, I'm not really worried about it. I seem to find that most people on HN, even when disagreeing, are happy to stay neutral or upvote for discussion. I suspect it's lurkers weighing in with their opinion that vote. It was pretty disheartening yesterday when a discussion turned nasty and was full of accusations that I was downvoting (and even in a place where it's impossible to downvote child comments).

I thought I'd go for a plea of sanity for those who are downvoting to consider why they're downvoting. It's so rare that I find anything worth downvoting and it's usually someone just being off the wall rude, mean or ignorant. Oh well.