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Airbnb announces confidential submission of draft Registration Statement

news.airbnb.com

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Re: Airbnb announces confidential submission of draft Registration Statement

#101

Post by jefftk »

echelon wrote: post #42
tenebrisalietum wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM lawsuit

https://www.forbes.com/sites/washingtonbytes/2020/03/13/airb... > Thes patents at issue are used primarily in e-commerce—and some of them date back to the time of dial-up technologies such as Prodigy. Dial-up era!? Patents shouldn't last that long! This is centuries in technology! I think the only valid use for software patents (if there are any at all), is to prevent bigger players from moving into your space. But s…

US patents last 20 years, which is pretty reasonable. Prodigy ran until 2001, just under 20 years ago.

Re: Airbnb announces confidential submission of draft Registration Statement

#102

Post by xpe »

vmception wrote: post #66
dbt00 wrote: post #6

Just to preempt most of the usual snarky comments -- What's confidential is the contents of the filing, not the fact. All the initial S-1 filings I'm aware of are confidential. After amendments (S-1A filings), the resulting document can be made public. At this time, any details of offering are still volatile, and there's no reason to force companies to publish that information until the final offering details are sol…

In all of my sales I have modified the offering midstream after feedback from investors that jumped through hoops to see how to invest and balked at the numbers. All advisors I've ever had all completely missed the mark about what the market is interested in and what a good deal looks like. And then after modifying its published publicly and that's the only record of what the terms ever were. In the public's mind we…

> All advisors I've ever had all completely missed the mark about what the market is interested in and what a good deal looks like.

May I ask:

1. How many data points are you talking about? (how many pieces of advice? how many advisors?)

2. (In cases where quantitative analysis makes sense) what kind of statistics have you seen around percentage error?

Re: Airbnb announces confidential submission of draft Registration Statement

#103

Post by opportune »

asdff wrote: post #52
mancerayder wrote: post #17

I'm upset, after using the platform for a decade, that they remove negative reviews of properties. I learned this recently. That included some of my very tame and reasonable reviews. Makes me want to short the stock when it IPOs, after its initial run-up out of vengeance.

Another dark pattern is hiding the price until you are nearly booking the place. Most people want a cheap stay close to where they need to be, so they look on the prices on the map, which fail to include fees which can be all over the place depending on the host.

Chesky mentioned at one point he would look into this. I don’t see what’s so hard about computing the average price per day in the aggregate view though...

Re: Airbnb announces confidential submission of draft Registration Statement

#104

Post by opportune »

seattle_spring wrote: post #85
asdff wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another dark pattern is hiding the price until you are nearly booking the place. Most people want a cheap stay close to where they need to be, so they look on the prices on the map, which fail to include fees which can be all over the place depending on the host.

This hasn't been the case for years. If you choose the dates, the full price (including any fees) is included in the total.

It’s not included in the list/map view for your search, so you can’t really compare the actual price without individually visiting each listing

Re: Airbnb announces confidential submission of draft Registration Statement

#105

Post by calbear81 »

mrfusion wrote: post #90
asdff wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another dark pattern is hiding the price until you are nearly booking the place. Most people want a cheap stay close to where they need to be, so they look on the prices on the map, which fail to include fees which can be all over the place depending on the host.

The cancellation policies are nuts too.

What’s nuts about the cancellation policies? Genuinely curious as I lead that team.

Re: Airbnb announces confidential submission of draft Registration Statement

#106

Post by mrfusion »

calbear81 wrote: post #105
mrfusion wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cancellation policies are nuts too.

What’s nuts about the cancellation policies? Genuinely curious as I lead that team.

As a user it’s just frustrating to find a place you like and then see that you need to give them say two months notice. Or you can’t cancel at all.

It’s made me go back to hotels where you can usually cancel pretty freely.

There’s probably nothing you can do about that.

Re: Airbnb announces confidential submission of draft Registration Statement

#107

Post by gen220 »

breck wrote: post #22
tenebrisalietum wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM lawsuit

Wow, I didn't hear about this. How sad that IBM is now a patent troll.

Yeah. Unfortunately it's a nontrivial source of revenue.

In 2018 they sued Groupon for $167m and got $83m.

Interesting quotes from an article [0] reporting on it include:

> In 2017 IBM generated about $1.2 billion in revenue from its licensing activities.

> An IBM licensing executive testified that Amazon, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter have each paid IBM $20 million to $50 million as part of cross-licensing deals that gave them access to the patent portfolio.

> IBM lawyer John Desmarais told jurors the company had no choice but to sue after Groupon refused to take responsibility for using IBM’s foundational technology.

> “The verdict is a vindication for IBM’s licensing program,” Desmarais said by phone.

It looks like they've been at it for a while, too. They sued Amazon in 2006 [1]. Quotes from that reporting:

> IBM alleges that Amazon.com knowingly exploits its intellectual property by infringing on several patents that cover, among other things, the presentation of applications in an interactive service, the storage of data in an interactive network, the presentation of advertising in an interactive service, and the ordering of items from an electronic catalog.

While doing some digging, I stumbled across this [2] super interesting scoop on how IBM views and remunerates successful patent-applicant-employees, from 2001. Makes sense to give out bonuses for patents, when they weaponize them this way.

Gross. :/

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ibm-groupon-lawsuit-idUSK...

[1]: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2547652/ibm-sues-amazo...

[2]: https://www.eetimes.com/ees-want-a-bigger-piece-of-patent-ro...

Re: Airbnb announces confidential submission of draft Registration Statement

#108

Post by calbear81 »

mrfusion wrote: post #106
calbear81 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s nuts about the cancellation policies? Genuinely curious as I lead that team.

As a user it’s just frustrating to find a place you like and then see that you need to give them say two months notice. Or you can’t cancel at all. It’s made me go back to hotels where you can usually cancel pretty freely. There’s probably nothing you can do about that.

There’s a range of flexibility offered including many homes that have free cancellation until 5 or 1 day before check-in. Some are on Stricter policies that are more strict than what you would find with hotels but homeowners also have different risk profiles and the policies help balance that risk out.

Re: Airbnb announces confidential submission of draft Registration Statement

#109

Post by imperialdrive »

thebean11 wrote: post #53

As someone who was looking into escaping the city for a bit on AirBnb a couple months ago, I think they might be doing better than many people think.

You'd think so but my brother started an extended WFH road trip and his first booking (after a very long drive) ended up going to hell due to the host not having the place ready and to top it off Airbnb has some crazy policies such as: if you have any issue it's a 100% refund (ok, great you think) but since there is no leeway to even attempt to work something out with a host, the host will always leave poor feedback, which (get this) you can not view unless you leave a review. Bonkers. Not worth the trouble for people who have enough money to not want to worry about the hassle and headache.

Re: Airbnb announces confidential submission of draft Registration Statement

#110

Post by heavenlyblue »

thebean11 wrote: post #94
heavenlyblue wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should also be a chef because people will never stop eating. This is a train that went away a long time ago. AirBNB is slowing down and becoming the yellow pages/TripAdvisor of the internet (that is very clear in terms of the commodification of the review process). It doesn’t mean they will fail, however you can’t just state they will grow forever.

> You should also be a chef because people will never stop eating. Not sure how this has anything to do with the network effect point I brought up. I definitely never stated they will "grow forever", I said the network effects of their platform are a sort of moat. Do you have a source for AirBNB slowing down?

You brought up a very obvious point.

Any marketplace will benefit from network effects. The devil is in the extent to which you can take advantage of these. And you made no points about that.

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