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How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company

davegooden.com

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Re: How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company

#171

Post by suking »

stickfigure wrote: post #98
suking wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CAN-SPAM, sending from a fake address (illegal headers). CA has a specific law that pre-empts CAN-SPAM that definitely makes this illegal if sent from CA (don't ask how I know).

Man oh man, there are a lot of (very bad) armchair lawyers on HN. You might consider AirBnB's actions unethical, but they certainly aren't illegal - which would be obvious to anyone who bothered reading the CAN-SPAM wikipedia page. It's not illegal to violate Craigslist's TOS, and AFAICT the "spam" messages were sent from a legitimate Gmail account. For those of you claiming "I'd rather be poor than violate craigslis…

It's commercial email 100%. Probably a fake sender name (illegal), against gmail ToS, against CL ToS and no unsubscribe link and no one even subscribed in the first place. 100% against CAN-SPAM.

Re: How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company

#172

Post by jhermsmeyer »

throwaway61802 wrote: post #146

Nobody here knows how much of Airbnb's growth is driven by Craigslist, it's purely speculative. Until Airbnb confirms, you'll never know but you'd have to be naive to believe that you can build a company up to $1 billion by firing off a bunch of emails. Nobody here has even suggested the possibility that "Airbnb became a billion dollar company" by suggesting how many Craigslist rentals are posted each day, along with…

Saying "the only part" of the law airbnb broke and then listing 1,2,3 violations is laughable.

Also I quite enjoy the irony that an account name of throwaway is defending the practice of using throwaway gmail accounts to spam people. Warms the cockles.

Re: How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company

#173

Post by huuleon »

thomasgerbe wrote: post #69
nhangen wrote: post #50

This is the same thing spammers do to steal money from people, and it's the same thing that dating sites do to pretend to have women interested in meeting dudes. Either way, it's fraudulent. I don't hate that they did this, but I hate that they tried to pretend they were anonymous women that happened to really like AirBnB. Why be so shady about it and instead why not just be honest? "Hey, we noticed your rental and t…

I assume they couldn't be honest because it would've violated Craiglist's Terms of Use, namely: You agree not to post, email, or otherwise make available Content: k) that constitutes or contains "affiliate marketing," "link referral code," "junk mail," "spam," "chain letters," "pyramid schemes," or unsolicited commercial advertisement; l) that constitutes or contains any form of advertising or solicitation if: posted…

I assume AirBnB have received many cease and desist letters from craigslist. Craigslist is just waiting for AirBnB to get bigger so they can get big chunk of money.

Re: How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company

#175

Post by btilly »

amirmc wrote: post #161
btilly wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, you're absolutely wrong. The value of X, for any X at all, is what someone else is willing to pay for it. That is how markets work. Any kind of market. And it works for everything from pricing apples to pieces of art to companies. If people are willing to pay $1 billion for your company, it is a billion dollar company. If nobody is willing to pay you a dime for it, it is worth nothing. Your revenue is an input…

Nobody's paid $1B for AirBnB. The investors paid a price for a % of AirBnB that equates to a valuation of $1B. In other words, they've placed a bet that AirBnB will be worth more than $1B.

This is no different than how we calculate the market cap for any company.

And nobody's paid nearly $325B for Apple. But someone just bought a bit under 1 billionth of the company for about $350, so that's what the market cap works out to be.

Re: How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company

#176

Post by suking »

nokcha wrote: post #99
suking wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CAN-SPAM, sending from a fake address (illegal headers). CA has a specific law that pre-empts CAN-SPAM that definitely makes this illegal if sent from CA (don't ask how I know).

>CA has a specific law that pre-empts CAN-SPAM A state law cannot pre-empt a federal law; when a federal law and a state law are in conflict, the federal law takes precedence over the state law. (U.S. Constitution, Article VI, Clause 2.) Notably, the CAN-SPAM Act expressly pre-empts any state law that "expressly regulates the use of electronic mail to send commercial messages, except to the extent that any such statu…

Business & Professions Code § 17529

Pre-empts it. www.DanHatesSpam.com

Re: How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company

#177

Post by thafman »

throwaway61802 wrote: post #148
baudehlo wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It's a violation of the CAN-SPAM act.

Do you drive 66 MPH in a 65 MPH zone? This is hardly breaking the law. This would have been perfectly legal in CAN-SPAM if they added three things: an unsubscribe link, a physical mailing address, and mentioned it was an ad. It probably would have been even more effective. If you want to stop spam, don't rely on bureaucratic processes to resolve it through legislation. Build a spam filter, or do some simple pattern r…

No, unsolicited email is never legal, CAN-SPAM only allows you to send email to people you have a prior business relationship with e.g. they signed up for your service/mailing list. Someone who posted a property to Craigslist hardly fits the profile.

Re: How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company

#178

Post by mover »

kwis wrote: post #137
marcamillion wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not being facetious by this question, but did you make a product that you are selling ? If so, how did you get your first set of customers ? Please share. If you have not made a product that you need to sell yet, I think you will find when you do it, it's MUCH, MUCH more difficult than you ever thought it would be. Also, selling a service - i.e. web development/design is very different than selling a product.

I've sold products. I didn't spam. I talked with customers before the product was even finished to make sure we were solving a real problem, to make sure they understood our marketing message, and to make sure we really understood the space. This led naturally to a situation where I had paying beta customers, and even more customers who signed up and started paying as soon as we launched.

There's a fundamental difference between building a product that doesn't depend on others for its functioning, and a marketplace, where the core function is access to other users.

It is about impossible to get a marketplace going from a standing start. I've commented on it before elsewhere: picking off Craigslist users was always critical for Airbnb to get going. There are dozens of startups trying to build companies off the back of what Craigslist doesn't provide.

I'm sure the Airbnb guys probably started with the honest approach, realized it got them nothing but cease and desist notes, so switched to the craftier fake emails from girls interested in the well-being of vacation renters everywhere. I bet it felt icky at the time, but here they are. And "you know what's cool....?"

Re: How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company

#180

Post by freshfunk »

calbear81 wrote: post #34
Mizza wrote: post #26

Is anybody else slightly disturbed by all of the 'attaboy!' comments here on a post exposing unscrupulous and probably illegal business tactics? Think the response here would be the same if it was MicroSoft or the RIAA caught in something like this and not a YC alum? Anyway, great investigation and great analysis here, I think.

I am slightly disturbed. I don't mind startups using Craigslist to market and heck, they might even be allowed to do this if they have an option on AirBnB to "market my property on my behalf" to just post the properties on CL every two weeks but what bothers me is this: 1) They explicitly violated the posters request to not receive "commercial" mail of any kind. This is basically the same thing as SPAMing. Would HN c…

What bothers me more is that Craigslist is one of the great Silicon Valley stories of something that grew from nothing (an email list that one person created). They weren't always big. Long ago they were a small, scrappy startup. It took years of perseverance, hard work and providing a useful service.

It's a story startups should aspire to. Instead AirBnb seems to get a pass because they are a YC company. I can't wait for irony to strike when another startup does this to AirBnb.

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