Sounds like a lot of people on here are jealous. Obviously they weren't being ethical, but I think just about every popular web startup does what they need to do to solve the chicken and the egg problem. I think every single dating site puts up fake profiles, sends fake msgs, winks and flirts to get started.
How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company
101–110 of 197 posts
Re: How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company
#102AirBnB is not a "Billion Dollar Company." Investment is not revenue or profit. The revenue numbers I heard are in the 5-10 million range. When AirBnB posts a billion dollars in revenue, then it will be a "Billion Dollar Company."
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…
All this is true, but has no bearing on the common use of language. When a trader refers to Acme corporation as an $N company, he is indicating that $N is its annual revenue, not its market capitalization.
Re: How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company
#103Earlier 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…
All this is true, but has no bearing on the common use of language. When a trader refers to Acme corporation as an $N company, he is indicating that $N is its annual revenue, not its market capitalization.
Citation needed
Common usage that I've seen is to refer to the market cap as the value of the company. For a random example http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2010/03/19/how-does-ap....
The other common usage that I've seen is to refer to a company as being worth X billion a year. In that usage the a year bit is not dropped, because dropping it would introduce confusion with the first common usage.
Re: How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company
#104Everyone's focused on the ethics here, but if this is indeed what AirBnB was doing, isn't it a massive (and repeated) violation of Federal laws on unsolicited emails (for one thing, you're required to identify yourself properly) and likely other rules as well? What this article alleges isn't just questionable marketing practices, it's potentially deceptive / illegal marketing.
Yes. It's a violation of the CAN-SPAM act.
Re: How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company
#105Re: How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Found via Google Search: http://www.vacationrentalscommunity.com/forums/t/2767.aspx
The author already claims he has access to professional spamming tools. All he has to do is spam people on craigslist pretending to be AirBnB in a way that can't be traceable to AirBnB. Then he writes an article complaining about AirBnB and asks "why would they hide behind shady tactics?" You get maximum impact if you wait two years and post when your competitor gets really big so everything is forgotten and really u…
Your comment is ridiculous. Can you really imagine someone making a two and a half year plan to set a competitor up like that? And in the meantime you're giving the competitor customers like crazy? Pull the other one.
Re: How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company
#107Earlier 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…
I'm not a lawyer but I am an anti-spam expert.
They most certainly are illegal. They are unsolicited advertising (which is fine under CAN-SPAM, sadly), and contain none of the requirements of CAN-SPAM - a legitimate business address, and a clear unsubscribe link.
Just because they come from gmail accounts does not exempt AirBnB from the law.
Re: How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a FAQ: for your first sale, you sacrifice the price (all the way down to free if you have to). For the next sales, you show your reference customer.
Free is not a sale. You have to charge something to claim them as a customer.
You know what I mean. Even in EDA, having a reference "user", as long as they are using the product, is a major achievement that will be leveraged [to death] with future [paying] customers.
Re: How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company
#109Is this 'grey' ? In the sense that it can be interpreted as 'shady' ? Hell yes. But is it "wrong" ? I don't think so. I always thought that getting that first set of customers that will take you to product/market fit was going to be easy. What with the Twitterverse, Facebook and all and sundry. But let me tell you, from experience, it is DAMN HARD! I guess the true test of whether or not this is 'unethical' is whethe…
"Is this 'grey' ? In the sense that it can be interpreted as 'shady' ? Hell yes. But is it "wrong" ? I don't think so."
I post a listing on Craigslist specifically saying it's not "ok for others to contact me about other services, products or commercial interests" (an option in Craigslist) and then a business tries to convince me to use their site using a disguise DESPITE clearly stating that I don't want to be contacted?
No, I'd say the true test of whether something is ethical or not is whether it violates rules and/or the choices of a user. Then again, I'm the type that actually wants businesses to respect my decision.
Re: How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Sue them for what, exactly? Coincidence? While it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what's happening here, it takes a bit more than connecting the dots to make a legal case stick. [EDIT] Just to be clear I'm certainly not a fan of this. It strikes me as unethical and a little low on the "sleazy marketer" scale. I don't however beleive that this is illegal unless you can somehow prove that JillSmith03@gmai…
It's actually very easy to prove, because the same email was sent from several different accounts: you go after AirBnB directly and shoot for discovery, get them under oath to answer whether they did this or not.
If you have ever been questioned under oath, you know how tough it is to lie (ping me offline for details).
No point in chasing the gmail accounts themselves, that would be a dead-end.