How The Hell Is This My Fault?

Everybody calm down please.

EJ is real, she's a real person, it really did happen, just in case anybody was still wondering about that.

I've passed her contact info to PG and him being the smart man that he is I'm pretty sure that he can come up with a solution that will satisfy everybody and will allow the victim to move on and get AirBNB past this crisis. Any words to the effect that AirBNB is 'setting precedent' are null and void, of course they aren't and even if they were it would not matter one bit, sometimes you just need to do the right thing, even if that hurts you financially. Sometimes lawyers are good, sometimes they muddle the water. In this case I'd advise to leave the lawyers out of it, this is an emotional train-wreck and lawyers are only going to make it worse.

The future can wait until after this has been resolved to EJs satisfaction. Customer = King. Be happy that so far the mainstream press seems to be ignoring this story, the last thing you want at this point is to leave that clock ticking to the point where they do pick it up and who knows how many more EJ stories start hitting the news.

Yes, this could be an isolated case, but given the numbers involved it probably isn't.

Whoever lied will have to come clean about it at some point, maybe PG will owe Arrington an apology, maybe not.

Note that 'offering help' and 'giving help' are two very different things, and PG has not said anywhere that AirBNB has given her help, just that they've been offering it from the beginning, it may have been an unconditional offer, or it may have been a conditional one with conditions unacceptable for EJ. If they did nothing tangible for the last 30 days that really is a problem, but that means that PG can still stand by his words. Whatever hang-ups that stop 'offering' turning in to 'given' need to be resolved immediately.

Time will tell, all that depends on what really happened and other than EJ and one or two people at AirBNB nobody knows, the rest is hearsay. It is very well possible that PG is acting on incomplete or wrong info. The fact that AirBNB is willing to move to keep this out of the media during a funding round may tell us a bit about their attitude towards being truthful with investors, assuming that that is true, which we can not take as read at this point.

As far as damage to the apartment, pictures with some proof would help (and would indicate the extent of the damage), and if the truth is to come out about the interaction with AirBNB then someone would have to dump their email cache.

Personally I don't think that is the best way forward (other than for EJ if she's telling the truth and wants to make that more than plain, and AirBNB turns out to have not done anything tangible other than saying they will 'support her' and have 'offered help'), what this mostly needs is to be taken care of, whether that happens in the public eye or not is not relevant.

I exchanged some email with the lady, EJ is right now literally scared out of her wits, concern for her safety and well being should come first, after that, when the situation has been normalized as far as possible there will be a time of reflection for everybody involved, including PG.

YC companies are hitting bigger home-runs each year and with that comes a need for a more professional approach to PR. When you're dealing at this level and you have this many interactions with your customers (2 million nights booked = 4 million chances for someone to be dissatisfied) there will always be trouble. It is unavoidable, so you have to plan for it and you plan for the worst case scenarios.

Luckily, there was no bodily harm in this case, the perps were gone when she returned. But that is just about the only icing on this cake, other than that there needs to be some real hard work done to set this right and to do what can be done to avoid a repetition in the future. And if there is a repetition (imo inevitable) that person should have been warned up front about the risks in an un-ambiguous way.

Best of luck to all involved, especially to EJ and the AirBNB team.

There are a lot of long words in these posts, so I doubt anyone will read this, but I want to say it anyway.

First, this whole thing just wreaks of a big disaster of miscommunication between all involved parties. Many commentators I think are being overly sensitive and pedantic (I commented yesterday on the shocking revelation that an airbnb founder would "enjoy meeting" EJ). The following points seem clear to me:

* EJ's perspective is tainted by her negative experience. While she criticized the founder for an impersonal meeting request, she could have disparaged the founder just as easily had it gone the other way: "Oh, the founder sent me this mail gushing with concern... if he really cared, he would have done X and Y differently, now he is just backtracking like a coward in light of media attention"

* airbnb believes that they are helping and is trying to do what's feasible, but is weighed down by concern over insurance, regulation, fault, and other pertinent issues involved in this precedent-setting incident. airbnb also is likely to (subconsciously) give a story that is perhaps unrealistically positive to one of its earliest mentors and investors, who readily believes and defends one of his earliest and most successful investments; I can't help but think there are child-parent-type instincts on that kind of relationship.

* Arrington is writing the story mostly accurately, perhaps not with the rigid journalistic method that ensures precision in retelling, as we generally expect to find lacking in the casual vernacular of a blog. In fact, I think a lot of TC-related controversy stems from nothing more than the casual format that leaves much room for misreadings (and miswritings). While it may not be fun to read or write an article that follows classical journalistic procedure, there is a reason that that procedure was put in place...

* Commentators jump to the defense of EJ prematurely, partly because of white-knight impulses and partly because of the victim's emotionally-charged writing.

I hope that people calm down over this. We need to allow all parties involved some time, I think. This is a major thing in the history of airbnb and the logistics require careful attention -- they may not get it perfectly right, but I believe they're operating out of good faith and trying to do the right thing. I also believe EJ is struggling to get a grip on her new circumstances and would also benefit from some time apart from the sensationalism. As for PG/TC/others, it just causes volumes of unnecessary drama to get publicly entangled.

I'm not sure that anything else productive can be done at this point by continuing to expound on the issue, it merely seems to create more controversy for controversy's sake.

HN has been pretty disgusting the last few days: the level of schadenfreude here has hit ridiculous new highs.

It seems that every time a story breaks about a successful company, a bunch of envious and disgruntled people come out of the woodwork and jump onto the bandwagon headed straight for the founders' heads. A community of seemingly intelligent and rational individuals turns into the most rabid, emotionally-charged group of catty girls I've ever seen. We only have one side of the story here. What if the've offered help and she's rejecting it? What if there are some very legitimate reasons that AirBnB is not going totally public about it? You don't know, and you have not heard the other side of the story.

The same thing happened with Dropbox. You guys were so ridiculously quick to foam at the mouth with your theatrics and conspiracies.

It's pretty revolting. Envy is just not a good color on many of you.

Edit: Spelling. Thanks, Jacques.

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.

I think the problem is that in an information vacuum rumours and speculation can easily take hold.

The lack of a complete, definitive account from AirBnB (that is also consistent with EJ's) means that those curious about the event have to speculate about what REALLY happened - a recipe for nastiness.

Edit: Also consider how many doubted EJ's account as well - or even that anything actually happened. More speculation due to the lack of clarity regarding this event.