How The Hell Is This My Fault?

Re:How The Hell Is This My Fault? by jacquesm on Saturday July 30, 2011 @07:45AM (#2825546)

It's 'schadenfreude'.

This issue is very emotionally charged because:

  - everybody that uses AirBNB thought 'this could be me'

  - everybody that has a sister thinks 'that could be my sister'

  - everybody that runs a start-up thinks 'this could be a
    shakedown' (including some preposterous claims about
    hotel chains putting her up to this)

  - everybody is wondering if AirBNB is sitting on a huge
    stack of cash why they didn't just put it right and
    changed their terms of service / signup process

Being the 'ebay of spaces' means that you will be doing the same things that ebay spends the most of its time on: battling fraud. AirBNB is coming of age with this incident, from now on the stakes will be raised considerably in how they deal with the reputation of their hosts and tenants.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Looking forward to the period after this incident has blown over when AirBNB will be a company that is that much stronger and that will put action to their claims of transparency and being a 'trusted marketplace'.

If they can make that work they'll be fine.

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Re:How The Hell Is This My Fault? by raganwald on Saturday July 30, 2011 @09:09AM (#2825680)

Being the 'ebay of spaces' means that you will be doing the same things that ebay spends the most of its time on: battling fraud.

This is the most old-school HN insight I've seen so far, thanks. Quite often, what a business appears to do for it's users (allow you to read your mail on line, hook landlords up with renters) and it's competitive advantage (spam fighting, ad targeting, fraud detection, &c.) are very different things.

Back when I was young and rode a nice, sporty dinosaur to work, I made software for publishing classified ads. On the surface, it's a publishing business. But in reality, it's an operations business, because classifieds used to have very high revenue per column inch, but the transaction costs were also very high. So the profitability of a page of classifieds was driven by how efficiently the paper could take ads.

Anyways, I agree with your speculation. Running a c2c business is going to be all about fraud and other bad actor detection as well as operation efficiency.

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Re:How The Hell Is This My Fault? by rexreed on Saturday July 30, 2011 @09:15AM (#2825691)

This is probably the most useful comment of the bunch for me personally and my startup - I'm trying to learn from other people's lessons (it's the cheapest way to learn), and I think what you said above really helps. I made the comment elsewhere, but here's what I learned:

* Respond quickly

* Respond in the open so that there's no he-said / she-said

* Be fair, and err on the side of the customer

* Don't spin the company line - be thoughtful, especially if someone has lost money / time / confidence / data / faith in humanity

* Think "This could be me / this could be someone I know & love"

* If relevant, get the authorities involved quickly so that you can be sure it's not a shakedown.

* Assume the customer is telling you the truth unless you have specific and verifiable reason to believe otherwise

* Get insurance

* Don't let others (especially those with interests) speak for you.

* Try to establish a single point person for all contact with the customer, and make that person easily and quickly available to the customer at the customer's behest

* Try not to respond to what's said in the press

Did I miss any good lessons here?

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Re:How The Hell Is This My Fault? by jodrellblank on Sunday July 31, 2011 @07:13PM (#2829985)

Are they really things you learned here that you couldn't mostly have written down before by thinking on "how should a company interact"? They sound pretty ideal, but what when you can't "be fair" and also "err on the side of the customer"?

What when you can't establish a single point of contact because you don't have the resources? What current state of your company will you deprioritize to make that a priority?

What does "don't spin the company line - be thoughtful" mean? If your company line changes as soon as you put thought into it then (a) where did you get it in the first place? and (b) in what way does it represent your company, anyway?

What if it turns out AirBnB believed they did respond quickly, fairly, thoughtfully, got the authorities involved, didn't officially let anyone else speak for them, etc. and this situation still developed because human communication is like that and other people didn't perceive the same intentions in their behaviour as they did?

Did I miss any good lessons here?

You can't please all the people all the time? You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs? No gain without pain? Whatever you plan for won't be the thing which trips you up? The best laid plans of mice and men? Shit happens? It's what you do with it that counts?

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Re:How The Hell Is This My Fault? by rexreed on Monday August 01, 2011 @05:09PM (#2834440)

This was just posted today: http://blog.airbnb.com/our-commitment-to-trust-and-safety

In particular: "With regards to EJ, we let her down, and for that we are very sorry. We should have responded faster, communicated more sensitively, and taken more decisive action to make sure she felt safe and secure. But we weren’t prepared for the crisis and we dropped the ball. Now we’re dealing with the consequences. In working with the San Francisco Police Department, we are happy to say a suspect is now in custody. Even so, we realize that we have disappointed the community. To EJ, and all the other hosts who have had bad experiences, we know you deserve better from us."

Looks like I wasn't so lame after all in taking some lessons learned. If AirBnB can learn some "obvious" lessons from this incident, so can I... and you.

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Re:How The Hell Is This My Fault? by jodrellblank on Monday August 01, 2011 @07:26PM (#2834991)

I didn't say you were lame or that they were bad points, I was more on the side that (a) you can't always win, (b) if you wait to start until you are sure you can win any situation, you'll be waiting forever.

We're not really thinking that the AirBnB founders, if asked last year, would have said "don't communicate sensitively to a crime victim" or "good customer service means responding slowly" of "don't work with the police", and now they've been hit by this and learned these lessons they know better, are we?

Planning to do everything right first time is a common failure mode and procrastination mode, that's all.

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Re:How The Hell Is This My Fault? by jodrellblank on Sunday July 31, 2011 @06:54PM (#2829941)

I think I've seen it suggested on HN that many huge companies got that way with some shady past behaviour. I can't help thinking on that with regard to AirBnB - if they started up demanding full ID, who would use them? Who trusts giving their full ID to a little known company? Nobody. So they start up with a reputation based trust system because that's the only option they have. Now they've got lots of users, big investment, and a horrible event twisting their arm to do something (e.g. requiring ID which they couldn't do before, or spending more on security staff teams which they couldn't afford before), and it might not hurt them much to do so.

Viewed from the future with hindsight, perception shifts to show them as a large company with a shady past "a very insecure system to gain traffic followed by a switchover to a legitimate system".

(This is not the same thing as saying AirBnB planned bad things, it's a musing on how things happen and how things are perceived.).

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Re:How The Hell Is This My Fault? by jmtame on Saturday July 30, 2011 @05:27PM (#2826835)

I actually thought that Airbnb were having their PayPal moment--where PayPal actually realized it was not in the business of payments, but in the business of anti-fraud and risk management. Then I realized this is probably a bizarre one-off case, and the responsibility lies on the renter, not on Airbnb. Although they could supplement renters with insurance, I don't think this is their 'big test'.

What happens next time? Airbnb will either settle with the person quietly (as they've done successfully in the past), or the renter will sue the person who damaged or stole their property. That's all there is to it.

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Re:How The Hell Is This My Fault? by adw on Saturday July 30, 2011 @01:37PM (#2826203)

One extra issue: a bunch of startups concerned with splashover reputational risk (in extremis, and we are nowhere near this, 'why should I use/partner with/fund you, you're associated with bad actors so I don't trust you'.

This isn't rational, but we're talking about hearts not heads here. Look at the damage Dow Jones has taken by association with the News of the World.

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Re:How The Hell Is This My Fault? by diolpah on Saturday July 30, 2011 @08:29AM (#2825619)

" everybody that has a sister thinks 'that could be my sister'"

Because ransacking the home of my brother is no big deal, according to modern gender politics, right?

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Re:How The Hell Is This My Fault? by kyro on Saturday July 30, 2011 @08:33AM (#2825624)

Nah, probably because EJ is most likely female.

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Re:How The Hell Is This My Fault? by rkalla on Saturday July 30, 2011 @09:12AM (#2825688)

She is, she confirmed it in her followup blog post.

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