What could they possibly need this much space for, and who is paying for it? Bubblelicious.
Their tens of millions of dollars in revenue?
Shouldn't they deposit that money in a bank?
Airbnb Commits To SF By Signing A 10-Year, 169,000 Square Foot Lease
11–20 of 41 posts
Re: Airbnb Commits To SF By Signing A 10-Year, 169,000 Square Foot Lease
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine that AirBnb needs a very large customer service team, for one.
Our customer support team is primarily home-shored, and works around the world in over 15 countries - less than 5% is in SF. The majority of people will be product, design, engineering... plus marketing, bd, operations, G&A, etc.
Interesting. I used to work for an accommodation company in a similar space to AirBnb (in fact, I was tasked with cloning you guys before I quit...) that had customer service operations centralised in two continental hubs. Sounds like your approach will work a lot better than that.
Re: Airbnb Commits To SF By Signing A 10-Year, 169,000 Square Foot Lease
#13Re: Airbnb Commits To SF By Signing A 10-Year, 169,000 Square Foot Lease
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Airbnb Commits To SF By Signing A 10-Year, 169,000 Square Foot Lease
#15888 Brannan does not look anything like the pristine building pictured in the article. Why would they need to post a clearly 'shopped picture of a building that already exists unless they were hiding something?
The actual building's windows are all painted over and that tree in the foreground does not exist. The freeway overpass pictured just across the street is a homeless encampment strewn with shopping carts, human feces, and needles. The city comes by about once a month to hose the sidewalk down with a noxious bleach solution.
btw, 888 Brannan is just around the corner from Zynga and Adobe.
Re: Airbnb Commits To SF By Signing A 10-Year, 169,000 Square Foot Lease
#16What could they possibly need this much space for, and who is paying for it? Bubblelicious.
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.
Re: Airbnb Commits To SF By Signing A 10-Year, 169,000 Square Foot Lease
#17888 Brannan does not look anything like the pristine building pictured in the article. Why would they need to post a clearly 'shopped picture of a building that already exists unless they were hiding something? The actual building's windows are all painted over and that tree in the foreground does not exist. The freeway overpass pictured just across the street is a homeless encampment strewn with shopping carts, huma…
Presumably they'll be renovating and this is planning artwork from their architect. This is the equivalent of my sending my family concept sketches of my kitchen renovation. I can't imagine what they'd be "hiding".
Edit: this seems to be pretty close to the angle in the picture: http://g.co/maps/xj758
Re: Airbnb Commits To SF By Signing A 10-Year, 169,000 Square Foot Lease
#18What could they possibly need this much space for, and who is paying for it? Bubblelicious.
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.
Re: Airbnb Commits To SF By Signing A 10-Year, 169,000 Square Foot Lease
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our customer support team is primarily home-shored, and works around the world in over 15 countries - less than 5% is in SF. The majority of people will be product, design, engineering... plus marketing, bd, operations, G&A, etc.
Completely sincere question that I'd love to hear your thoughts on: why in the world do you need 1000 people doing that stuff? I get how sales/marketing/customer service require high headcounts -- but product people? Is there really something useful for 500 developers to do that the top 50 of them couldn't have done? I've always assumed (since I don't understand it) that it's just a momentum thing. Did you ever consi…
I'm guessing the 10 year plan is they're going to start competing with orbitz, travelocity, priceline, tripadvisor, flightcaster, hipmunk, everyone in the travel space basically.
Let's not forget about cars, trucks, bikes, why not start competing with zipcar, Hertz, Budget, Enterprise? Sometimes you need a car when you travel, right?
Commercial REITs are getting into the rental space as well, they might have some sort of deal lined up with large players. Let's also not forget about coworking spaces for when you want to get work done on the road...
Airbnb for play, airbnb for work, airbnb for commercial real estate, airbnb for wheels, airbnb for...
Re: Airbnb Commits To SF By Signing A 10-Year, 169,000 Square Foot Lease
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.