Airbnb is frequenty cited as a counterpoint to all the bubble talk because they have a real business model and are making money. Same goes for all the other highly valued YC companies(Dropbox,OMGPOP,Heroku,etc).

There seem to be non-trivial possible legal landmines though which are likely to multiply internationally.

That's not unusual--PayPal was in the same boat and they made billions.

Their tens of millions of dollars in revenue?

Shouldn't they deposit that money in a bank?

And have their employees work out of Starbucks?

We originally wanted to work in our apartment forever. We figured we could fit 100 people in 5 apartment units in our building. Assuming we would need to scale beyond that, Joe and I talked about renting every home on the street. Imagine product in one house, marketing in another... Wasn't really feasible though.

Why, oh why, did this beautiful dream die?

I know. Train has left. Inspiration for a new startup perhaps?

That would have been epic.

Zoning code issues or hard finding a block of housing to buy with owners willing to sell?

"Wasn't really feasible though"

Zoning as only one issue. You most definitely can't run a business in a residential apartment, condo, coop or neighborhood. In some neighborhoods you might slide by depending on the makeup and the neighbors.

That sounds amazing an scary at the same time. Wonder if you could try it out for a new product team, that's fairly isolated from rest of the company. A startup within AirBnb?

"airbnb skunkworks? Yeah, they're three houses down"

Maybe they plan to divide it into smaller chunks and loan them out to people via some kind of internet website for that sort of thing?

I'm actually wondering if they will ever get into the coworking space.

I think 42Floors is going to get there first:

http://42floors.com/