dispatcher68

Uber does not have meaningful network effects. Airbnb does.

A competitor would need to be more than marginally better to compete subscale, as Airbnb was vs craigslist or original vrbo.

There is an entire blog dedicated to the topic of tech at Airbnb: http://nerds.airbnb.com/. Perhaps you will still feel the same after reading this?

Peter Thiel's Zero To One described four pillars that were necessary for a monopoly. It appears Airbnb has most if not all of these.

1. Network effects - this is usually more important than proprietary tech. They have this - global network effect. This is not a "retail company" any more than Amazon's 3rd party marketplace or Alibaba's is.

2. Tech - read blog and decide for yourself. It's easy to imagine at sub-scale also being able to build Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. Most of the challenges come at scale (and are protected by #1 above).

3. Brand - the commenters seem to agree they have this.

4. Economies of scale - they have this.