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The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy by Leigh Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Blitzscaling, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data science, don't be evil, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, gentrification, geopolitical risk, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Justin.tv, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, Network effects, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, RFID, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the payments system, Tony Hsieh, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Y Combinator, yield management

Weaver and Kayla Deru, “Carbon Monoxide Poisoning at Motels, Hotels, and Resorts,” American Journal of Preventative Medicine, July 2007. 98 According to the National Fire Protection Association: Richard Campbell, “Structure Fires in Hotels and Motels,” National Fire Protection Association, September 2015. 100 relative to nonblack hosts: Benjamin Edelman and Michael Luca, “Digital Discrimination: The Case of Airbnb.com,” Harvard Business School Working Paper, no. 14-054, January 2014. 100 compared with white guests: Benjamin Edelman, Michael Luca, and Dan Svirsky, “Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, September 16, 2016, https://ssrn.com/abstract=2701902. 101 rejections stopped: Shankar Vedantam, Maggie Penman, and Max Nesterak, “#AirbnbWhileBlack: How Hidden Bias Shapes the Sharing Economy,” Hidden Brain, NPR, podcast audio, April 26, 2016, http://www.npr.org/2016/04/26/475623339/-airbnbwhileblack-how-hidden-bias-shapes-the-sharing-economy. 101 “your XXX head”: Elizabeth Weise, “Airbnb Bans N. Carolina Host as Accounts of Racism Rise,” USA Today, June 2, 2016, http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2016/06/01/airbnb-bans-north-carolina-host-racism/85252190/. 102 the experts’ recommendations: Laura W. Murphy, Airbnb’s Work to Fight Discrimination and Build Inclusion, report to Airbnb, September 8, 2016, http://blog.airbnb.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/REPORT_Airbnbs-Work-To-Fight-Discrimination-and-Build-Inclusion-pdf. 104 “we would probably not accomplish our mission”: “Airbnb Just Hit 100 Million Guest Arrivals,” onstage discussion with Brian Chesky and Belinda Johnson, moderated by Andrew Nusca, at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference, Aspen, Colorado, uploaded on July 12, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

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The company wouldn’t exit hypergrowth for quite a long time—it is still in it—but more key executive hires would come, as would a move in 2013 into huge new headquarters. Airbnb had gone from being called the “eBay for space” in Silicon Valley elevator-pitch parlance to becoming a standard that other start-ups were modeled after: Boatbound pitched itself as the Airbnb of boats, dukana was to be the Airbnb of equipment, and DogVacay was the Airbnb for dogs. These days, Airbnb is a juggernaut. There are more than 2,500 employees, including 400 engineers and a customer-service department that’s bigger. And that’s just inside the company. There is also the most important constituency in the Airbnb story, and it lies outside the four walls of its headquarters: the hosts and the travelers; in other words, the millions of people who turned Airbnb from a company into a movement. 3 Airbnb Nation * * * * * * Uber is transactional; Airbnb is humanity.

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While Keycafe serves customers beyond just Airbnb, including dog walkers and other service professionals, Airbnb and property managers are more than half its business, and the company is one of the stronger Airbnb “bolt-ons”: it is an official partner in Airbnb’s Host Assist platform, which integrates some of these vendors into its website, and Brown and his business partner have raised almost $3 million, more than most of the other ancillary services. “As Airbnb has become larger and the valuation and sheer scale of the company has grown, it’s kind of a known play in the venture space,” Brown says. Airbnb has been gathering hosts informally since the beginning, but in 2014 it formalized these efforts with the launch of Airbnb Open, its first global summit of hosts.

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom Slee

4chan, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, commons-based peer production, congestion charging, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, democratizing finance, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, emotional labour, Evgeny Morozov, gentrification, gig economy, Hacker Ethic, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, openstreetmap, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, urban planning, WeWork, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

But the naiveté of twenty-six-year old CEOs, the hubris of their venture capital advisers, and the narrowness of vision of the hacktivists, still fighting the battle of the 1990s and promoting open source, do not bode well. Bibliography Airbnb. “Airbnb Economic Impact.” The Airbnb Blog—Belong Anywhere. Accessed May 9, 2015. http://blog.airbnb.com/economic-impact-airbnb/. ———. “Airbnb’s Economic Impact on New York City.” The Airbnb Blog—Belong Anywhere. Accessed May 9, 2015. http://blog.airbnb.com/airbnbs-economic-impact-nyc-community/. ———. “Building Trust with a New Review System,” July 10, 2014. http://blog.airbnb.com/building-trust-new-review-system/. ———. “One Way Forward: After the Crash, Keeping the Roof Overhead, Airbnb Stories.” Airbnb. Accessed May 9, 2015. https://www.airbnb.com/stories/new-york/one-way-forward. ———.

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Chapter 3 1 Botsman and Rogers, What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. 2 Chesky, “Shared City.” 3 Chesky, “Who We Are, What We Stand For.” 4 Baker, “Barclays: Airbnb Usage To Surpass Hotel Cos., But Not For Business Travel.” 5 Robinson, “Update from Barcelona: Airbnb Policy Blog.” 6 Bradshaw, “Lunch with the FT: Brian Chesky.” 7 Airbnb, “Airbnb Economic Impact.” 8 Airbnb, “One Way Forward.” 9 Said, “Airbnb Profits Prompted S.F. Eviction, Ex-Tenant Says.” 10 Marritz, Two True Stories from the Airbnb Wars.” 11 Airbnb, “Sandy’s Impact.” 12 Coscarelli, “Airbnb Poster-Child Was Evicted for Airbnb-Ing a Converted Barn She Didn’t Own.” 13 Hantman, New York: The next Steps. 14 Electronic Frontier Foundation, Airbnb, Inc. v. Schneiderman; Internet Association, “The Internet Association Files Amicus Brief to Quash the NYAG Subpoena against Airbnb.” 15 Chesky, “Who We Are, What We Stand for.” 16 Tam, “New York AG’s Office.” 17 Flamm, “Strange Bedfellows in Airbnb Dispute.” 18 Krueger, “On Behalf of Regular New Yorkers, Sen.

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Schneiderman; Internet Association, “The Internet Association Files Amicus Brief to Quash the NYAG Subpoena against Airbnb.” 15 Chesky, “Who We Are, What We Stand for.” 16 Tam, “New York AG’s Office.” 17 Flamm, “Strange Bedfellows in Airbnb Dispute.” 18 Krueger, “On Behalf of Regular New Yorkers, Sen. Krueger Responds to Airbnb’s ‘Three Principles.’” 19 Tiku, “Airbnb’s New Office Has a Replica of the Dr. Strangelove War Room.” 20 The Office of New York State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, “Airbnb in the City.” 21 Airbnb, “Airbnb’s Economic Impact on New York City.” 22 Bingham, “The Sharing Economy: Q&A With Airbnb’s Chip Conley.” 23 UNWTO, “Annual Report 2013.” 24 Kassam, “Naked Italians Spark Protests against Antics of Drunken Tourists in Barcelona.” 25 Essers, “Amsterdam Using Airbnb Listing Service to Identify Illegal Rentals.” 26 Haverkort, “Airbnb Is Allowed in Amsterdam.” 27 Hantman, “Good News from Amsterdam.” 28 News, “Amsterdammers Can Rent Their Homes to Tourists via Airbnb after All.” 29 Hantman, “More Good News in Amsterdam.” 30 News, “Amsterdammers Can Rent Their Homes to Tourists via Airbnb after All.” 31 van Daalen, “Airbnb to Collect Tourist Taxes in Amsterdam.” 32 News, “Amsterdammers Break Airbnb Rules: Long Lets with Too Many People.” 33 Robinson, “Moving Forward in Barcelona.” 34 Robinson, “Update from Barcelona: Airbnb Policy Blog.” 35 Kuchler, “Airbnb to Collect and Remit Taxes for Hosts in Paris.” 36 French, Schechner, and Verbergt, “How Airbnb Is Taking Over Paris.” 37 Schofield, “Short-Let Apartments Spark Paris Row as Airbnb Thrives.” 38 French, Schechner, and Verbergt, “How Airbnb Is Taking Over Paris.” 39 Njus, “Portland Legalizes Airbnb-Style Short-Term Rentals.” 40 Peltier, “Airbnb Faces Big Fines in Portland If Hosts Don’t Get City ­Permits.” 41 Mesh, “City Commissioner Nick Fish Berates Airbnb Lobbyist.” 42 Davies, “Activists Vow to Buy Abandoned Cinema and Save Rome’s Bohemian Soul.”

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Boris Johnson, Burning Man, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collaborative consumption, data science, Didi Chuxing, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, East Village, fake it until you make it, fixed income, gentrification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, inflight wifi, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Necker cube, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, race to the bottom, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

“Airbnb Memorandum in Support of Petition to Quash Subpoena,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, https://www.eff.org/document/airbnb-v-schneiderman-memo-law. 19. “Airbnb Introduces Instant Bookings for Hosts,” ProBnB, October 12, 2013, http://www.probnb.com/airbnb-introduces-instant-bookings-for-hosts. 20. Daniel P. Tucker, “Airbnb Won’t Comply with Subpoena from New York Attorney General,” WNYC, October 7, 2013, http://www.wnyc.org/story/airbnb-wont-comply-subpoena-new-york-attorney-general/. 21. “Airbnb’s Economic Impact on the NYC Community,” Airbnb, http://blog.airbnb.com/airbnbs-economic-impact-nyc-community/. 22. “Ruling in Airbnb’s Case in New York,” New York Times, May 13, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/05/13/technology/ruling-airbnb-new-york.html. 23.

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(Courtesy of Airbnb) A teenage Nathan Blecharczyk at home in Boston, already running a successful internet business. (Courtesy of Airbnb) The original AirBed & Breakfast website in October, 2007. (Courtesy of Airbnb) The Airbnb founders (from left: Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky (seated), and Joe Gebbia in their Rausch Street Apartment. (Courtesy of Airbnb) Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia with his seat cushion, CritBuns, “the ultimate sitting tool.” (Courtesy of Airbnb) The Airbnb founders outside the Y Combinator startup incubator in Mountain View, Calif. (Courtesy of Airbnb) The Airbnb co-founders (From left: Blecharczyk, Chesky, and Gebbia) in their first offices in 2010.

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Michael Arrington, “The Moment of Truth for Airbnb As User’s Home Is Utterly Trashed,” TechCrunch, July 27, 2011, http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/27/the-moment-of-truth-for-airbnb-as-users-home-is-utterly-trashed/. 16. EJ, “Airbnb Nightmare: No End in Sight,” Around the World and Back Again, July 28, 2011, http://ejroundtheworld.blogspot.com/2011/07/airbnb-nightmare-no-end-in-sight.html. 17. Ibid. 18. Drew Olanoff, “Airbnb Ups Its Host Guarantee to a Million Dollars,” Next Web, May 22, 2012, http://thenextcom/insider/2012/05/22/airbnb-partners-with-lloyds-of-london-for-the-new-million-dollar-host-guarantee/. 19. Brian Chesky, “Our Commitment to Trust & Safety,” Airbnb, August 1, 2011, http://blog.airbnb.com/our-commitment-to-trust-and-safety/. 20.

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles, Mehmet Cansoy

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, carbon footprint, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, future of work, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, global supply chain, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, mass incarceration, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer rental, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Stewart Brand, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, wage slave, walking around money, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

“A New Wrinkle in the Gig Economy: Workers Get Most of the Money.” New York Times, July 20, 2016. Cox, Murray. 2017. “Airbnb as a Racial Gentrification Tool.” New York: Inside Airbnb. http://insideairbnb.com/reports/the-face-of-airbnb-nyc.pdf. Cox, Murray, and Tom Slee. 2016. “How Airbnb Hid the Facts in New York City.” http://tomslee.net/how-airbnb-hid-the-facts-in-nyc. Cui, Ruomeng, Jun Li, and Dennis Zhang. 2016. “Discrimination with Incomplete Information in the Sharing Economy: Field Evidence from Airbnb.” SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2882982. Cullen, Zoë, and Chiara Farronato. 2018.

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Mehmet’s detailed findings are contained in his PhD dissertation, “ ‘Sharing’ in Unequal Spaces” (Cansoy 2018), and various papers, such as “Gentrification and Short-Term Rentals: Re-assessing the Rent Gap in Urban Centers” (Cansoy 2019a); “The Fault in the Stars: Public Reputation and the Reproduction of Racial Inequality on Airbnb” (Cansoy 2019b); and “Who Gets to Share in the ‘Sharing Economy’: Understanding the Patterns of Participation and Exchange in Airbnb” (Cansoy and Schor 2019). For pioneering research on Airbnb also using scraped data, see Slee (2015) and the work of Murray Cox, who posts research on the website Inside Airbnb, http://insideairbnb.com. 32. The “average” Airbnb listing in this example is an entire unit up for rental that cannot be instantly booked, is located in New York City, with all other listing properties (distance to city center, number of people accommodated, number of days the unit was available to be booked, average nightly price, number of listings by the same host, number of listings in the same area) and neighborhood properties (number of Airbnb listings in the area and population of the area) at the sample mean.

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Can the public reputation systems really eliminate discrimination? Our research helps answer these questions. Our Airbnb Study: The Reproduction of Structural Disadvantage After Airbnb declined our offer to study racial discrimination using its data, we decided to collect our own. Mehmet Cansoy took the lead and scraped Airbnb data from 104 metropolitan areas across the country, eventually yielding about two hundred thousand listings.31 We also purchased data from a company that was doing something similar. Here I’ll focus on findings from 335,000 listings in the ten biggest Airbnb markets, for which we’ve done extensive analysis. In contrast to the studies I’ve discussed so far, ours differs in that we don’t link the property listings back to individual hosts.

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, barriers to entry, basic income, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, job automation, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), low skilled workers, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, precariat, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telemarketer, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, very high income, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

The entrepreneurial ethos is best highlighted by comparing the bookings pages of Airbnb’s website with the pages for hosts. The opening page of the Airbnb website (see fig. 5) emphasizes sharing and community: the text announces, “Welcome Home,” and the company’s tagline is “Belong Anywhere.” According to the company’s website, Airbnb is “your home, everywhere.” There’s even a video on “how Airbnb hosts create a sense of belonging around the world.” Figure 5. With messages like “Welcome Home,” Airbnb presents prospective guests with the idea of an open and accepting community. Screenshot by author. The section targeted at hosts, “Earn money as an Airbnb host,” is focused on the financial- and personal-control aspect of hosting (see fig. 6).

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He plans to add more he said, possibly even under phony accounts to avoid legal scrutiny.”50 Other documented Airbnb empires include a San Francisco stockbroker who rented six different apartments in order to “create a makeshift hotel that could net him almost $100,000.”51 In some cases, sharing economy services are used to pad the incomes of the already wealthy. In 2014, the New York State attorney general released a report highlighting Airbnb’s illegal listings, finding that as many as 72 percent of Airbnb listings in New York were illegal. This report, Airbnb in the City, found that although more than 90 percent of hosts in New York City rented two or fewer units on Airbnb, 1,406 hosts (6 percent) during a four-year period acted as “commercial users,” running larger operations that administered as many as 272 unique units each.

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But, as in the case of Kitchensurfing chefs, not all Airbnb hosts identified as entrepreneurs. And as noted earlier, many hosts were Strivers and a few would fall within the category of Strugglers. There are also a few notable differences between the sort of people who become Airbnb hosts and the sort who work with Kitchensurfing. For instance, while some Kitchensurfing chefs engaged in their food work full time, few Airbnb hosts only hosted. Most had full-time occupations or identities outside Airbnb, whether as students, lawyers, writers, or small business owners, and their Airbnb work was a side hustle or part-time effort.

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism by Arun Sundararajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Burning Man, call centre, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, distributed ledger, driverless car, Eben Moglen, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, gig economy, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, job automation, job-hopping, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, peer-to-peer rental, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

The first large Internet-enabled peer-to-peer market, eBay, was founded in 1995, went public in 1998, and it remains visibly successful as I write this book in 2015. Why did it take until 2007 for Airbnb and the others to emerge? What was missing until recently? Airbnb—Design Your World Right I first met Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, as a dinner guest in the summer of 2013, at a loft in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen, where I mingled with a group of Airbnb hosts, NYC entrepreneurs, and sharing advocates. Chesky, a designer who trained at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), sees his foray into entrepreneurship with Airbnb as being part of the fifth chapter of his life. “I really loved hockey growing up,” he recounted when we spoke in the spring of 2015.

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There are numerous subtle legal and human aspects that shaped the evolution of Airbnb’s interaction with the attorney general. Some of the key events played out as follows. Airbnb responded to the request by issuing a public statement in which the company reiterated its commitment to work with, not against, local governments. While acknowledging that there may be a few “bad actors” abusing their platform to operate illegal hotels, Airbnb argued that it was unfair to penalize thousands of hosts acting in good faith in order to stop a small number of illegal hotel operators and slumlords that were never part of the Airbnb vision. In a statement posted on the Airbnb site on October 6, 2013, David Hantman, their global head of public policy at the time, assured hosts that “in the days ahead, we’ll continue our conversations with the attorney general’s office to see if we can work together to support Airbnb hosts and remove bad actors from the Airbnb platform.

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It’s helping me achieve my dreams by providing me with a source of income that makes it possible for me to focus my energy on preparing for a new career where I can help people through better public policy.2 Mishelle’s “Save Airbnb in New York: Legalize Sharing” campaign eventually received over 200,000 signatures (far beyond the initial goal of 20,000), and the campaign’s grassroots feel and widespread publicity added credibility and texture to Airbnb’s own responses. To many, the campaign drove home the fact that Airbnb’s hosts were not slumlords. As signatures on the petition grew, the face of Airbnb hosts became clearer. Although there were indeed hosts who were renting out multiple units in a hotel-like manner, it turned out that a majority of Airbnb’s hosts represented a remarkable cross-section of New Yorkers from all five boroughs and from neighborhoods that rarely benefit from the city’s tourist industry, from grandmothers in Harlem to hipsters in Williamsburg to families on Staten Island.

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems by Lauren Turner Claire, Laure Claire Reillier, Benoit Reillier

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, blockchain, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Diane Coyle, Didi Chuxing, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, multi-sided market, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Altman, search costs, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, Y Combinator

Introduction to platform businesses 9 3 Following the Sequoia round, Airbnb went on to raise a series A round of $7.2 million in 2010. Wall Street Journal, 25 July 2011, http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2011/ 07/25/airbnb-from-y-combinator-to-112m-funding-in-three-years/. 4 VentureBeat, 19 June 2014, http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/19/uber-and-airbnbsincredible-growth-in-4-charts/ and Airbnb website at www.airbnb.co.uk/about/ about-us. 5 www.airbnb.co.uk/about/about-us. 6 CB Insights, 1 August 2016, www.wired.com/2015/12/airbnb-confirms-1-5-billionfunding-round-now-valued-at-25-5-billion/. By the end of 2014, Airbnb had raised over $800 million. ‘Airbnb Is Raising a Monster Round at a $20B Valuation’, TechCrunch, 27 February 2015, http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/27/airbnb-2/. 7 G.

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Piggybacking on existing networks There are many tales of platforms igniting by piggybacking on existing networks. The most famous one is Airbnb. Craigslist had many users who looked for listings other than the standard hotel experience, which was precisely Airbnb’s target market. To attract guests, Airbnb developed an integration with the Craigslist platform as early as 2010.7 It offered hosts who listed properties on Airbnb the opportunity to automatically publish them on Craigslist. To attract hosts, Airbnb also developed a hack that spammed people posting listings on Craigslist, offering them to list on Airbnb.8 Both hacks allowed Airbnb to grow their guest and host base at almost no cost.

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The company is estimated to be worth $30 billion,6 which means that in less than 10 years, the travel accommodation platform has become one of the most valuable privately owned start-ups, worth more than the largest hotel chains Wyndham, Intercontinental and Hyatt, who own extensive portfolios of prime real estate globally. And Airbnb owns no property. While there’s been an overwhelming response from customers, Airbnb’s high-growth success story has not been without resistance from hoteliers, who claim that individuals renting their rooms or entire homes to visitors represents an ‘unfair competition’ to their trade. There is emerging evidence7 that Airbnb is not only growing the market, but also increasingly competing against hotels, who have to respond with new services and lower prices. Interestingly, these lower prices benefit all consumers, and not just Airbnb clients. Yet Airbnb has also been under growing pressure from city authorities regarding housing regulations and tax laws.

Extreme Teams: Why Pixar, Netflix, AirBnB, and Other Cutting-Edge Companies Succeed Where Most Fail by Robert Bruce Shaw, James Foster, Brilliance Audio

Airbnb, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, call centre, cloud computing, data science, deliberate practice, Elon Musk, emotional labour, financial engineering, future of work, holacracy, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Jony Ive, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, loose coupling, meta-analysis, nuclear winter, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, work culture

They work to define and prioritize impactful work with the rest of their team including product managers, designers, data scientists and others.” nerds.airbnb.com/engineering-culture-airbnb/. 10Own Thomas. “How Airbnb Manages Not to Manage Engineers.” 11The importance of experience in Airbnb is suggested when realizing that the head of what most firms call human resources is called the head of employee experience at Airbnb. His job is to enrich what employees experience at Airbnb—creating a sense of belonging through a wide range of factors, including the design of the workspace, communication and education efforts, the food in the company cafeteria, and a variety of recognition and reward programs. 12Thomas, “How Airbnb Manages Not to Manage Engineers.” 13These questions are similar to those proposed by Peter Drucker in his famous five questions in The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008). 14“Top Three CEO Bindspots,” Build, December 5, 2011. 15Vijay Govindarajan and Anil K.

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He wondered what it would feel like to have a meeting in that room—wouldn’t it be more interesting, more fun, and more productive than sitting in the boring conference rooms found in most corporations? At the Airbnb headquarters in San Francisco, each conference room is a nearly exact replica of an Airbnb rental somewhere in the world. Attend a meeting at Airbnb and you may be working in a room that replicates one of its apartment rentals in Paris. Or you may find yourself in a replica of Frank Sinatra’s former home in Palm Springs, which is also a listing on the Airbnb website. At most firms, you find photographs of the firm’s products or customers in the lobbies or on conference room walls—Airbnb, as in many areas, goes one step further. The company also provides a range of benefits, including free gourmet food three times a day.

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The company went from having $100 million in startup funding to $5 million before it turned profitable. Airbnb and Netflix were focused on survival. 5Austin Carr, “Inside Airbnb’s Grand Hotel Plans,” Fast Company, March 17, 2014. The CEO noted about his firm’s annual objectives, “If you can’t fit it on a page, you’re not simplifying it enough . . . . I told my team they have to put the entire plan on a page this big by next week—same size font.” 6“PandoMonthly: Fireside Chat with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky,” Pando Daily, January 14, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yPfxcqEXhE. 7Carr, “Inside Airbnb’s Grand Hotel Plans.” 8Owen Thomas, “How Airbnb Manages Not to Manage Engineers,” Readwrite, June 5, 2014, readwrite.com/hack. 9See Airbnb’s website: “Making this environment possible requires a few things.

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy by Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, disintermediation, driverless car, fake it until you make it, future of work, gig economy, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, patent troll, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, platform as a service, power law, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, the medium is the message, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

Back in 2010, Airbnb was a tiny startup that had just raised its Series A, a company’s first round of significant funding. It was still a small player in the online short-term rentals industry, especially compared to the leader in that market, Craigslist. Craigslist had more traffic and more listings than Airbnb did, but Airbnb’s site provided higher-quality listings and better customer support. In an effort to grow its network, Airbnb created an unofficial “integration” with Craigslist. The feature was called “Post to Craigslist” and it allowed any host to post their listing on Airbnb to the relevant section of Craigslist with a few clicks.

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But rather than lettings viewers respond to the listing through Craigslist, the Craigslist posting would send them back to Airbnb to book a reservation. The end result was that Airbnb was able to divert a lot of consumers from Craigslist to booking reservations on Airbnb. At the same time Airbnb was taking traffic from Craigslist, the upstart company was also tapping into Craigslist’s network of hosts. It allegedly used multiple Gmail accounts to spam Craigslist posters. The emails didn’t appear to come from Airbnb itself but from an individual who simply wanted to inform the poster about another vacation rental site they should “check out.”

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These issues should help put the controversy surrounding companies such as Airbnb and Uber in perspective. Challenging the legal status quo is well-established territory for platform companies. In Airbnb’s case, major companies in the hotel industry are unhappy that their platform competitor gets to skirt local hotel regulations and safety standards. They have pushed local regulators to crack down on Airbnb hosts, most notably in New York City. According to one report, as many as three quarters of Airbnb rentals in New York City, one of Airbnb’s largest markets, are illegal.30 Yet this hasn’t stopped the company from continuing to grow, and it hasn’t stopped many hosts in New York from continuing to do business.

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

Just a few months later, determined to acquire the resources needed to outscale the Samwers, Brian raised $112 million in additional venture capital. Airbnb then embarked on an aggressive international expansion plan, including the acquisition of Accoleo, a smaller and more affordable German Airbnb clone, that allowed Airbnb to compete directly with Wimdu in its home market. By the spring of 2012, Airbnb had opened nine international offices, setting up shop in London, Hamburg, Berlin, Paris, Milan, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Moscow, and São Paulo. Bookings had grown ten times since that previous February, and in June 2012 Airbnb announced its ten millionth booking. “The Samwers gave us a gift,” Brian admitted many years later in our Blitzscaling class.

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This can take many forms, ranging from formal in-person meetings to electronic communications to things as seemingly neutral as office layout and design. Airbnb, for example, employs a wide range of channels to maximize cultural transmission. The weekly e-mail cofounder Brian Chesky sends to all Airbnb employees is a powerful one. “You have to continue to repeat things” Brian told our class at Stanford. “Culture is about repeating, over and over again, the things that really matter for your company.” Airbnb reinforces these verbal messages with visual impact as well. Brian hired an artist from Pixar to create a storyboard of the entire experience of an Airbnb guest, from start to finish, emphasizing the customer-centered design thinking that is a hallmark of its culture.

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Systemic risks may require an immediate, “stop the presses” response. In 2011, for example, an Airbnb host in San Francisco came home and discovered that an Airbnb guest had trashed her house and stolen her possessions, including her grandmother’s jewelry. Airbnb’s initial response, which was to coordinate with the police department and compensate the host financially but to emphasize that such incidents would be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, may have been legally sound, but didn’t address the systemic issue—hosts losing trust in Airbnb. After he recognized the magnitude of the problem, Brian Chesky took decisive action.

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism by Robin Chase

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business climate, call centre, car-free, carbon tax, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion charging, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, decarbonisation, different worldview, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Shoup, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, Gini coefficient, GPS: selective availability, high-speed rail, hive mind, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, language acquisition, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, Post-Keynesian economics, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, vertical integration, Zipcar

Bixi, B-cycle, CitiBike, DecoBike, Hubway, Social Bikes, and Velib are “like Zipcar for bikes.”3 Hello Health is “like Zipcar for online concierge medicine.”4 Ziplens is “like Zipcar for photographers.”5 SnapGoods is “like Zipcar for Gadgets.”6 And Cohealo is “the Zipcar for hospital gear.”7 Other platforms aggregate the excess capacity of assets that were individually too small to bother with and make them into something reliable and consistent, thus creating enough value to make tapping into those resources worthwhile. Airbnb, which allows people to rent out all or a portion of their own homes, is definitely the company of reference here, and in recent years there have been many start-ups that describe their business as “like Airbnb for x.” GetMyBoat is “like Airbnb for boats.”8 HovelStay is “like Airbnb for adrenaline junkies on a budget.”9 And Rover.com is “like Airbnb for your dog.”10 Both Zipcar and Airbnb are examples of access platforms that, through slicing or aggregation of excess capacity, enable users to get more value out of an asset by using it more conveniently and cheaply than they could before.

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I’ll admit that I failed to tap into the potential of excess capacity in cars because of insurance issues. But Airbnb did spring into action—1,400 Airbnb hosts in the New York metro area offered up rooms for free to those who needed them.26 The Airbnb website wasn’t structured for zero-cost rooms, and frankly, the connection between displaced families and Airbnb hosts was not well communicated. Some matches were made and real families benefited, but most rooms went empty. Still, the idea of using existing communities and platforms to respond to disasters took hold. Lessons were learned, and in 2013 Airbnb launched a disaster response initiative that makes it easy for Airbnb hosts to provide space for people in need when disasters strike.27 Since then, hosts have opened their door to displaced residents in response to emergencies around the world, including in San Diego in response to major fires; in Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia for people affected by the Balkan floods; in London, Sardinia, and Colorado after serious flooding hit those regions; in Kefalonia after an earthquake hit the island; in Toronto and Atlanta following severe ice storms; and in the Philippines following Typhoon Haiyan.

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There were more than a hundred “power hosts,” with ten or more units listed.15 Shortly after turning the data over to the attorney general, Airbnb went through its New York listings, identified 2,000 that were clearly from institutions, and took them off the site. Airbnb says it removed them because they didn’t reflect Airbnb’s brand or service aspirations. It is unlikely that any of the top ten earners remain on the platform. From Airbnb’s perspective, when it was deep in the everyone-welcome phase, the goal was to make adding a listing as easy as possible. Today, the company has moved beyond that. “It’s not just vetting listings coming in,” said Chip Conley, Airbnb’s head of global hospitality and strategy.

Platform Scale: How an Emerging Business Model Helps Startups Build Large Empires With Minimum Investment by Sangeet Paul Choudary

3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, fake it until you make it, frictionless, game design, gamification, growth hacking, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, Paul Graham, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, search costs, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social software, software as a service, software is eating the world, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, TaskRabbit, the long tail, the payments system, too big to fail, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Wave and Pay

This cycle, driving viral growth, is repeatedly observed across diverse startups. In a move that is now a part of startup folklore, Airbnb reverse-engineered an integration with Craigslist that allowed hosts on Airbnb to post their listings (value units created on Airbnb) simultaneously on Craigslist. Travelers on Craigslist (the external network, in this case) would see the listing and join Airbnb to make a booking. Over time, this integration, in combination with several other initiatives from Airbnb, created the repeatable cycle mentioned above and led to Airbnb’s rapid growth early on. INCENTIVES FOR VIRAL GROWTH An ongoing theme that we note through most of this book is the design of incentives for users.

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Craigslist’s inability to cater well to high-risk interactions makes it especially susceptible to competition in these categories. ANOTHER AIRBNB? Airbnb famously leveraged Craigslist to solve its chicken-and-egg problem. It allowed hosts to post their listings to Craigslist and directed travelers back, from Craigslist to Airbnb, for the transaction. Additionally, it also lured sellers on Craigslist to list on Airbnb, offering a better transaction experience. More importantly, Airbnb has built a strong reputation system to build a worldwide community of travelers and hosts. It allows both parties to rate each other and has focused on building a huge corpus of reviews.

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It invests in acquiring and owning more rooms and optimizing its business to maximize occupancy. Airbnb solves the same needs, leveraging platform scale. It doesn’t own any rooms, nor does it need to create more rooms physically to scale. Airbnb demonstrates that value lies not in owning resources but in managing the exchange of services in the ecosystem. Airbnb scales an ecosystem of service providers, most or all of which are distributed and autonomous. Unlike hotels, which invest in resource creation, platforms like Airbnb invest in creating better trust mechanisms that identify and differentiate good behavior from poor behavior and minimize interaction risks.

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Journalist Jessica Pressler recorded some of the choicest comments in New York magazine. One poster had been supplemented with the observation, “Airbnb accepts NO Liability.” Another had been marked with the scrawl, “The dumbest person in your building is passing out a set of keys to your front door!” And on several posters, the phrase “for New York City” had been replaced with a different handwritten conclusion: “Airbnb is great for Airbnb.” The war of the posters reflected a bigger conflict already being waged in New York City and in other cities around the world where Airbnb was expanding its foothold. Airbnb’s corporate image advertising campaign was part of an expensive lobbying and public relations program designed to counter what the company viewed as an unfair assault by regulators, business rivals, and misinformed members of the media and the general public.

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This means continually scouting the real estate markets for promising territories, investing in existing properties or building new ones, and spending large sums to maintain, upgrade, expand, and improve them. Upstart Airbnb is, in one sense, in the same business as Hilton or Marriott. Like the hotel giants, it uses refined pricing and booking systems designed to allow guests to find, reserve, and pay for rooms as they need them. But Airbnb applies the platform model to the hotel business: Airbnb doesn’t own any rooms. Instead, it created and maintains the platform that allows individual participants to provide the rooms directly to consumers. In return, Airbnb takes a 9–15 percent (average 11 percent) transaction fee for every rental arranged through the platform.1 One implication is that growth can be much faster for Airbnb or any rival platform than for a traditional hotel company since growth is no longer constrained by the ability to deploy capital and manage physical assets.

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One of the crucial decisions a platform manager must make—and often reconsider as the market evolves—is the extent to which the platform will be open to extension developers. A number of extension developers have enhanced the value of the Airbnb platform. For example, Airbnb’s own research reveals that properties listed with professional-quality photographs are viewed by prospective renters twice as often as those with lower-quality images. In response, an extension developer now offers professional support under the rubric of “Airbnb photography service” to create compelling images that should make an Airbnb host more successful. Extension developer Pillow (formerly known as Airenvy) supports hosts on the platform by providing tools to simplify property listing, guest checkin, and cleaning and linen delivery.

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional

The opportunity in China is massive, since tourism is a major force in the country’s growing economy.11 The most popular destinations for Airbnb guests are Shanghai and Beijing, and Shenzhen is seeing the fastest growth. Going local, Airbnb reviews every listing, monitors the quality of listings, inspects homes, and counsels hosts on design and in-home services. For hosts of more luxurious properties, Airbnb provides decor consultations, photography tips, and top placement in search results. Airbnb offers an academy for hosts to learn the dos and don’ts of hospitality by attending workshops, offering live chats on WeChat, and watching educational videos. Digging deeper into the Chinese market, Airbnb recently launched a Plus service in China that features beautiful homes, gracious hosts, and hotel-like features for peace of mind.

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Such localized aspects of its Chinese business probably were never imagined by cofounder and billionaire Brian Chesky when he dreamed up the homestay concept with two cofounders in San Francisco in 2008. Airbnb had a running start in China because of some natural advantages. It’s in the travel business and is inherently a global company. Airbnb wisely hired from within the region rather than fly in newbies from California to run China operations. But management turnover in China has haunted Airbnb. The landing team for Airbnb in China was Henek Lo from investment trading positions at JPMorgan and Macquarie Group in Hong Kong and Robert Hao, a cofounder of two Hong Kong–based e-commerce startups. Within a few years, they grew the team to more than 100 and turned China into Airbnb’s fastest-growing market globally by focusing on partnerships, policy, branding, social marketing, community building, and inventory growth.

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She’s stayed at an architect’s Qing dynasty home in Yangshuo, a remote village in southwest China with a view of the mountain peaks that are printed on China’s 20 RMB currency. Amazing! At Airbnb in China, guests can learn how to make Chinese soup dumplings or listen to Chinese opera, and then share their stories of experiencing local, authentic China on a content site that Airbnb developed to create awareness and inspire travelers to China to try out and get accustomed to the home-sharing concept. Airbnb is really making an effort in China, but those efforts aren’t always successful. A promotional campaign recently offered 100 Airbnb free nights and experiences to Millennials who didn’t have a chance to travel within the past year, and got 10,000 sign-ups.

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, David B. Yoffie

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, general purpose technology, gig economy, Google Chrome, GPS: selective availability, Greyball, independent contractor, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Metcalfe’s law, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Network effects, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, web application, zero-sum game

Many platforms take great care in limiting their liability. Airbnb stated in its June 2017 updated terms and conditions that, “as the provider of the Airbnb Platform, Airbnb does not own, create, sell, resell, provide, control, manage, offer, deliver, or supply any Listings or Host Services. Hosts alone are responsible for their Listings and Host Services. . . . Airbnb is not acting as an agent in any capacity for any Member.” And with regard to its role within potential disputes, Airbnb stated that, “while we may help facilitate the resolution of disputes, Airbnb has no control over and does not guarantee (i) the existence, quality, safety, suitability, or legality of any Listings or Host Services, (ii) the truth or accuracy of any Listing descriptions, Ratings, Reviews, or other Member Content (as defined below), or (iii) the performance or conduct of any Member or third party.”

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The way Airbnb attracted early members was ingenious and added value for both market sides, but this strategy also differed from how Airbnb expanded. For Airbnb to send photographers to each new member’s residence was not easily scalable and financially unsustainable. More important, it was not necessary to continue subsidizing professional photo shoots. By initially subsidizing professional photos, Airbnb set a high bar for the quality of property photography on the Airbnb website. This practice soon became the new norm: Property renters would invest on their own in professional photography to differentiate themselves from other renters. In effect, Airbnb initially incurred a cost that raised expectations within the ecosystem and later simply took advantage of competition among the property owners.

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New York Times, August 29, 2018; and Sui-Lee Wee, “Didi Suspends Carpooling Service in China After 2nd Passenger is Killed,” New York Times, August 26, 2018. 27.Uber, “Community Guidelines,” https://www.uber.com/legal/community-guidelines/us-en/ (accessed July 3, 2017). 28.Airbnb, “Community Commitment,” http://blog.atairbnb.com/the-airbnb-community-commitment/ (accessed July 5, 2017). 29.David B. Yoffie and Dylan Minor, “Upwork: Creating the Human Cloud” (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, Case #9-717-475, May 2017). 30.Sheera Frenkel, “Facebook Will Use Artificial Intelligence to Find Extremist Posts,” New York Times, June 15, 2017; and TripAdvisor, “Review Moderation and Fraud Detection FAQ,” https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/vpages/review_mod_fraud_detect.html (accessed July 3, 2017). 31.Airbnb, “Updated Terms of Service,” https://www.airbnb.co.uk/terms (accessed July 3, 2017). 32.Annabelle Gawer and Michael A.

Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World by Donald Sull, Kathleen M. Eisenhardt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Apollo 13, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, complexity theory, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, diversification, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, machine translation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, Network effects, obamacare, Paul Graham, performance metric, price anchoring, RAND corporation, risk/return, Saturday Night Live, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Startup school, statistical model, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Wall-E, web application, Y Combinator, Zipcar

. [>] The founders also had: Vella and Bradley, “Airbnb CEO—‘Grow Fast but not Too Fast.’” [>] Airbnb ended up with: Tomio Geron, “Airbnb Hires Joie de Vivre’s Chip Conley as Head of Hospitality,” Forbes, September 17, 2013, http://www.Forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/09/17. [>] In fact, Airbnb: Salter, “Airbnb: The Story Behind the $1.3bn Room-Letting Website.” [>] Airbnb has become: Thompson, “Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on Building a Company and Starting a Sharing Revolution.” 8. Breaking the Rules [>] When spring arrived: “Politics Drowns Water Bonds,” San Jose Mercury News, March 23, 2014. [>] After three years: Josh Richman and Paul Rogers, “Brown Declares California Drought Emergency,” San Jose Mercury News, January 17, 2014, http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_24933924/. [>] Much of California: Heidi Gildemeister, “What Is a Mediterranean Climate?

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Sales spiked, but that was the problem—it was only a spike. Joe and Brian kept Airbnb afloat by selling gimmicky breakfast cereal, and surprisingly sold several hundred boxes of “Obama O’s” and “Cap’n McCain” on eBay. The big picture was, however, that Airbnb was floundering, with a few initial rules that cried out for improvement. A much-needed turning point came when Airbnb joined Y Combinator. Y Combinator is a “seed accelerator” providing financing, advice, and connections to cohorts of early-stage ventures, but its headliner mission is helping entrepreneurs improve very fast. At this point, Airbnb’s entrepreneurs began multitasking different ways to learn.

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This was another opportunity to learn—this time through presenting Airbnb’s story and getting feedback and insights from peers. These dinners created a relentless weekly rhythm of stepping back to reflect, getting feedback and ideas, and heading back to work. Another way of learning was through tailored expert advice. The Airbnb founders gained two pivotal insights from Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham that critically reframed their conception of what to do. One piece of advice was counterintuitive—forget about growing Airbnb, and instead focus on creating the perfect Airbnb experience. Graham’s argument was, “It’s better to have a hundred people love you than to have a million people like you.”

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Airbnb had begun to rally its hosts as a way of fighting back against city governments, which made users’ bond with the platform even more critical. So Airbnb relaunched its brand, with a brand story made for the age of new power. Douglas Atkin, an Airbnb executive with the unusual corporate title “Global Head of Community,” summed it up as “creating a world where anyone can belong anywhere.” Airbnb’s new logo was not designed to be admired, but to be remixed and adapted by different affinity groups within the Airbnb community. The soft, malleable, inverted heart (or pretzel, depending on your perspective) drew a level of online engagement perhaps best summed up by Fast Company’s headline: “This Tumblr shows everything Airbnb’s new logo looks like, in addition to a vagina.”

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Hilton Hotels & Resorts remains the stylish, forward thinking global leader of hospitality—and we help make traveling easier with our smart design, innovative restaurant concepts, authentic hospitality and commitment to the global community. Airbnb’s brand voice is built to cultivate a sense of community and participation, and executives are betting that this will be a key source of competitive advantage—because it makes it far less likely that Airbnb hosts or guests will move to the next platform when one emerges. Airbnb now spends millions holding an annual gathering of thousands of its most active hosts, building solidarity and esprit de corps the way a church or Rotary Club might. Going further, it has invested in supporting local groups of hosts as part of a decentralized “home sharing club,” supported by Airbnb but led by its most involved members.

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“This Tumblr shows”: Joe Berkowitz, “This Tumblr Shows Everything Airbnb’s New Logo Looks Like in Addition to a Vagina,” Fast Company, July 21, 2014. “Most brands would send”: Austin Carr, “Airbnb Unveils a Major Rebranding Effort That Paves the Way for Sharing More Than Homes,” Fast Company, July 16, 2014. “optimal distinctiveness”: M. B. Brewer, “The Social Self: On Being the Same and Different at the Same Time,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 17 (1991): 475–482. “We used to take belonging for granted”: Brian Chesky, “Belong Anywhere,” Airbnb blog, July 2017. www.airbnb.com. “Take me to the Hilton”: “About,” July 2017. www.hilton.com.

Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success by Sean Ellis, Morgan Brown

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, DevOps, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, minimum viable product, multi-armed bandit, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, working poor, Y Combinator, young professional

Michael Carney, “Brian Chesky: I Lived on Cap’n McCain’s and Obama O’s Got Airbnb Out of Debt,” January 10, 2013. Pando (blog), accessed September 13, 2016, pando.com/2013/01/10/brian-chesky-i-lived-on-capn-mccains-and-obama-os-got-airbnb-out-of-debt/; Chen, “Growth Hacker Is the New VP Marketing”; Dave Gooden, “How Airbnb Became a Billion Dollar Company,” Dave Gooden (blog), June 31, 2011, accessed September 13, 2016, davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-dollar-company/; Rishi Shah, “Airbnb Leverages Craigslist in a Really Cool Way,” GettingMoreAwesome (blog), November 24, 2010, gettingmoreawesome.com/2010/11/24/airbnb-leverages-craigslist-in-a-really-cool-way/. 12.

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Alex Schultz, “Lecture 6: Growth,” How to Start a Startup (blog), startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec06/. 9. Palihapitiya, “Facebook on the Path to 1 Billion Users.” 10. Jordan Crook and Anna Escher, “A Brief History of Airbnb,” slideshow at TechCrunch (n.d.), techcrunch.com/gallery/a-brief-history-of-airbnb/; “How Design Thinking Transformed Airbnb from a Failing Startup to a Billion Dollar Business,” First Round Review (n.d.), firstround.com/review/How-design-thinking-transformed-Airbnb-from-failing-startup-to-billion-dollar-business/. 11. Austin Carr, “19: Airbnb,” Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies 2012, February 7, 2012, fastcompany.com/3017358/most-innovative-companies-2012/19airbnb. 12.

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A good rule of thumb is: whether you are selling a service, or a physical product, or some kind of information or content, the value of your incentive should be as closely aligned to that as possible. Cash offers can work also, but for the best effect, it’s important that they’re also related to the core value of the product. Airbnb offers a $25 incentive for both inviters and invitees to use toward a future stay booked through Airbnb. Here, using messaging tied to the product or brand matters; in Airbnb’s case they use language suggesting that customers share the great experience of living like a local that Airbnb delivers, rather than just blatantly offering the cash. Similarly, for our grocery app team, offering a referral program where each shopper using the app gets a $10 discount on their next grocery order makes good sense, as it acts as a onetime discount on their purchase.

The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups by Randall Stross

affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, always be closing, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Burning Man, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Elon Musk, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, inventory management, John Markoff, Justin.tv, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, medical residency, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Morris worm, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, transaction costs, Y Combinator

He closes with a mention that both Vidyard and Airbnb have shared parentage. “Thanks and let me know—we’re very glad to be YC!” His message is forwarded to Venetia Pristavec, the manager in charge of Airbnb’s videos. Airbnb presently is using the video service of Vid Network, a startup that does the video hosting and analytics that Vidyard plans to offer. But Pristavec says that Airbnb is looking for a new video provider. Unfortunately for Vidyard, Airbnb has narrowed the field of replacement candidates to a pair of big names in video hosting, Ooyala and Brightcove. Clearly, Airbnb has decided to move away from relying on a startup and instead shift to a much larger company as its video supplier.

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Having a shared lineal connection to YC would not be a sufficient basis for the far larger company to rely on a not yet hatched startup. When Michael Litt looks at Airbnb’s Web site, which makes use of videos, he sees a natural home for Vidyard’s services. Airbnb’s AirTV section has videos of the more unusual lodging listings or colorful Airbnb hosts—its nickname is “the ‘Cribs’ of Airbnb.” Vidyard’s software is not finished, but Litt goes after Airbnb, sending an e-mail to the cofounders, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia. It is the very first week of the summer session. Always Be Closing. The subject heading of Litt’s first e-mail message is “AirTV—Current YC company looking for some quick insight!”

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Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984) extricates the word “hacker” from derogatory associations. To Levy, “hacker” simply means “those computer programmers and designers who regard computing as the most important thing in the world.” He traces the hacker culture back to the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT in the late 1950s. 6. “Airbnb Celebrates 1,000,000 Nights Booked!” Airbnb blog, February 24, 2011, http://blog.airbnb.com/airbnb-celebrates-1000000-nights-booked. The company launched its service in August 2008, before it was funded by YC. CHAPTER 1: YOUNGER 1. http://jasonshen.com/. In early years, the blog had the longish subtitle of “A Blog on Conquering Fear, Doing Great Work and Making Things Happen.”

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

cid=AEN20160223003651315. 6 “I kind of felt powerless”: Jordan Novet, “Go Board Game Champion Lee Sedol Apologizes for Losing to Google’s AI,” VentureBeat, March 12, 2016, http://venturebeat.com/2016/03/12/go-board-game-champion-lee-sedol-apologizes-for-losing-to-googles-ai. 6 “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company”: Tom Goodwin, “The Battle Is for the Customer Interface,” TechCrunch, March 3, 2015, https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/03/in-the-age-of-disintermediation-the-battle-is-all-for-the-customer-interface. 7 over a million people: Ellen Huet, “Uber Says It’s Doing 1 Million Rides per Day, 140 Million in the Last Year,” Forbes, December 17, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2014/12/17/uber-says-its-doing-1-million-rides-per-day-140-million-in-last-year. 7 one of 300 cities in 60 countries: Anne Freier, “Uber Usage Statistics and Revenue,” Business of Apps, September 14, 2015, http://www.businessofapps.com/uber-usage-statistics-and-revenue. 7 640,000 different lodging options: Chip Conley, “Airbnb Open: What I Learned from You,” Airbnb (blog), November 25, 2014, http://blog.airbnb.com/airbnb-open-chips-takeaways. 7 191 countries: Airbnb, “Airbnb Summer Travel Report: 2015,” accessed January 11, 2017, http://blog.airbnb.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Airbnb-Summer-Travel-Report-1.pdf. 7 a yurt in Mongolia: Airbnb, “Nomadic Life in the Countryside,” accessed January 11, 2017, https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/13512229?s=zcoAwTWQ. 7 James Joyce’s childhood home: Airbnb, “James Joyce’s Childhood Home Dublin,” accessed January 11, 2017, https://www.airbnb.ie/rooms/4480268. 7 4,500 shops across the United States: Wal-Mart, “Our Locations,” accessed January 13, 2017, http://corporate.walmart.com/our-story/our-locations. 7 $180 billion of property and equipment assets: US Securities and Exchange Commission, “Form 10-Q: Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.,” December 1, 2016, http://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0000104169/2b25dfe5-6d4a-4d2d-857f-08dda979d6b9.pdf. 7 number of Chinese people using Alibaba’s apps: Alibaba Group, “Consumer Engagement Driving Growth for Mobile Taobao (Alizila News),” June 28, 2016, http://www.alibabagroup.com/en/ir/article?

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language=en. 209 “High reputation beats high similarity”: Ibid. 209 “can actually help us overcome”: Ibid. 211 SoulCycle: SoulCycle, “All Studios,” accessed February 6, 2017, https://www.soul-cycle.com/studios/all. 217 But if it’s costly to switch: See, for instance, Paul Klemperer, “Markets with Consumer Switching Costs,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 102, no. 2 (1987): 375–94; and Joseph Farrell and Garth Saloner, “Installed Base and Compatibility: Innovation, Product Preannouncements, and Predation,” American Economic Review (1986): 940–55. 219 more than $15 billion in loans: Douglas MacMillan, “Uber Raises $1.15 Billion from First Leveraged Loan,” Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-raises-1-15-billion-from-first-leveraged-loan-1467934151. 221 The lodging-industry benchmarking company STR: Bill McBride, “Hotels: Occupancy Rate on Track to Be 2nd Best Year,” Calculated Risk (blog), October 17, 2016, http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2016/10/hotels-occupancy-rate-on-track-to-be_17.html. 221 In Los Angeles the daily hotel rate: Hugo Martin, “Airbnb Takes a Toll on the U.S. Lodging Industry, but Los Angeles Hotels Continue to Thrive,” Los Angeles Times, September 26, 2016, http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-airbnb-hotels-20160926-snap-story.html. 223 Airbnb was responsible for a 10% decline: Gregorios Zervas, Davide Proserpio, and John W. Byers, “The Rise of the Sharing Economy: Estimating the Impact of Airbnb on the Hotel Industry,” last modified November 18, 2016, http://cs-people.bu.edu/dproserp/papers/airbnb.pdf. Chapter 10 THAT ESCALATED QUICKLY: THE EMERGENCE OF THE CROWD 229 the author Robert Wright: Robert Wright, Twitter page, accessed February 6, 2017, https://twitter.com/robertwrighter. 229 “Most newsgroup traffic”: Robert Wright, “Voice of America,” New Republic, September 13, 1993, http://cyber.eserver.org/wright.txt. 230 “The things [the Net] changes”: Ibid. 231 An estimated 130 million books: Leonid Taycher, “Books of the World, Stand Up and Be Counted!

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But in all of these cases, the companies in question held long-lived assets, like licenses and contracts, that are important to the industry and thus valuable. Uber and Airbnb have none of these. Uber has no claim on any vehicle or medallion in any city in the world, and Airbnb has no long-term contract with any lodging owners anywhere. Yet both companies quickly reached millions of customers and billions in valuation, making the success that Goodwin observed all the more remarkable. At the time of his column, over a million people each day “took an Uber” to get somewhere in one of 300 cities in 60 countries, and Airbnb offered 640,000 different lodging options in 191 countries, ranging from a yurt in Mongolia to James Joyce’s childhood home in Ireland.

Growth Hacking Techniques, Disruptive Technology - How 40 Companies Made It BIG – Online Growth Hacker Marketing Strategy by Robert Peters

Airbnb, bounce rate, business climate, citizen journalism, content marketing, crowdsourcing, digital map, fake it until you make it, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Hacker News, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, pull request, revision control, ride hailing / ride sharing, search engine result page, sharing economy, Skype, social bookmarking, TaskRabbit, turn-by-turn navigation, Twitter Arab Spring, ubercab

Before they were shut down, Airbnb had an option for users to cross post their available accommodation listings to Craigslist, which created inbound links both for the individual user, but also for the Airbnb platform. This is one of the more infamous and technical of the “great” growth hacking stories, and worked brilliantly until AirBbB began to directly contact Craigslist users. Those people had no idea who or what AirBnB was and began to complain that the company was using a “black hat” hack. The interactions AirBnB attempted to initiate were fairly aggressive, going out to Craigslist users who had specifically indicated they did not want to be contacted by commercial entities. While AirBnB was working outside of the Terms of Service for Craigslist, they characterized the relationship as “symbiotic.”

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If a self-promoter of any kind starts an AMA and refuses to answer hard questions, they are likely to be savaged by the Reddit community. AirBnB The San Francisco company Airbnb was founded in August 2008. It currently has more than 500,000 listings for lodgings available for rent in 34,000 cities and 192 countries. A wide variety if spaces are included, from whole house to rooms and even some private islands! The service’s success was largely dependent on a brilliant albeit questionably ethical growth hacking strategy involving Craigslist. Before they were shut down, Airbnb had an option for users to cross post their available accommodation listings to Craigslist, which created inbound links both for the individual user, but also for the Airbnb platform.

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This claim is highly semantic since Craigslist didn’t offer a public API in 2009. The AirBnB hack was a reverse engineered stealth integration. The engineers created a bot that automatically posted listings to Craigslist by logging in, acquiring a URL, filling in all the necessary information, and allowing the AirBnB user to hit the “post to CL” option. The coding behind the hack was complex and capable of jumping through a number of hoops on the Craigslist end, including the default anonymous address provided to posters. Without a doubt, AirBnB knew that if they were caught, they’d be kicked off, which is exactly what happened.

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live by Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, Community Supported Agriculture, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global village, hedonic treadmill, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, information retrieval, intentional community, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Simon Kuznets, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, South of Market, San Francisco, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, web of trust, women in the workforce, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

For the most part, the people and places are not vetted, inspected, or interviewed by Airbnb. It’s up to users to determine if they want to host a guest or if they want to stay with someone based on kaleidoscopic photos of the property, detailed profiles, and other users’ reviews. As the site has grown, in fact, the founders have removed rules they initially thought would be required. They took away the initial cap on charges of $300 because they realized that people were using the Airbnb community for far more than budget accommodation. Today you can find castles for rent in England for $3,000 a night. The only fixed rules on Airbnb are that the travelers must be able to ask the host questions before they book, and rooms can’t be a commodity, which excludes most hotels.

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Hosts are not paid in full until twenty-four hours after a guest has checked in. Airbnb charges hosts a standard 3 percent service fee and travelers an additional 6 to 12 percent depending on the reservation price. Aside from turning Airbnb into a real business with a profitable revenue model that has been growing at more than 10 percent every month since they launched, the founders believe that some form of payment “puts both parties on the best behavior and makes the whole process more reliable.” When Chesky told his grandfather about the idea behind Airbnb, “It seemed totally normal to him. My parents had a different reaction.

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The same is true of Collaborative Consumption. Airbnb has received an array of top-tier traditional press, from Time magazine to CNN, but founder Brian Chesky admits it’s the “viral thing” that has enabled Airbnb to build a critical mass of more than 85,000 users in more than 115 countries in less than two years. “People want to go to work on Monday and when asked what did you do over the weekend to be able to say, ‘Well, I hosted this brother and sister from Sweden.’ ” Users want to declare their collaborative, nonowning, or sharing status. “People approach Airbnb all the time with ideas on how they can help us.

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs by Reid Hoffman, June Cohen, Deron Triff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, call centre, chief data officer, clean water, collaborative consumption, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, financial independence, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, global macro, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, knowledge economy, late fees, Lean Startup, lone genius, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, polynesian navigation, race to the bottom, remote working, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, work culture , Y Combinator, zero day, Zipcar

Scale, and the beginner’s mind Brian no longer knocks on hosts’ doors or sleeps on their couches. Airbnb today is a public company that hardly resembles the scrappy little startup in the stories above. But handcrafting still matters to Brian. He relies on close contact with longtime hosts and customers for input on design and strategy. And any time he considers a bold new product direction, he instinctively imagines it through the eyes of a single user. For example, when they first conceived Airbnb Trips—an extension of Airbnb’s core business offering curated end-to-end experiences—Brian and his team began by handcrafting a vacation experience for a single customer.

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The team booked Ricardo a stay with a top-notch Airbnb host; took him to dinner parties; booked seats at a couple of the city’s best restaurants; even brought him on a midnight mystery bike tour. At the end of the trip, Brian met up with Ricardo so he could personally ask how it had gone. By the time they were done talking, Ricardo was in tears. “This is the best trip I’ve ever had,” he told Brian. Clearly, the Ricardo experiment doesn’t scale, as such. Airbnb couldn’t possibly handcraft every trip for every customer. But the lessons learned from these experiments shaped the Airbnb Trips model—showing them the most important elements to emphasize.

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If everyone I talk to thinks it’s a terrible idea, I’ll start wondering: Am I drinking the Kool-Aid in a very bad way? What I want is for some people to say, “You’re out of your mind,” and some people to say, “I see it.” I want a polarized reaction. Take my decision to invest in Airbnb as an example. David Sze, a partner of mine at Greylock Partners, thought I was making an epic mistake with that investment. I remember him saying to me, “Well, Reid, every venture capitalist has a deal that doesn’t work, which they learn from. Airbnb can be yours.” To be clear: David Sze is a super-smart VC. He invested in LinkedIn, Facebook, and Pandora. He personally returned two and a half billion dollars to Greylock’s funds.

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing by Andrew Ross

8-hour work day, Airbnb, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, clean water, climate change refugee, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, do what you love, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, El Camino Real, emotional labour, financial innovation, fixed income, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, Hernando de Soto, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Housing First, housing justice, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, land bank, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Calthorpe, pill mill, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, starchitect, tech bro, the built environment, traffic fines, uber lyft, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, working poor

Tripp Mickle and Preetika Rana, “‘A Bargain with the Devil’—Bill Comes Due for Overextended Airbnb Hosts,” Wall Street Journal, April 28, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-bargain-with-the-devilbill-comes-due-for-overextended-airbnb-hosts-11588083336. 13.  The controversial impact of these new landlords is most visible in urban neighborhoods, where Airbnb has the greatest booking density, but they are not exclusive to cities. In Florida, Osceola County is second only to the more urban Miami-Dade County in the number of Airbnb guests and revenue. It is also the site of the first “Niido Powered by Airbnb,” the company’s line of branded apartment complexes, which allow renters to make income (shared with the company) by leasing out their unit on Airbnb for up to 180 days per year. Niido is Airbnb’s effort to move into the market created by multiunit owners of rental properties, who are essentially running small-scale lodging companies on an absentee basis. 14.  

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Such regulations are cheered on by housing advocates, who blame Airbnb and other nightly rental platforms for driving up neighborhood rents and removing affordable units from the market.13 A 2019 study by the Economic Policy Institute showed that the entry of Airbnb into a community reduces the stock of long-term rentals, creating economic costs that outweigh the benefits of increasing tourism.14 A detailed McGill University study of New York City showed that two-thirds of Airbnb revenue came from likely illegal listings and that Airbnb rentals had removed as many as 13,500 units from the long-term rental market. The result was a $380 rent increase per year for the median tenant in New York City overall and an increase of more than $700 per year in some Manhattan neighborhoods. The study also found a racially disparate component to Airbnb’s impact: the neighborhoods where Airbnb properties were far more profitable than long-term rentals, placing them at particularly high risk for losing rental housing, were 72 percent nonwhite.15 Overall, the retailing of space inside private homes has morphed into a commercial opportunity for professional hosting firms or speculators who commandeer ever-greater portions of housing stock.

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Niido is Airbnb’s effort to move into the market created by multiunit owners of rental properties, who are essentially running small-scale lodging companies on an absentee basis. 14.  Josh Bivens, “The Economic Costs and Benefits of Airbnb,” Economic Policy Institute, January 30, 2019, https://www.epi.org/publication/the-economic-costs-and-benefits-of-airbnb-no-reason-for-local-policymakers-to-let-airbnb-bypass-tax-or-regulatory-obligations/. 15.  David Wachsmuth et al., “The High Cost of Short-Term Rentals in New York City,” School of Urban Planning, McGill University, January 30, 2018, https://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/files/newsroom/channels/attach/airbnb-report.pdf. 16.  Diana Olick, “Build-to-Rent Housing Market Explodes as Investors Rush In,” CNBC, June 26, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/26/suddenly-the-build-to-rent-single-family-housing-market-is-exploding.html. 17.  

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

,” Harvard Business Law Review 4 (2014): 235, University of Pennsylvania Institute for Law & Economics, Research Paper No. 14–41, posted December 18, 2014, https://ssrn.com/abstract=2539098. 293 “if not more than, the bottom line”: Etsy, “Building an Etsy Economy: The New Face of Creative Entrepreneurship,” 2015, retrieved April 4, 2017, https://extfiles.etsy.com/Press/reports/Etsy_NewFaceofCreativeEntrepreneur ship_2015.pdf. 293 the ouster of Chad Dickerson, Etsy’s CEO: The Associated Press, “Etsy Replaces CEO, Cuts Jobs Amid Shareholder Pressure,” ABC News, May 2, 2017, http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/etsy-replaces-ceo-cuts-jobs-amid-shareholder-pressure-47167426. 293 supported more than 10,000 jobs: “Airbnb Community Tops $1.15 Billion in Economic Activity in New York City,” Airbnb, May 12, 2015, https://www.airbnb.com/press/news/airbnb-community-tops-1-15-billion-in-economic-activity-in-new-york-city. 293 helped them stay in their home: “Airbnb Economic Impact,” Airbnb, retrieved April 4, 2017, http://blog.airbnb.com/economic-impact-airbnb/. 294 A third-party economic study: Peter Cohen, Robert Hahn, Jonathan Hall, Steven Levitt, and Robert Metcalfe, “Using Big Data to Estimate Consumer Surplus: The Case of Uber,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 22627, September 2016, doi:10.3386/w22627. 294 nine million third-party sellers: Duncan Clark, Alibaba: The House That Jack Built (New York: Harper, 2016), 5. 294 in order to favor more lucrative sales by big brands: Ina Steiner, “eBay Makes Big Promises to Small Sellers as SEO Penalty Still Stings,” eCommerce Bytes, April 23, 2015, http://www.ecommercebytes.com/cab/abn/y15/m04/i23/s02. 294 half of all private sector employment: “SBA Advocacy: Frequently Asked Questions” Small Business Administration, September 2012, retrieved May 12, 2017, https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/FAQ_Sept_2012.pdf. 295 “now drying the clothes”: Steve Baer, “The Clothesline Paradox,” CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter 1975, retrieved April 3, 2017, http://www.wholeearth.com/issue/2008/article/358/the.clothesline.paradox. 296 value as and if created: Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State (London: Anthem, 2013), 185–87. 296 “a minuscule fraction”: William D.

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There is of course some offsetting loss of income to hotels, so these numbers likely deserve further scrutiny. But it’s important to note that Airbnb’s benefit is distributed more directly to ordinary people and small businesses than are the profits of large hotel chains. Across all the cities they’ve studied, 74% of Airbnb properties are outside the main hotel districts. Airbnb guests spend 2.1 times longer than the average hotel stay, and spend 2.1 times more than hotel visitors, with 41% of it spent in local neighborhoods not usually frequented by tourists. While professional Airbnb hosts play a larger role in some markets like Japan, Airbnb is increasingly enforcing a “one host, one home rule” to minimize the conversion of rental housing stock to short-term rentals.

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BUILDING A THICK MARKETPLACE What made Airbnb’s achievement possible, of course, was not just digital photography, making it easy for hosts to show off their property, but the World Wide Web, online credit card payments, and the experience of other sites that had built reputation systems and ratings to help users build trust with strangers. Airbnb had to wrap these services into a new platform, which you can define as the set of digital services that enables its hosts to find and serve guests. The primary platform service provided by Airbnb, though, is not to build a pretty web page showing off a property, to schedule rentals, or to take payments. Anyone with a modicum of web experience can do all those things in an afternoon. The essential job of an Internet service like Airbnb is to build what Alvin E. Roth, the economist whose work on labor marketplaces earned him the Nobel Prize, calls a “thick marketplace,” a critical mass of consumers and producers, readers and writers, or buyers and sellers.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

Yes, hotels may be collecting some data behind the scenes, perhaps to market to you better in the future, but they have no interest in turning you down as a patron, nor do they have the legal right to do so based on your identity. Those rules don’t quite apply with Airbnb, which encourages users to log in with their Facebook accounts and provide detailed profiles. Some Airbnb users have reported being discriminated against because of their appearances. Franklin Leonard, who owns the Black List, a script discovery and reading service in Hollywood, recounted to me a story about trying to book Airbnb lodging for a business trip. Leonard travels frequently and had had success with Airbnb in the past. Six months before a film festival, he tried to rent a house in Austin for himself and several employees, but the owner refused, saying he wouldn’t rent anything more than three months out.

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Aug. 30, 2013. tomslee.net/2013/08/why-the-sharing-economy-isnt.html. 239 “unreasonable obstacles”: ibid. 239 Atkin’s connection to Peers: Nitasha Tiku. “Airbnb’s Industry Mouthpiece Astroturfs for Donations.” Valleywag, a blog on Gawker. Dec. 11, 2013. valleywag.gawker.com/airbnbs-industry-mouthpiece-astroturfs-for-donations-1481305550. 239 Pierre Omidyar and Peers: Ryan Chittum. “Fortune Flacks for the ‘Sharing Economy.’” Columbia Journalism Review. Dec. 10, 2013. cjr.org/the_audit/fortune_flacks_for_the_sharing.php. 239 “We’ll provide everything”: Peers. “Help Fix the Law in New York.” action.peers.org/page/signup/office-drop-by-in-newyork-. 240 “You are responsible”: Airbnb. “Terms of Service.” May 22, 2012. airbnb.com/home/terms. 241 Uber financing program: Mark Milian.

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But the message had already been communicated: Leonard and his employees weren’t welcome there, and the reasoning was fairly clear. Leonard began changing how he styled his Airbnb profile. “As it is, I do everything I can to make clear that I’m a responsible tenant,” he said, “typically either mentioning that I’m in town with the company that I founded and run or that I’m traveling with my fiancée. “After this event, I actually changed my profile photo on Airbnb to one with my fiancée [who isn’t black] and I together. Sad but true. Got the idea from another black man on Twitter who had had similar experiences.” Despite tweeting a complaint at Airbnb, which encourages Twitter feedback from users, Leonard never heard from the company.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Among other restrictions, it also limited short-term rental hosting to permanent city residents. In response, Airbnb took its lobbying efforts from City Hall to the streets. Before the election, the company bought sneering billboards that advertised how much money they had contributed to the city: Dear SF Tax Collector, You know the $12 million in hotel taxes? Don’t spend it all in one place. Love, Airbnb Of course, Airbnb had only paid those taxes after a fight. A second billboard carried on impudently: But … if you do spend all $12 million in one place, we suggest burritos. Love, Airbnb The anti-Airbnb measure was defeated, but turnout was significantly lower than the previous year and the winning side represented a mere 18 percent of eligible voters.

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“There’s one key,” Liam said. “One key?” I said. “For everybody?” A voice called out from across the room: “You have twenty-four hours to tell Airbnb the place isn’t as advertised.” Uh-oh. What else was wrong with it? Liam showed me the wall-mounted light in the hallway where they stashed the interior door key. To reach it required long arms or a leap. There were more tricks to learn, as a consequence of the possibly illicit nature of this type of rental arrangement and the evident stinginess of our Airbnb hosts. The Condo Hackers never came in through the front door, Liam explained. It was too conspicuous. I followed Liam down to the ground-floor garage, then outside to the rear of the building.

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Bad tips and an eviction notice. The well-off newcomers couldn’t help but rub it in. Airbnb, which had perhaps more than any other company contributed directly to the displacement of San Francisco tenants by taking some six thousand units off the long-term rental market, addressed its critics with open contempt. Neighborhood activists placed a municipal referendum on the November 2015 ballot that would have forced the venture-capital-backed startup to compete fairly with existing hotels and rental homes. The measure included provisions to ensure that Airbnb hosts paid taxes, stayed up to code, and reported occupancy and earnings.

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

Another of Andreessen Horowitz’s venture investments is Airbnb, a peer-to-peer marketplace founded in 2007 that allows anyone to rent out a room in their home, transforming it into a hotel. By the end of 2013, Airbnb had topped 10 million guest stays from an active list of 550,000 worldwide properties in 192 countries that included spare rooms in homes, castles, and yurts.111 And in February 2014, the 700-person startup raised a $475 million round of investment at a valuation of $10 billion,112 which makes it worth about a half as much as the $22 billion Hilton corporation, a worldwide chain with 3,897 hotels and 152,000 employees. Airbnb cofounder Brian Chesky describes the company as a platform of “trust” in which the reputations of guests and of hosts will be determined by feedback on the network.113 But Airbnb has been beset by such a scarcity of trust from the authorities that 15,000 New York City hosts were subpoenaed in May 2014 by New York State attorney general Eric Schneiderman because they may not have paid taxes on their rental incomes.

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What the Financial Times calls a “regulatory backlash”45 has pushed Uber to limit surge pricing during emergencies46 and forced Airbnb hosts to install smoke and carbon monoxide detectors in their homes.47 “Just because a company has an app instead of a storefront doesn’t mean consumer protection laws don’t apply,” notes the New York State attorney general Eric Schneiderman, who is trying to subpoena Airbnb’s user data in New York City.48 A group of housing activists in San Francisco is even planning a late 2014 ballot measure in the city that would “severely curb” Airbnb’s operations.49 “Airbnb is bringing up the rent despite what the company says,” explains the New York City–based political party Working Families.50 The answer is to use the law and regulation to force the Internet out of its prolonged adolescence.

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Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 83. 107 Marc Andreessen, “Why Bitcoin Matters,” New York Times, January 21, 2014. 108 Ibid. 109 Colin Lecher, “How Did a $10 Potato Salad Kickstarter Raise More than $30,000?,” Verge, July 7, 2014. 110 Sarah Eckel, “You Want Me to Give You Money for What?,” BBC Capital, May 1, 2014. 111 Ryan Lawler, “Airbnb Tops 10 Million Guest Stays Since Launch, Now Has 550,000 Properties Listed Worldwide,” TechCrunch, December 19, 2013. 112 Sydney Ember, “Airbnb’s Huge Valuation,” New York Times, April 21, 2014. See also Carolyn Said, “Airbnb’s Swank Digs Reflect Growth, but Controversy Grows,” SFGate, January 27, 2014. 113 Thomas L. Friedman, “And Now for a Bit of Good News . . .” New York Times, July 19, 2014. 114 Will Oremus, “Silicon Valley Uber Alles,” Slate, June 6, 2014. 115 See Dan Amira, “Uber Will Ferry Hampton-Goers Via Helicopter This July 3rd,” New York, July 2013, nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/07/uber-helicopter-uberchopper-hamptons-july-3rd.html. 116 Jessica Guynn, “San Francisco Split by Silicon Valley’s Wealth,” Los Angeles Times, August 14, 2013. 117 Paul Sloan, “Marc Andreessen: Predictions for 2012 (and Beyond),” CNET, December 19, 2011, news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57345138-93/marc-andreessen-predictions-for-2012-and-beyond. 118 Mark Scott, “Traffic Snarls in Europe as Taxi Drivers Protest Against Uber,” New York Times, June 11, 2014. 119 Kevin Roose, “Uber Might Be More Valuable than Facebook Someday.

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamaseb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, asset light, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, business intelligence, buy and hold, Chris Wanstrath, clean water, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, game design, General Magic , gig economy, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Network effects, nuclear winter, PageRank, PalmPilot, Parker Conrad, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, power law, QR code, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the payments system, TikTok, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator

They made over $30,000 in profits from the cereals, which helped them continue building Airbnb. Eventually, a year and a half after founding, the startup landed a spot in Y Combinator. Paul Graham accepted them specifically because they were “cockroaches”: they were tenacious and had tried everything to survive, including selling cereal. Graham was looking for cockroaches during the 2008 recession. During a YC dinner, the co-founders met Greg McAdoo, a partner from Sequoia Capital, and they walked up to pitch him. “In two weeks, we had a term sheet for a $600,000 seed round,” Chesky said.3 Things changed for Airbnb from that point on. Looking back, Airbnb’s success seems as though it should have been a foregone conclusion.

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Companies in this category range from Slack, a workplace chat app designed to replace emails, to Gusto, a startup that handles human resources, payroll, and benefits. Another group, representing about one-fifth of billion-dollar companies, focuses on directly saving people money. Airbnb, for example, started as a cheap alternative to a hotel—though now the platform offers much more to its users than just cost savings. All of Airbnb’s early customer-facing materials focused on being affordable. A smaller percentage of billion-dollar startups focus on convenience, like Instacart, a grocery-delivery company that saves its customers a trip to the store. In the group of random startups, just one-third focused on productivity, while 19 percent provided convenience and 13 percent saved money.

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The key is for entrepreneurs to connect their fundraising with concrete and tangible milestones while giving themselves enough cushion and room for errors and delays. AN INVESTOR IN AIRBNB, DOORDASH, HOUZZ, ZIPLINE, AND MORE INTERVIEW WITH ALFRED LIN OF SEQUOIA CAPITAL Sequoia Capital, one of the most successful and longest-running venture capital firms in history, doesn’t need an introduction. Its portfolio includes Apple, Atari, Yahoo, Google, Oracle, YouTube, Stripe, Dropbox, Cisco, Zoom, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Alfred Lin, one of Sequoia’s partners, focuses mostly on consumer internet companies. Lin sits on the boards of Airbnb, Zipline, Houzz, and DoorDash, among other companies. I spoke with Alfred to learn more about how he became a venture capital investor and joined Sequoia, and how founders should think about fundraising and approaching VCs.

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work by Alex Rosenblat

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, business logic, call centre, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive load, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death from overwork, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Chrome, Greyball, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social software, SoftBank, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, Tim Cook: Apple, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, urban planning, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

THE MYTH OF TECHNOLOGICAL EXCEPTIONALISM Taxi drivers have protested that Uber violates the laws that regulate their industry by operating without permits,57 but Uber maintains that it is not a taxi company—it’s a technology company that uses neutral algorithms to merely facilitate connections between consumers and drivers. Meanwhile, the growth of Uber has quickly become a threat to the highly regulated taxi industry’s monopoly on chauffeur services. Companies like Uber and Airbnb separate themselves from their predecessors, taxis and hotels, by emphasizing the altruistic premise of their “sharing” platforms. Airbnb argues that it is a technology platform, like Facebook, YouTube, or Google, that connects hosts with guests. In conflicts with Airbnb, the hotel industry alleges that the company operates illegal hotels: hosts rent out their spare rooms or homes to traveling guests but do not have to comply with the safety regulations that govern hotels or bed and breakfasts.58 Likewise, Facebook, which is in the business of sharing news, resists being categorized as a media company.

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The gratitude logic of “accept our contribution, but don’t expect us to submit to governance in this space” was similarly visible in an advertising campaign by Airbnb in San Francisco. A sample ad plastered to a bus stop shelter read, “Dear Public Library System, We hope you use some of the $12 million in hotel taxes to keep the library open later.” The condescending ads, which hinted broadly at the city’s ingratitude for the taxes that Airbnb’s business generates, followed an $8 million lobbying campaign by the company against San Francisco’s 2015 ballot measure Proposition F. Voters ultimately rejected the proposition, which would have restricted short-term rentals and thus undermined Airbnb’s short-term-rental business model.11 Gratitude logic is part of how Uber drums up popular support for its regulatory evasions.

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Benjamin Edelman, Michael Luca, and Dan Svirsky, “Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, September 16, 2016, www.benedelman.org/publications/airbnb-guest-discrimination-2016–09–16.pdf. 26. Sam Levin, “Airbnb Gives In to Regulator’s Demand to Test for Racial Discrimination by Hosts,” The Guardian, April 27, 2017, www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/27/airbnb-government-housing-test-black-discrimination. 27. Alex Rosenblat, “Uber’s Drive-By Politics,” Motherboard, May 27, 2016, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gv5jaw/uber-lyft-austin-drive-by-politics. 28.

The Network Imperative: How to Survive and Grow in the Age of Digital Business Models by Barry Libert, Megan Beck

active measures, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, diversification, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, future of work, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, late fees, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Oculus Rift, pirate software, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, software as a service, software patent, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Wall-E, women in the workforce, Zipcar

Evan Bakker, “Bankers Across the Globe Expect Major Tech Companies to Cut Into Their Retail Banking Business,” Business Insider, March 18, 2015, http://www.businessinsider.com/bankers-expect-their-retail-banking-revenue-to-fall-2015-3. 2. Barry Libert, Yoram (Jerry) Wind, and Megan Beck Fenley, “What Apple, Lending Club, and Airbnb Know about Collaborating with Customers,” HBR.org, July 3, 2015, https://hbr.org/2015/07/what-apple-lending-club-and-airbnb-know-about-collaborating-with-customers; and “What Airbnb, Uber, and Alibaba Have in Common,” HBR.org, November 20, 2014, https://hbr.org/2014/11/what-airbnb-uber-and-alibaba-have-in-common. 3. “Did You Know? Facts from Our Executive Compensation and Benefits (ECB) Proprietary Databases,” Alvarez & Marsal, issue 8, November 10, 2014, http://www.alvarezandmarsal.com/sites/default/files/files/Age-CEO-CFO-COO.pdf.

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PALMER, former Dean, the Wharton School; former CEO, Touche Ross (now Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited) “The Network Imperative is a must-read because professional relationships, business models, and the way we position value in only three to five years will be changed to a point that is difficult to grasp. Lead the change in your company, or be prepared to eat dust.” —JEROME PERIBERE, President and CEO, Sealed Air “Today’s management education is focused on the firm. It is clear that networks like Uber, Airbnb, and Amazon require us to rethink management education if our future leaders are to have any chance of survival and growth. The Network Imperative is a must-read for all business, public policy, and academic leaders—today’s and tomorrow’s.” —DAVID C. SCHMITTLEIN, John C. Head III Dean, MIT Sloan School of Management “One of the most insightful and practical books on how networks are creating future competitive advantage.

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With the growth of digital platforms, organizations can now expand their network connections rapidly and at very low cost. Today’s leading organizations are network-centric and are creating remarkable economic returns by capitalizing on network advantages, such as co-creation with their customers (Facebook); digital platforms (Amazon); shared assets (Uber and Airbnb); and big data insights (Netflix and Google). Leaders and investors who want to participate in the network revolution need to envision their future, and the future of their industry, based on intangibles and networks or risk falling behind. The Network Imperative provides the why and how to survive and thrive in the age of hyperscale digital networks.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

On the campaign against discrimination on Airbnb, see “Airbnb Has a Discrimination Problem. Ask Anyone Who’s Tried to #Airbnbwhileblack,” by Aja Romano (Vox, May 6, 2016). Airbnb’s report in response to the accusations is titled “Airbnb’s Work to Fight Discrimination and Build Inclusion,” by Laura W. Murphy (September 8, 2016): http://blog.atairbnb.com/​wp-content/​uploads/​2016/​09/​REPORT_Airbnbs-Work-to-Fight-Discrimination-and-Build-Inclusion.pdf?3c10be (accessed September 2017). The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing’s allegations against Airbnb are contained here: www.dfeh.ca.gov/​wp-content/​uploads/​sites/​32/​2017/​06/​04-19-17-Airbnb-DFEH-Agreement-Signed-DFEH-1-1.pdf (accessed September 2017).

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Two months after the viral explosion of #AirbnbWhileBlack, however, when the company received complaints from California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing alleging that it “may have failed to prevent discrimination against African American guests” and “may have engaged in acts of discrimination” itself, Airbnb retreated. “While Airbnb simply operates a platform and is not well positioned to make determinations regarding the booking decisions Hosts make in each case,” the company said in a legal response, “Airbnb has recognized on its own based on available data that some third-party hosts on its site are likely violating Airbnb’s policy against racial discrimination, and that its policies and processes have, to date, been insufficient fully to address the problem.”

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“It’s not an emphasis of this ideology,” Ferenstein said. Suffering can be innovated away. Let the innovators do their start-ups and suffering will be reduced. Each entrepreneurial venture could take on a different social problem. “In the case of Airbnb, the way you alleviate housing suffering is by allowing people to share their homes,” Ferenstein said. An Airbnb ad campaign along these lines featured older black women thriving now that the entrepreneurs had helped them to rent out rooms and make extra money. Of course, many poor people don’t own homes or have a surplus of space to rent out. And many African Americans find it difficult to rent on the platform—hotels can no longer easily discriminate by race, but spare-room hoteliers often do.

Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in LIfe by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

affirmative action, Airbnb, cognitive bias, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, digital map, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, General Magic , global pandemic, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Sam Altman, science of happiness, selection bias, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systematic bias, Tony Fadell, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, urban planning, Y Combinator

Chapter 6: Hacking Luck to Your Advantage Airbnb: The Airbnb story has been told many places, including by Leigh Gallagher, The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy (New York: HMH Books, 2017). “Idea times Product times Execution times Team times Luck”: Tad Friend, “Sam Altman’s manifest destiny,” New Yorker, October 3, 2016. how luck influences large companies: Jim Collins, Great by Choice (Good to Great) (New York: Harper Business, 2011). Airbnb’s bookings dropped: Corrie Driebusch, Maureen Farrell, and Cara Lombardo, “Airbnb plans to file for IPO in August,” Wall Street Journal, August 12, 2020.

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And allow millions of people, around the world, when they are out of town—to drum for Barry Manilow or for any other reason—to make some extra cash by renting out their place. Airbedandbreakfast.com was rebranded as Airbnb—and immediately began to get traction. Sure, few people wanted to set up an air mattress in their apartment and serve breakfast to out-of-town visitors. But it turned out that millions of people around the world wanted to rent out their empty places. (The full Airbnb story is told in Leigh Gallagher’s excellent book The Airbnb Story.) There was one remaining problem: the Airbnb team needed money to continue their business. They were in the midst of the Great Recession; investors around the world had tightened their belts.

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Remarkably, he also just happened to have spent the past year and a half analyzing the vacation rental market. He had determined that the market was actually worth $40 billion, far more than what others thought. He met the Airbnb team and was immediately ready to send a check for $585,000. Airbnb now had a product people wanted and the money to get their idea off the ground. They were now on the path to a multibillion-dollar valuation. As Tad Friend wrote in the New Yorker, Airbnb’s rise “seems replete with luck.” There was the lucky meeting of Seibel in Austin. There was the lucky encounter with the perfect investor, McAdoo, at Y Combinator. And of course, there was Manilow’s drummer.

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs by Guy Raz

Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, business logic, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fear of failure, glass ceiling, growth hacking, housing crisis, imposter syndrome, inventory management, It's morning again in America, iterative process, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tony Hsieh, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, Zipcar

It’s about using other nonmonetary assets to solve problems that you would otherwise hire someone else to solve or throw money at—assets like your time, your effort, your network, and your own talent and ingenuity. Joe Gebbia, Brian Chesky, and Nathan Blecharczyk leveraged every one of those resources in 2007 and 2008 to bootstrap their way into the peer-to-peer online hospitality platform that we know today as Airbnb. Airbnb began as a website called Airbedandbreakfast.com that was designed to offer a place to stay for attendees of large conferences once all the hotel rooms in the host city were sold-out. The idea came to Joe one day in September 2007 as he sat at home surfing the internet, wondering how he was going to make rent and not lose a friend.

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The idea worked. They got a ton of press and they sold all the cereal. I was absolutely blown away by this part of the Airbnb story. But it triggered a question: What was the point? How was this really going to help Airbedandbreakfast.com? Joe’s answer was that it wasn’t. Or, more precisely, that it didn’t really matter. “At $40 a box times 500 boxes, we made $20,000 in breakfast cereal,” Joe explained, “which was just enough to pay off our credit cards.” Obama O’s and Cap’n McCain’s didn’t fuel the Airbnb rocket ship, but it kept them going long enough for them to get accepted into Y Combinator’s winter class that year.

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Personally, I think they had the answers to their big “why” questions right from the beginning—sleeping in someone’s house on an air bed, like a sleepover, makes you feel like you’re a part of the city you’re traveling to, whereas staying in a national chain hotel can make you feel apart from it—but it took them some time to get it. Once they did, however, once they began to connect more dots, and those dots began to connect to their own stories and to something deeper going on in the culture, the evolution of Airbedandbreakfast.com into Airbnb began in earnest and set them on the unicorn’s path. The stories of Bumble and Airbnb are unique to themselves, but what is true across industries and across time is that all businesses are stories, and all stories are a process. They are a mechanism for thinking deeply about yourself, your product or service, your employees, your customers, your market, and the world.

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, business logic, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Didi Chuxing, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greensill Capital, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, index fund, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plant based meat, post-oil, railway mania, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, supply chain finance, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, Zenefits, Zipcar

Still, nothing concrete resulted from these meetings—not from Google, not from Apple, and not even from another startup closer to WeWork in age and valuation: Airbnb. In multiple meetings with the San Francisco home rental startup, Neumann pitched Airbnb’s CEO, Brian Chesky, on a plan to reinvigorate WeLive and spread it around the world. Chesky, despite a smaller valuation of $35 billion, had much of the credibility in Silicon Valley Neumann seemed to crave. Airbnb lost less money and had a more efficient business model; Chesky was respected by many top venture capitalists. Neumann angled to cultivate a partnership. He told Chesky that WeWork and Airbnb would build ten thousand apartment units they would rent on Airbnb. Chesky’s initial reaction was that ten thousand was a bit small for Airbnb to get involved.

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For employees holding stock options—which generally varied from thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars when they were issued—their stock was now worth over ten times more than when Benchmark invested two years earlier, at least on paper. Just four years old, WeWork was already the billion-dollar company Neumann had envisioned when he was opening the first building. Still, he wasn’t close to being done. Airbnb would soon nab a $10 billion valuation, and Neumann saw himself in that stratosphere. More and more, he was portraying WeWork as a tech company. WeWork was part of the sharing economy; it needed offices just as Uber and Airbnb needed cars and apartments, he told investors. Its tech was cutting edge, he’d say. The entrepreneur who could barely use a MacBook managed to pepper references to technology effortlessly into his pitch.

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WeWork was a by-product of the same mass delusion that raised the valuations of “tech” companies higher and higher. Investors saw a physical social network with amazing growth rather than a collection of people paying market rents for office space that had losses growing just as fast as revenue. When Neumann told them WeWork was like Uber and Airbnb, the investors focused on the few parallels between those businesses rather than numerous fundamental differences, including how Airbnb and Uber are asset light and don’t have costly fifteen-year leases for their homes and cars. These investors were considered the smart money—the ones investing on behalf of wealthy families or endowments or pensions who had their pick of advisers.

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, defund the police, deplatforming, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fudge factor, full employment, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, green new deal, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, impact investing, independent contractor, index fund, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Network effects, Parler "social media", plant based meat, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, single source of truth, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, WeWork, zero-sum game

“An Update on Our Work to Serve All Stakeholders.” Airbnb Newsroom, 28 Jan. 2020, news.airbnb.com/serving-all-stakeholders/. 10. Volz, Dustin, and Kirsten Grind. “Airbnb Executive Resigned Last Year over Chinese Request for More Data Sharing.” The Wall Street Journal, 20 Nov. 2020, www.wsj.com/articles/airbnb-executive-resigned-last-year-over-chinese-request-for-more-data-sharing-11605896753?mod=mhp. 11. Volz, Dustin, and Kirsten Grind. “Airbnb Executive Resigned Last Year over Chinese Request for More Data Sharing.” The Wall Street Journal, 20 Nov. 2020, www.wsj.com/articles/airbnb-executive-resigned-last-year-over-chinese-request-for-more-data-sharing-11605896753?

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It made a nice little chart that described the relationships that Airbnb hoped to have with its various stakeholders.9 Chesky was lionized for the announcement. But it turns out the handy chart conveniently omitted one of one of Airbnb’s most important stakeholders: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). About seven months before Brian Chesky’s declaration of love for stakeholders, Airbnb hired Sean Joyce, a former deputy director of the FBI, as its first “chief trust officer.” The purpose of the role was to protect users’ safety on the platform. Yet in a move that Airbnb tried to sweep under the rug, Joyce resigned before the end of the year over concerns about how the behemoth was sharing data on millions of its users—without their knowledge—with the Chinese Communist Party.

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Guests and hosts are at the top of Airbnb’s stakeholder list. Yet it was stealing and sharing data from both of these stakeholders to share it with an even more important one. According to The Wall Street Journal, Joyce left because he was concerned that Airbnb wasn’t transparent with its users about the data that it regularly shares with the CCP. And Airbnb continued to expand the scope of data that it shared.10 Regularly shared data about American users includes phone numbers, email addresses, and the content of messages between users and the company, according to unidentified sources within Airbnb. Chinese officials privately approached Airbnb with an unwritten request for even more data, including so-called “real-time data,” about the users.

Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising by Ryan Holiday

Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, data science, growth hacking, Hacker News, iterative process, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, market design, minimum viable product, Multics, Paul Graham, pets.com, post-work, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Steve Wozniak, Travis Kalanick

The necessity of that jolt—needing to get it any way they can—has made start-ups get very creative. Let’s look at Airbnb again. The company’s most effective marketing tactic (besides making a great product) would never have been conceived or attempted by a pure marketing team. Instead, the engineers coded a set of tools that made it possible for every member to seamlessly cross-post his or her Airbnb listing on craigslist (because craigslist does not technically “allow” this, it was a fairly ingenious work-around). As a result, Airbnb—a tiny site—suddenly had free distribution on one of the most popular websites in the world.

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That is what growth hackers have taught us. Run down the list of the start-ups we’ve talked about in this book, from Hotmail to Airbnb to Groupon to Spotify, and see the startling fact: tactics that no one would have previously described as “marketing” turned out to be the marketing steroids behind their business growth. For Hotmail, it was inserting an e-mail signature at the bottom that turned every e-mail sent by one of its users into a pitch for new users. For Airbnb it was craiglist infiltration, which allowed Airbnb hosts to use the site as a sales platform. For Groupon and LivingSocial it was their referral offers that paid users to share deals with their friends.

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This was clearly a better market, but the founders sensed they could improve the idea further, so they pivoted slightly to target the type of traveler who didn’t want to crash on couches or in hostels but was looking to avoid hotels. This did better still. Finally, based on feedback and usage patterns, they shortened the name to Airbnb, abandoned the breakfast and networking parts of the business, and redefined the service as a place for people to rent or book any kind of lodging imaginable (from rooms to apartments to trains, boats, castles, penthouses, and private islands). This was explosive—to the tune of millions of bookings a year in locations all over the world. Airbnb had a good idea in 2007. The founders could have spent all their time and energy trying to force the “let people crash on your floor and feed them breakfast” angle and created a small business around it.

Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design by Alvin E. Roth

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Build a better mousetrap, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, computer age, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, deferred acceptance, desegregation, Dutch auction, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, High speed trading, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, law of one price, Lyft, market clearing, market design, medical residency, obamacare, PalmPilot, proxy bid, road to serfdom, school choice, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, two-sided market, uber lyft, undersea cable

Booking a room with an Airbnb host was a little like that. So Airbnb had to figure out how a market with many hosts offering one room at a time could compete more effectively with hotels. Price was obviously important. But it was the spread of smartphones that helped Airbnb close the speed gap, and that may have mattered even more than price. Today, as hosts manage their reservations on their smartphones, they don’t have to wait until they return home to confirm a booking—they just check their phones. They can also, as soon as the room is booked, immediately update their Airbnb listing to remove its availability.

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This is why the rise of mobile communications has been so important for the development of many Internet markets: smartphones shorten response times. Consider Airbnb, which makes a market between travelers looking for a nice, cheap place to stay and hosts who want to rent out their underused guest rooms and apartments. When Airbnb started in San Francisco in 2008, most people communicated with the Internet via computers. So if you wanted to make your guest room available for visitors the following week, you might use your laptop to post it on Airbnb in the morning before leaving for work. When you came home in the evening, you would check to see whether anyone had expressed an interest—and if so, you would confirm his or her booking.

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As a potential guest, you might have had to wait a whole day to find out whether the room you wanted was still available, and if you learned at the end of the day that it wasn’t, you would have had to start over. You can see the problem. Airbnb’s business model worked well enough in the beginning, when the market was small and the travelers were intrepid young people on tight budgets who were willing to take the time to find a good deal. Airbnb’s competitors in those days were similar Web services, such as the London-based Crashpadder (acquired by Airbnb in 2012) and the Toronto-based iStopOver (acquired by the Berlin-based 9Flats, also in 2012). Competition in those days was based largely on attracting more and more hosts and travelers in order to make the market thicker.

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

Fast-forward to today: Airbnb is effectively the world’s largest hotel chain without owning a single hotel room. It has more than 800,000 listings in 34,000 cities. It has housed more than 20 million people. With a valuation of $20 billion, Airbnb is worth more than twice as much as Hyatt, and Brian has gone from being unable to afford the rent to being a billionaire. At the conclusion of Chesky’s creation story, he always says, “It’s like the United Nations at every kitchen table!” While the idea that Airbnb is bringing people from around the world together is cute, it masks the economic reality. Airbnb has succeeded in bringing eBay’s trust-through-algorithms-and-ratings model to lodging and built a business around it.

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In the case of lodging, as with Airbnb, increased stock takes a scarce resource and makes it more abundant and therefore affordable. It lowers hotel room rates and transfers some of that value to people with a spare bedroom while also creating new value. While Airbnb rents castles and lodges the likes of Charlie Songhurst, its data also show that it is allowing people to travel who otherwise could not and is making it possible for people to stay on vacation longer. Where a typical tourist stay is three nights, the average Airbnb guest stays for five nights. Finally, Airbnb extends the opportunity for supplemental income to hundreds of thousands of households.

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eBay’s business is based: “Online Extra: Pierre Omidyar on ‘Connecting People,’ Bloomberg Businessweek, June 19, 2005, http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/195874-online-extra-pierre-omidyar-on-connecting-people?type=old_article. It has more than 800,000 listings: “About Us,” Airbnb, https://www.airbnb.com/about/about-us. With a valuation of $20 billion: Ingrid Lunden, “Airbnb Is Raising a Monster Round at a $20B Valuation,” TechCrunch, February 27, 2015, http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/27/airbnb-2/; “Hyatt Hotels Corporation (H),” Yahoo! Finance, http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=H; “#1006 Brian Chesky,” “The World’s Billionaires,” Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/profile/brian-chesky/. At the conclusion of Chesky’s creation: Steven T.

The Gig Economy: The Complete Guide to Getting Better Work, Taking More Time Off, and Financing the Life You Want by Diane Mulcahy

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, deliberate practice, digital nomad, diversification, diversified portfolio, fear of failure, financial independence, future of work, gig economy, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, mass immigration, mental accounting, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, passive income, Paul Graham, remote working, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social contagion, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the strength of weak ties, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, wage slave, WeWork, Y Combinator, Zipcar

The Gig Economy gives us options to rent or access cars (Zipcar, Uber), bikes (Hubway, Citi Bike), fully furnished apartments and homes (Airbnb, Onefinestay), clothes (Rent the Runway, Le Tote), jewelry (Haute Vault), and just about anything else. With the ability to access so much so easily, we need to come up with pretty compelling reasons to buy. There’s even a lifestyle emerging built on the foundation of the access economy. Prerna Gupta, a serial entrepreneur, wrote about her experience living what she calls “the Airbnb lifestyle.”1 She and her husband lived in several countries over the course of the year, staying in temporary Airbnb housing in every location and carrying all of their possessions in a few suitcases.

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To evaluate the possibility (and financial impact) of renting, start with online calculators that can give you a preliminary idea of the financial differences between renting and buying both a home and a car.11 Accessing housing instead of owning it might make more sense at various stages in your life. If renting doesn’t sound appealing, there is a new “Airbnb lifestyle” of accessing housing that might be more interesting. Returning ex-pats Elaine Kuok and David Roberts wrote about the year they spent living “home-free” in Airbnb apartments around New York City to explore a variety of neighborhoods.12 Their lifestyle offers them flexibility they couldn’t have if they were committed to a year-long lease or a multidecade mortgage. I contacted David on Twitter for an update, and, as of this writing, he and Elaine are enjoying a second year of their home-free lifestyle.

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CFP Board, “New Research Shows Most American Households Do Financial Planning, but the Extent of this Planning Varies Greatly,” September 18, 2013. www.cfp.net/news-events/latest-news/2013/09/18/new-research-shows-most-american-households-do-financial-planning-but-the-extent-of-this-planning-varies-greatly CHAPTER 9 1. Gupta, Prerna, “Airbnb Lifestyle: The Rise of the Hipster Nomad,” Tech Crunch, October 3, 2104. techcrunch.com/2014/10/03/airbnb-lifestyle-the-rise-of-the-hipster-nomad/ 2. Federal Reserve Bank of New York, “Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit,” February 2016. www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/interactives/householdcredit/data/pdf/HHDC_2015Q4.pdf 3. Wolff, Edward N., “Household Wealth Trends in the United States, 1962–2013: What Happened over the Great Recession?”

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise by Eric Ries

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Ben Horowitz, billion-dollar mistake, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, connected car, corporate governance, DevOps, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, hockey-stick growth, index card, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loss aversion, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, move fast and break things, obamacare, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, place-making, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Uber for X, universal basic income, web of trust, Y Combinator

You can’t stay the same.”2 Zadeh and Chesky realized that in order to come up with something completely new, they needed to give themselves the time and space to experiment—something they’d had when they launched the company, purely because of circumstance, but hadn’t been prioritizing as Airbnb grew. They created a small dedicated team within the company, led by Chesky, whose first mission was an afternoon at Fisherman’s Wharf, a scenic spot overlooking San Francisco Bay, Alcatraz, and the Golden Gate Bridge, where out-of-towners flock and souvenir shops abound. The result, which came several years later, was the launch of Airbnb Trips, a trip-planning service that marks the company’s first major expansion. In Chapter 8 you’ll learn more about what came between that afternoon and the product launch, and about Airbnb’s structure, which allows both for the maintenance of its core product and for experiments with new ideas, like Trips.

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These stories illustrate what that process has looked like in a variety of settings. AIRBNB’S SECOND FOUNDING Trips, which I first talked about in Chapter 1, marks Airbnb’s second founding. But before Trips was launched, it languished for a while because the company wasn’t focused on it even as it continued to grow its core business. The urgency Brian Chesky felt about ushering his company into its next phase had sent him back to the inspirations that had made it a success in the first place. Among them was the book that had motivated him to move to San Francisco and start Airbnb: Neal Gabler’s biography Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination.

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In 2006, you probably never would have even thought of renting a stranger’s apartment instead of checking in at the Hilton. As of this writing, more than 100 million people have,1 thanks to Airbnb. At its core, the company is already experimental. If it weren’t, it never would have uncovered a whole hidden market and grown in just ten years to a valuation of $30 billion. So what more could startup thinking possibly bring to a company that very recently found huge success by disrupting an entire market? A few years after Airbnb launched, the company’s original team started looking around for growth opportunities. They’d added new features to their existing product, including user verification and host insurance to increase confidence in the platform, and they’d formed a partnership with Concur Technologies to capture business travelers.

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Local Motors, an ExO, accomplishes the same thing for just $3 million—a 1,000x improvement, albeit not to the same production scale. Next, consider Airbnb, a company that leverages users’ extra bedrooms. Founded in 2008, Airbnb currently has 1,324 employees and operates 500,000 listings in 33,000 cities. However, Airbnb owns no physical assets and is worth almost $10 billion. That’s more than the value of Hyatt Hotels, which has 45,000 employees spread across 549 properties. And while Hyatt’s business is comparatively flat, Airbnb’s number of room-nights delivered is growing exponentially. At its current pace, Airbnb will be the biggest hotelier in the world by late 2015. Similarly, Uber, the Airbnb of cars—Uber converts private automobiles into taxis—has been valued at $17 billion.

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In the software world, Salesforce.com, which operates 100 percent in the cloud, can adapt to changing market conditions much faster than can competitor SAP, given that the latter requires customized installations onsite. We’ve already discussed Airbnb, which by leveraging its users’ existing assets, is now valued at more than the Hyatt Hotels chain worldwide. While Hyatt has 45,000 employees spread out across its 549 properties, Airbnb has just 1,324, all located in a single office. Similarly, Lending Club, Bitcoin, Clinkle and Kickstarter are forcing a radical rethinking of the banking and venture capital industries, respectively. (No retail outlets are involved in these new financial tech startups.)

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Today, it is almost impossible to find a single startup that doesn’t use AWS. We have even found a simple metric that helps to identify and distinguish emerging Exponential Organizations: a minimum 10x improvement in output over four to five years. The following shows some ExOs and their minimum 10x performance inprovement over their peers: Airbnb Hotels 90x more listings per employee GitHub Software 109x more repositories per employee Local Motors Automotive 1000x cheaper to produce new car model, 5-22x faster process for a car to produce (depending on vehicle) Quirky Consumer Goods 10x faster product development (29 days vs 300 days) Google Ventures Investments 2.5x more investments in early stage startups, 10x faster through design process Valve Gaming 30x more market cap per employee Tesla Automotive 30x more market cap per employee Tangerine (formerly ING Direct Canada) Banking 7x more customers per employee, 4x more deposits per customer Look again at Waze.

City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There by Ted Books

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, big-box store, carbon footprint, clean tech, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, crowdsourcing, demand response, food desert, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Induced demand, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, McMansion, megacity, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, Zipcar

Within the company’s first year and a half, it signed up 10,000 vehicles. Airbnb has similarly destigmatized strangers in private homes. Today, half of the company’s hosts are renting out a spare room, living alongside a stranger. The other half are turning their empty apartments over to unknown tenants. One of the older companies in the sharing space — at all of 4 years old — Airbnb has spawned its own share of mimics. “There’s such a proliferation of ‘the Airbnb of XYZ,’” Turner says, “and I think some of the models probably aren’t going anywhere, like the ‘Airbnb of toilets’ or the ‘Airbnb of dogs.’” But she predicts that services meeting the needs of both sides of a market — the givers and receivers in sharing — will succeed.

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And I think that kind of bleeds into your personal life.” This move back into city centers also coincided with the Great Recession. Those big houses and multiple cars, it turns out, were beyond many of our means. And it’s no coincidence, Turner says, that Airbnb — a company founded around shared housing — was born in 2008, just as the United States was entering a recession built on a housing crisis. For many Airbnb hosts, the spare rooms they rented through the service helped them keep their homes. City living, for all its allure, is expensive, but the sharing economy makes it possible for more people, whether they’re sharing a car because they can’t afford to own one, or a bike because they’ve got nowhere to store it.

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Sharing has its downsides, too. We’re used to the notion of sharing libraries, public parks, and train cars. But in many ways, American culture drifted away from sharing as a value when we spread out from city centers and into the suburbs. Molly Turner, director of public policy for the short-term rental lodging website Airbnb, pins the turning point to an iconic image: Richard Nixon, in Moscow, introducing Nikita Khrushchev to the modern marvel of the washing machine available for private consumption in every American home. Beginning with the era of that washing machine, Turner argues, we forgot how to share. In the so-called Kitchen Debate, Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev dispute their countries’ relative merits while touring the United States exhibit in Moscow in 1959.

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

How do you know you’re not renting your DC apartment to the Unabomber? He has twenty-six ratings too from prior rentals, and he left them all spotless. And there you have the Airbnb narrative. All that’s stopping Uber and Airbnb from realizing their dreams of a better, more efficient world are the villains in this laissez-faire fairy tale: the cab and hotel lobbies that profit from the old economy status quo (at the expense of the rest of us, as the Uber and Airbnb lobbies are quick to remind us) and their bureaucratic counterparts in government who are too lazy or rule-bound to care about doing what’s right. Let’s start with what we can all agree on: the Uber app is awesome.

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No, actually. Because the host seemed like a nice guy, and anyway, what goes around comes around: you don’t want to get known on Airbnb as Mr. Critical. (Ray did send a private communication to the host suggesting he wash his sheets more often.) So, yes, Airbnb is awesome: we’ve both used it a number of times since and mostly, but not always, successfully. But let’s not kid ourselves by equating the advent of smart phones to market perfection.11 In saying that Airbnb and Uber have their problems, we’re also not buying the taxi and hotel lobbies’ line that they’re merely protecting consumers from unreliable, unregulated, and sometimes outright dangerous conmen.

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Especially for the over-forty set who suffered under big taxi’s reign for most of their adult lives, there’s a head-shaking sense of amazement when you summon a cab with—literally—the touch of a button to pick you up from some godforsaken San Diego strip mall that happens to have the city’s best sushi (the taxi dispatcher said it would be “at least an hour”). It’s like having your own personal cab genie. (Just mention Uber to an iPhone-owning senior citizen, and you’ll really see what we mean.) Airbnb is an epic leap forward when compared to the epic leap of faith involved in renting a room via its predecessors, the classified ads or Craigslist. But let’s not confuse a set of groundbreaking market innovations with the end of market frictions. Yes, there are entire websites devoted to Airbnb horror stories—the trashed homes, the tenant-turned-squatter. There’s an equal number of angry rants directed at Uber. Neither of us rents our idle real estate assets when we’re out of town and not because we’re old-fashioned.

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

The Domestic Workers Alliance, for example, formulated a Good Work Code in hopes that policy makers would endorse their guidelines and that platform owners would follow them. Seattle imposed a tax on Uber and gave drivers the right to unionize, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City made attempts to curb the number of Uber cars, and the city of San Francisco tried to regulate Airbnb. A third pathway is to move production outside of the market altogether. Yochai Benkler labeled this “non-market peer production,” with the most successful example being Wikipedia. And, finally, for the compensated labor market, there is a fourth approach, which is platform cooperativism, a model of social organization based on the understanding that it is hard to substantially change what you don’t own.

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These new structures embrace the technology to creatively reshape it, embed their values, and then operate it in support of local economies. Seriously, why does a village in Denmark or a town like Marfa in rural West Texas have to generate profits for some fifty people in Silicon Valley if they can create their own version of Airbnb? Instead of trying to be the next Silicon Valley, generating profits for the few, these cities could mandate the use of a cooperative platform, which could maximize use value for the community. Platform co-ops already exist, from cooperatively owned online labor brokerages and marketplaces like Fairmondo, to video streaming sites that are owned by filmmakers and their fans.

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We have to design for tomorrow’s labor market. In the absence of rigorous democratic debates, online labor behemoths are producing their version of the future of work right in front of us. We have to move quickly. Together with cities like Berlin, Barcelona, Paris, and Rio de Janeiro, which have already pushed back against Uber and Airbnb, we ought to refine the discourse around “smart cities” and machine ownership. We need incubators, small experiments, step-by-step walkthroughs, best practices, and legal templates that online co-ops can use. Developers will script a WordPress for platform co-ops, a free-software labor platform that local developers can customize.

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

CHAPTER 5 NEW BUSINESS MODELS: MAKING IT RAIN ON THE BLOCKCHAIN Founded a month before the market crashed in 2008, Airbnb has become a $25 billion platform, now the world’s largest supplier of rooms as measured by market value and rooms occupied. But the providers of rooms receive only part of the value they create. International payments go through Western Union, which takes $10 of every transaction and big foreign exchange off the top. Settlements take a long time. Airbnb stores and monetizes all the data. Both renters and customers alike have concerns about privacy. We brainstormed with blockchain expert Dino Mark Angaritis to design an Airbnb competitor on the blockchain.

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When you want to rent, the bAirbnb software scans and filters the blockchain for all the listings that meet your criteria (e.g., ten miles from the Eiffel Tower, two bedrooms, four-plus star ratings only). Your user experience is identical to that in Airbnb, except that you communicate peer to peer on the network, through encrypted and cryptographically signed messages not stored in Airbnb’s database.2 You and the room owner are the only two people who can read these messages. You can swap phone numbers, an exchange that Airbnb blocks to preserve future revenues. On bAirbnb you and the owner could communicate off-chain and complete the transaction entirely off-chain, but you are better off completing the transaction on-chain for a few reasons.

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A world where billions of excluded people can now participate in the global economy and share in its largesse. Here’s a preview. Creating a True Peer-to-Peer Sharing Economy Pundits often refer to Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit, and others as platforms for the “sharing economy.” It’s a nice notion—that peers create and share in value. But these businesses have little to do with sharing. In fact, they are successful precisely because they do not share—they aggregate. It is an aggregating economy. Uber is a $65 billion corporation that aggregates driving services. Airbnb, the $25 billion Silicon Valley darling, aggregates vacant rooms. Others aggregate equipment and handymen through their centralized, proprietary platforms and then resell them.

Travel While You Work: The Ultimate Guide to Running a Business From Anywhere by Mish Slade

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, business process, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, content marketing, crowdsourcing, digital nomad, Firefox, Google Chrome, Google Hangouts, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, job automation, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Lyft, Multics, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Salesforce, side project, Skype, speech recognition, turn-by-turn navigation, uber lyft, WeWork

I do travel for the sake of it and make sure I have trips that I take just for the hell of it and work from wherever I am. I have a base near the circus school in Glasgow, but make sure that I spend time working with other schools around the world – recently in NYC and Brazil. Most of my travel is solo and could be in a hotel, Airbnb (www.worktravel.co/airbnb) or staying with a network of friends. I would normally spend around 50% of my time outside the UK Did you do the same work before you became a digital nomad? I did with regards to telecommunications, but I slowly moved from being office-based in London to being remotely based in Scotland, to now being based wherever I like.

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There's a Mac App called World Clock (www.worktravel.co/worldclock), which is useful for checking the times back home (or around the world) for meetings etc. Shameless plug: my app World Time Widget (www.worktravel.co/timewidget) does the same thing on iPhone. Having a local SIM makes life so much easier. [See Chapter 1: Settle In Fast for more information about buying a local SIM.] Airbnb (www.worktravel.co/airbnb) can be good for finding accommodation. Blake Boles: Adventure company owner Can you provide a bit of information about what you do and how you got into it? My company, Unschool Adventures (www.unschooladventures.com), leads international trips and U.S.-based educational programs for self-directed young adults.

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I don't think I could stay in Estonia too long – it's too cold both weather-wise and interpersonally for me. But it's actually a digital destination – it has some of the fastest internet in the world, and internet-friendly business laws. I think every destination is worthy in its own right. How do you find accommodation? Booking.com (www.worktravel.co/booking), Airbnb (www.worktravel.co/airbnb), VRBO (www.worktravel.co/vrbo), FlipKey (www.worktravel.co/flipkey) and 9flats (www.worktravel.co/9flats) are all ones we've used. Sometimes we will use a rental company specific to the location, like Sakura House in Japan (www.worktravel.co/sakura). What we're looking for is the most inexpensive place we can get downtown.

5 Day Weekend: Freedom to Make Your Life and Work Rich With Purpose by Nik Halik, Garrett B. Gunderson

Airbnb, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, business process, clean water, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Ethereum, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, gamification, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, initial coin offering, Isaac Newton, Kaizen: continuous improvement, litecoin, low interest rates, Lyft, market fundamentalism, microcredit, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Skype, solopreneur, subscription business, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, traveling salesman, uber lyft

Here are just a few examples of ways you can use the sharing economy to boost your income: Airbnb Airbnb, VRBO, and other companies allow you to rent a room or your whole home to travelers, thus earning supplemental income with existing assets. In just over seven years, Airbnb has become a multibillion dollar company with more than two million listings across 190-plus countries. There are many things to consider before starting an Airbnb service, including municipal laws (many cities don’t allow it); competing rates in your area; and the costs of hosting, such as cleaning, higher utility bills, taxes, and Airbnb’s payment processing fee (6 to 12 percent).

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There are many things to consider before starting an Airbnb service, including municipal laws (many cities don’t allow it); competing rates in your area; and the costs of hosting, such as cleaning, higher utility bills, taxes, and Airbnb’s payment processing fee (6 to 12 percent). Your listing will be displayed on Airbnb’s website, and you can also cross-promote it using any free social media platforms or your own website. Airbnb arbitrage is the process of renting out a property that you do not own but rent for yourself. An arbitrage opportunity exists where you generate more money renting out the property on Airbnb than it costs you to rent from the landlord, providing you free rental status. If you want to rent on Airbnb, but have a landlord, approach him or her and get permission to rent out the space. Offer your landlord something on the income side, perhaps a flat rate or a percentage of all Airbnb earnings on the property.

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Offer your landlord something on the income side, perhaps a flat rate or a percentage of all Airbnb earnings on the property. One of Garrett’s clients, Demi, was a single mom and yoga instructor. She heard about Airbnb and started renting out two bedrooms in her personal residence. She generated enough cash flow from those bedrooms that she was able to buy another home, move out, and then rent out the whole house. She now earns between $1,000 and $1,800 a month from her Airbnb property. Uber/Lyft You can earn money on your schedule. You give rides when you want and earn as much as you want, with the potential to make great money. Thirty hours of driving per week can generate up to $1,000 on average.

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit by Marina Krakovsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Al Roth, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, buy low sell high, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, experimental economics, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kenneth Arrow, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Network effects, patent troll, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, power law, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, search costs, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social graph, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Y Combinator

With its feedback system and fraud department, eBay serves as a pretty powerful watchdog in protecting buyers from unscrupulous and incompetent sellers—and in eliciting the very best behavior from good sellers such as Ann Whitley Wood.28 Craigslist provides a lot of value as a Bridge, but it does very little in the way of policing the trading activity it facilitates, a shortcoming that’s opened up entrepreneurial opportunities for the hundreds of specialized start-ups that do a better job of ensuring honest buyer and seller behavior in a particular niche (on top of better user interfaces with more specialized search tools). Perhaps the best-known of these “spawn of Craigslist”29 is Airbnb: you can rent (or rent out) a room through Craigslist, but how comfortable would you be dealing with a stranger directly?30 In his book Game-Changer, David McAdams contrasts Airbnb, an effective Enforcer, with a rival company, HomeAway (which runs the site VRBO.com, Vacation Rental By Owner). Unlike Airbnb, HomeAway allows property owners to get away with deceptive descriptions of their rentals31—in part because, unlike Airbnb, it allows individual owners to opt out of reviews.32 Now, you might be saying that VRBO is not trying to be an Enforcer.

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The number rises to $10,000 for Gold, $25,000 for Platinum, and an astounding $150,000 per month for Titanium. 17.You must also get consistently high feedback scores from your buyers: fall anywhere below 98 percent positive feedback, and you lose your PowerSeller status. 18.Interview with Ann Whitley Wood, September 24, 2013. 19.Along the same lines, a recent article pointed out that large players also dominate the Prosper Marketplace (where two-thirds of the lenders are hedge funds and other large institutions) and that nearly half of the hosts on Airbnb had at least three listings on the site, suggesting these hosts weren’t just renting out a spare bedroom. See William Alden, “The Business Tycoons of Airbnb,” New York Times Magazine, November 25, 2014. 20.Paul Resnick, Richard Zeckhauser, John Swanson, and Kate Lockwood, “The Value of Reputation on eBay: A Controlled Experiment,” Experimental Economics 9, no. 2 (2006): 79–101. 21.Nira Yacouel and Aliza Fleischer, “The Role of Cybermediaries in Reputation Building and Price Premiums in the Online Hotel Market,” Journal of Travel Research 51, no. 2 (2012): 219–26. 22.Michael Anderson and Jeremy Magruder, “Learning from the Crowd: Regression Discontinuity Estimates of the Effects of an Online Review Database,” The Economic Journal 122, no. 563 (September 2012): 957–89. 23.Michael Luca, “Reviews, Reputation, and Revenue: The Case of Yelp.com,” Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 12–016. 24.Carl Shapiro, “Premiums for High Quality Products as Returns to Reputation,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics (November 1983): 659–79. 25.Investing in a storefront is one of several ways sellers can elicit trust among buyers.

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Quality: Exclusion by Platforms with Network Effects,” Harvard Business School Working Paper, 11–125. 11.Julia Angwin, “Putting Your Best Faces Forward,” Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2009. 12.Note the difference between pseudonymity and anonymity; by giving users the opportunity to establish a track record under a given pseudonym, a system that allows pseudonyms combines the best features of anonymity with the best features of real names. For a discussion of some of the economics of pseudonyms, see Eric J. Friedman and Paul Resnick, “The Social Cost of Cheap Pseudonyms,” Journal of Economics and Management Strategy 10, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 173–99. 13.Airbnb does something similar. See Itay Fainmesser, “Exclusive Intermediation,” SSRN Working Paper, March 17, 2014. 14.Julie Weed, “For Uber, Airbnb and Other Companies, Customer Ratings Go Both Ways,” New York Times, December 1, 2014. 15.Gary Bolton, Ben Greiner, and Axel Ockenfels, “Engineering Trust: Reciprocity in the Production of Reputation Information,” Management Science 59, no. 2: 265–85. 16.For example, compare TripAdvisor (which enables anyone to post a review) with Expedia (where only customers can post a review): although someone can post a fake review on either site, it is much more costly to do so on Expedia.

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

In sum, LinkedIn is the Bruce Jenner of this analysis: a great athlete who did a lot of things well . . . after all, Bruce won an Olympic gold medal for the decathlon, and was on the box of the Wheaties I ate in elementary school (sorry, Caitlyn, you’ll always be Bruce to me). But Jenner was never a gold medalist in any of those individual sports. He was, to use an old phrase, “A Jack (now Jill) of all trades, but master of none.” Airbnb It would be tempting to say Airbnb is the Uber for hotels, and move to the next candidate. However, there are stark differences that illuminate Airbnb’s competitive strength, relative to Uber, and how the T Algorithm can be used to influence strategy and capital allocation. While they both are global and enjoy access to cheap capital, their product has substantially different variance.

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Both have achieved this. However, the liquidity Airbnb has garnered is more impressive and harder to replicate. Uber needs a mess of drivers and people looking for rides to build a business in a city. Uber’s cash hoard gives them the ability to ramp up a city, as can other ride-hailing firms with sufficient capital. However, Airbnb needed to achieve a critical mass of supply in one city and demand (awareness) in many others—people visit Amsterdam from all over the world. There is competition for Uber in every major city, as a firm only needs to establish liquidity in one market. Airbnb needed, and reached, scale on a continental and then global level.

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Airbnb needed, and reached, scale on a continental and then global level. Airbnb’s and Uber’s valuations (at time of this writing) are $25 billion and $70 billion, respectively. However, I believe Airbnb will surpass Uber’s value by the end of 2018, and Uber will register the mother of all write-downs as word spreads regarding their lack of product differentiation and regional competitors take an awful income statement ($3 billion in losses on $5 billion in revenues in 2016) and make it worse. Airbnb is the most likely “sharing” unicorn to become the Fifth Horseman. Their weakest point is their lack of vertical integration (they don’t own any apartments), meaning Airbnb doesn’t have the same degree of control over the customer experience as the Four.

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

And how many strangers want to be down the hall? Answer: a lot! By 2016, there were sixty-eight thousand commercial hotel rooms in Paris and more than eighty thousand Airbnb listings. Today, if you go to the Airbnb website you can choose to stay in one of hundreds of castles, dozens of yurts, caves, tepees with TVs in them, water towers, motor homes, private islands, glass houses, lighthouses, igloos with Wi-Fi, and tree houses—hundreds of tree houses—which are the most profitable listings on the Airbnb site per square foot. “The tree house in Lincoln, Vermont, is more valuable than the main house,” said Chesky. “We have tree houses in Vermont that have had six-month waiting lists.

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You can sleep in the homes that Jim Morrison of the Doors once owned or take your pick of Frank Lloyd Wright houses or even squeeze into a one-square-meter house in Berlin that goes for thirteen dollars a night. In July 2014, when the World Cup soccer tournament was held in Brazil, it was only thanks to Airbnb that all the visitors had a place to stay, because Brazil had not built enough hotel rooms to house all those who wanted to come and watch the games. Said Chesky: “Roughly a hundred twenty thousand people—one in five international visitors—stayed in Brazil in Airbnb-rented rooms for the World Cup; they came from over a hundred fifty different countries. Airbnb hosts in Brazil earned roughly thirty-eight million dollars from reservations during the World Cup. The average host in Rio earned roughly four thousand dollars during the monthlong tournament—about four times the average monthly salary in Rio.

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And, finally, you needed to bring them “all together into a really well-designed interface—we were all design students—where you could do all of this with one touch,” said Chesky. Once those pieces were in place and scaled a few years after 2007, Airbnb just took off, not only because all that complexity—someone in Minnesota renting a yurt from someone in Mongolia—could be reduced to one touch, but also because it could be done in a way that parties totally trusted. In fact, the most interesting thing Chesky and his fellow Airbnb makers made was one of the most complex things to make at scale: trust. Airbnb’s founders understood that the world was becoming interdependent—meaning the technology was there to connect any renter to any tourist or traveling businessperson anywhere on the planet.

A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger

Airbnb, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, food desert, Google X / Alphabet X, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

With the 2008 Democratic presidential convention in Denver, they found the perfect place to launch—lots of people coming into town, not enough hotels. But how would those visitors, and the people with space to rent, learn about Airbnb? Gebbia and Chesky couldn’t afford ads; so they had to make news. The founders knew that the news channels would be doing stories about how crowded and overbooked Denver was. They pitched Airbnb as a “solution story” to news producers and ended up on CNN. The bookings came in and the Denver launch was a success. But Gebbia says they kept questioning, kept iterating and refining the model for another year before they felt they had it right.

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(the question that helped “invent the Internet”) Why should you be stuck without a bed if I’ve got an extra air mattress? (Airbnb’s formative question) Why can’t we find a place for out-of-towners to crash for a night or two? What if we provide more than just a mattress to sleep on? What if we could create this same experience in every major city? What if we take this idea on the road, and test it in another city? How would those visitors, and the people with space to rent, learn about Airbnb? What if you could pay online? Why are we limiting this to the US? What if we go global? Why should we, as a society, continue to buy things we really don’t need to own?

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That’s because with each new advance, Thrun said, one must pause to ask, Now that we know what we now know, what’s possible now? In some sense, innovation means trying to find and formulate new questions that can, over time, be answered. Those questions, once identified, often become the basis for starting a new venture. Indeed, the rise of a number of today’s top tech firms—Foursquare, Airbnb, Pandora Internet Radio—can be traced to a Why doesn’t somebody or What if we were to question, in some cases inspired by the founder’s personal experience. One such example, which has become a modern classic business story, is the origin of the Netflix video-rental service. The man who would go on to start the company, Reed Hastings, was reacting to one20 of those frustrating everyday experiences we’ve all had.

Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms by David S. Evans, Richard Schmalensee

Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Andy Rubin, big-box store, business process, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disruptive innovation, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Lyft, M-Pesa, market friction, market microstructure, Max Levchin, mobile money, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy

As one runner put it in 2014, “I’m ready to roll; I’m in shape; I just don’t know where I’m going to sleep.”1 In 2016, however, thousands of people in the Boston area will make rooms available to runners. They’ll list those rooms and their prices on Airbnb, and runners can search for a place that fits their needs and their budgets. As of November 30, 2015, more than a thousand places were already listed for the 2016 marathon. With Airbnb, runners will have more choices for more convenient places to stay than ever before, and many people in Boston will have some extra income. Airbnb is one of the leaders in what’s known as the “sharing economy.” That’s one of the most popular business buzzwords of 2015. A Google search of that phrase yields more than 30 million hits.

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What’s novel and what isn’t here though? Airbnb and other companies that are part of the “sharing economy” are multisided platforms. What they have in common is that they are matching up people who have spare capacity—an extra room, a car, or a lawnmower, for example—with people who would benefit from that spare capacity. That’s not a recent invention. OpenTable started helping match up restaurants with spare capacity—empty tables—with people looking to go out for dinner in 1999. Before then, people advertised their spare rooms in the classified sections of physical newspapers before there was Airbnb and before there was Craigslist.

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Slower and Faster Than You Think Glossary Notes Index Acknowledgments About the Authors Introduction MANY OF THE BIGGEST COMPANIES IN THE WORLD, INCLUDing Alibaba, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, News Corp., Rakuten, Tencent, and Visa, are matchmakers. So are many of the most exciting and valuable start-ups, such as Airbnb, BlaBlaCar, Didi Kuaidi, Flipkart, Lending Club, Pinterest, Spotify, and Uber. What these businesses have in common is that they all connect members of one group, like people looking for a ride, with another group, like drivers looking for passengers. Matchmakers are very different from the businesses that have been the staple of college economics classrooms and MBA lectures for decades.

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

Rich Jervis, “Austin Voters Reject Uber, Lyft Plan for Self-Regulation,” USA Today, May 8, 2016. 48. Sam Levin, “Elizabeth Warren Takes on Airbnb, Urging Scrutiny of Large-Scale Renters,” Guardian, July 13, 2016. 49. Matt Payton, “Berlin Bans Airbnb from Renting Apartments to Tourists in Move to Protect Affordable Housing,” Independent, May 1, 2016. Also Natasha Lomas, “Airbnb Faces Fresh Crackdown in Barcelona as City Council Asks Residents to Report Illegal Rentals,” Techcrunch, September 19, 2016. 50. Caroline Davies, “Iceland Plans Airbnb Restrictions amid Tourism Explosion,” Guardian, May 30, 2016. 51. Rob Davies, “UberEATS Drivers Vow to Take Pay Protest to London Restaurants,” Guardian, August 26, 2016. 52.

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Shannon Liss-Riordan’s political ally, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, has taken on Airbnb, claiming that the $31 billion–valued home-sharing start-up is forcing up rents in large cities. In October 2016 Warren established a coalition of lawmakers from more than a dozen cities, urging the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to “help cities protect consumers” and to study how the short-term rental market is affecting the overall rental market.48 In November 2016 regulators in New York City and San Francisco successfully got Airbnb to establish a “one host, one home” rule for new hosts as a defense against rising rents.

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In October 2016 Warren established a coalition of lawmakers from more than a dozen cities, urging the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to “help cities protect consumers” and to study how the short-term rental market is affecting the overall rental market.48 In November 2016 regulators in New York City and San Francisco successfully got Airbnb to establish a “one host, one home” rule for new hosts as a defense against rising rents. In an attempt to protect affordable housing, both Berlin and Barcelona have clamped down on Airbnb, with Berlin banning the renting of apartments to tourists and Barcelona aggressively cracking down on illegal rentals.49 Even Iceland, in order to control the prices of the local market, has passed a law restricting the number of days that properties can be rented out on Airbnb.50 The precariat itself is also taking to the streets in order to change the system. In August 2016, drivers of UberEATS, Uber’s food-delivery service, picketed London restaurants to demand that Uber pay them the London living hourly wage of a guaranteed £9.40 ($12.10).51 And in November 2016 there was a national protest in the United States by Uber drivers demanding a $15 minimum wage.52 In May 2016, meanwhile, the thirty-five thousand Uber drivers in New York agreed to form an organization called the Independent Drivers Guild, which would be affiliated with more traditional industrial labor unions.53 Indeed, one of the first actions of this guild was an April 2017 petition, signed by eleven thousand drivers, requiring Uber to include a tipping option in its app.54 And so I recently became able to electronically tip good Uber drivers like that polite young man from Pakistan who transported me to Shannon Liss-Riordan’s office in downtown Boston.

Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster by Alistair Croll, Benjamin Yoskovitz

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, bounce rate, business intelligence, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, constrained optimization, data science, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, frictionless market, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, inventory management, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, Network effects, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, performance metric, place-making, platform as a service, power law, price elasticity of demand, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social software, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, web application, Y Combinator

We want you to rely less on your reality distortion field, and rely more on Lean Analytics. Airbnb Photography—Growth Within Growth Airbnb is an incredible success story. In just a few years, the company has become a powerhouse in the travel industry, providing travelers with an alternative to hotels, and providing individuals who have rooms, apartments, or homes to rent with a new source of income. In 2012, travelers booked over 5 million nights with Airbnb’s service. But it started small, and its founders—adherents to the Lean Startup mindset—took a very methodical approach to their success. At SXSW 2012, Joe Zadeh, Product Lead at Airbnb, shared part of the company’s amazing story.

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A concierge approach in which you run things behind the scenes for the first few customers lets you check whether the need is real; it also helps you understand which things people really use and refine your process before writing a line of code or hiring a single employee. Initial tests of Airbnb’s MVP showed that professionally photographed listings got two to three times more bookings than the market average. This validated the founders’ first hypothesis. And it turned out that hosts were wildly enthusiastic about receiving an offer from Airbnb to take those photographs for them. In mid-to-late 2011, Airbnb had 20 photographers in the field taking pictures for hosts—roughly the same time period where we see the proverbial “hockey stick” of growth in terms of nights booked, shown in Figure 1-1.

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It’s amazing what you can do with 20 photographers and people’s apartments Airbnb experimented further. It watermarked photos to add authenticity. It got customer service to offer professional photography as a service when renters or potential renters called in. It increased the requirements on photo quality. Each step of the way, the company measured the results and adjusted as necessary. The key metric Airbnb tracked was shoots per month, because it had already proven with its Concierge MVP that more professional photographs meant more bookings. By February 2012, Airbnb was doing nearly 5,000 shoots per month and continuing to accelerate the growth of the professional photography program.

Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, data science, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, driverless car, Ford Model T, future of work, gig economy, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, mittelstand, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, platform as a service, quantitative easing, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, the built environment, total factor productivity, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unconventional monetary instruments, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, Zipcar

Whereas firms once had to spend large amounts to invest in the computing equipment and expertise needed for their businesses, today’s start-ups have flourished because they can simply rent hardware and software from the cloud. As a result, Airbnb, Slack, Uber, and many other start-ups use AWS.79 Uber further relies on Google for mapping, Twilio for texting, SendGrid for emailing, and Braintree for payments: it is a lean platform built on other platforms. These companies have also offloaded costs from their balance sheets and shifted them to their workers: things like investment costs (accommodations for Airbnb, vehicles for Uber and Lyft), maintenance costs, insurance costs, and depreciation costs. Firms such as Instacart (which delivers groceries) have also outsourced delivery costs to food suppliers (e.g.

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This chapter argues that the new business model that eventually emerged is a powerful new type of firm: the platform.10 Often arising out of internal needs to handle data, platforms became an efficient way to monopolise, extract, analyse, and use the increasingly large amounts of data that were being recorded. Now this model has come to expand across the economy, as numerous companies incorporate platforms: powerful technology companies (Google, Facebook, and Amazon), dynamic start-ups (Uber, Airbnb), industrial leaders (GE, Siemens), and agricultural powerhouses (John Deere, Monsanto), to name just a few. What are platforms?11 At the most general level, platforms are digital infrastructures that enable two or more groups to interact.12 They therefore position themselves as intermediaries that bring together different users: customers, advertisers, service providers, producers, suppliers, and even physical objects.13 More often than not, these platforms also come with a series of tools that enable their users to build their own products, services, and marketplaces.14 Microsoft’s Windows operating system enables software developers to create applications for it and sell them to consumers; Apple’s App Store and its associated ecosystem (XCode and the iOS SDK) enable developers to build and sell new apps to users; Google’s search engine provides a platform for advertisers and content providers to target people searching for information; and Uber’s taxi app enables drivers and passengers to exchange rides for cash.

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GE, Siemens), which build the hardware and software necessary to transform traditional manufacturing into internet-connected processes that lower the costs of production and transform goods into services. The fourth type is that of product platforms (e.g. Rolls Royce, Spotify), which generate revenue by using other platforms to transform a traditional good into a service and by collecting rent or subscription fees on them. Finally, the fifth type is that of lean platforms (e.g. Uber, Airbnb), which attempt to reduce their ownership of assets to a minimum and to profit by reducing costs as much as possible. These analytical divisions can, and often do, run together within any one firm. Amazon, for example, is often seen as an e-commerce company, yet it rapidly broadened out into a logistics company.

Beginning Backbone.js by James Sugrue

Airbnb, business logic, continuous integration, don't repeat yourself, Firefox, Google Chrome, loose coupling, MVC pattern, node package manager, single page application, web application, Y Combinator

You’ll find many more case studies listed at the official Backbone web site. 11 Chapter 1 ■ An Introduction to Backbone.js Airbnb Airbnb is one of Y Combinator’s greatest success stories, providing a collaborative sharing service for people to rent living space across 192 countries. Airbnb has used Backbone in a number of its products, from its mobile web application to web site features including wish lists and matching and in its own internal applications. An example of how Backbone is used in the mobile website can be seen in Figure 1-8. Figure 1-8. Backbone features extensively in Airbnb’s technology stack While initially Airbnb used Rails in the back end with Backbone on the client side, it has evolved the mobile application to now use Node.js on the server, which also includes Backbone.

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Backbone features extensively in Airbnb’s technology stack While initially Airbnb used Rails in the back end with Backbone on the client side, it has evolved the mobile application to now use Node.js on the server, which also includes Backbone. This results in the ability to share application logic that is relevant on both sides, without the need to rewrite in different languages. You can find out more about Airbnb’s use of Backbone at its developer blog at http://nerds.airbnb.com/weve-launched-our-first-nodejs-app-to-product/. SoundCloud SoundCloud is a German-based music distribution platform with the ability to upload or listen to user-created content. The team initially used Backbone as the underpinning of its mobile web application but has since utilized it for the front end of its desktop web site too, an example of which can be seen in Figure 1-9. 12 Chapter 1 ■ An Introduction to Backbone.js Figure 1-9.

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While this can help minimize the page load time, it can lead to delays when the user does actually request the information. If your application is built with server-side technologies, such as Grails, JSP, or .NET, it is possible that you could populate some of the initial models and collections with JSON data. This technique has become more popular, especially with Airbnb making its Rendr library available to all as an open source project on GitHub (https://github.com/airbnb/rendr). This project allows Backbone code to be rendered both on the client and on the server. More importantly, it makes it easy to pass the Backbone model content to your page when it is being rendered on the browser, allowing the server to perform the bulk of the network operations.

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Computer Numeric Control, connected car, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, financial exclusion, financial innovation, gamification, global supply chain, IKEA effect, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, megacity, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, reshoring, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, value engineering, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture , X Prize, yield management, Zipcar

Peer-to-peer sharing platforms It is now increasingly easy for individuals to share their assets, products and skills without the need for (or interference of) intermediaries. In Germany, home-owners can generate their own solar energy and sell any excess into the grid. Perhaps more dramatically, since its inception in 2008, Airbnb (a community marketplace for short-let rentals) has established a presence in 190 countries with over 600,000 listings. (Over half of Airbnb hosts rely on this market to pay their rent or mortgage.) Already the world’s fifth largest “hotel” chain (by number of beds), Airbnb is on its way to becoming the world’s largest short-stay accommodation business, without owning a single building. Similarly, Uber, a taxi service that connects users with drivers at the tap of a smartphone, has recently launched an extension called uberPOP in several European capitals. uberPOP is a peer-to-peer service that enables non-professional drivers to register their cars to transport individuals, thus earning extra income in their free time.

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The unbanked and underbanked spend 10% of their $1 trillion disposable income on fees, the same amount as they spend on food. Schulman asks:13 “Imagine if you could turn loose almost $100 billion back into the economy?” Engage restless entrepreneurs, hackers and tinkerers Airbnb, an online short-let rental company, was launched in 2008 by Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, two young people with no experience of the hotel industry. By 2014, Airbnb had become the fifth largest hotel chain in the world, filling more room nights than all the Hilton hotels put together (and Hilton began in 1919). Similarly, in 2006 Frédéric Mazzella and Nicolas Brusson founded BlaBlaCar which, by 2014, had emerged as Europe’s largest car-sharing firm.

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As a result, R&D and marketing leaders at firms like Auchan are working with do-it-yourself (DIY) and crowdsourcing pioneers, such as TechShop and Quirky, to bolster and harness the collective ingenuity and skills of consumer communities. Additionally, big brands such as IKEA are linking up with start-ups such as Airbnb to develop a “sharing economy” in which consumers share goods and services. The chapter also outlines how sales and marketing managers can build greater brand affinity and deepen their engagement with customers by co-creating greater value for all. Make innovative friends. Firms such as GE and Ford are ensuring that the R&D function is lean, flexible and highly networked.

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future by Orly Lobel

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital map, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Grace Hopper, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, iterative process, job automation, Lao Tzu, large language model, lockdown, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, microaggression, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, occupational segregation, old-boy network, OpenAI, openstreetmap, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, randomized controlled trial, remote working, risk tolerance, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, work culture , you are the product

For example, Harvard Business School researchers designed an experimental field study, creating fake Airbnb profiles of guests looking to book vacation homes; some were white and some Black. Disturbingly, the researchers found that requests from guests with distinctively Black names were 16 percent less likely to be accepted than identical guests with typically white names. These differences persisted whether the host was male or female, white or minority. Another study compared the ratings of vacation rentals cross-listed on Airbnb and its competitor HomeAway. Airbnb visibly shows hosts’ identity; HomeAway does not. And sure enough, the researchers found users’ ratings on Airbnb to be racially biased: Black hosts often receive lower rating scores and, in turn, earn less for comparable accommodations.

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Services often contain photos and names of users, such that race and gender are often visible. Airbnb could, like traditional hotel chains, require hosts to accept guests without revealing the guests’ identities. Like HomeAway, it could hide hosts’ identities until later in the exchange. I talked with Airbnb about its solutions, and it prides itself on responding quickly—far more quickly than any administrative agency could when a complaint of discrimination is filed—to any concerns raised by hosts or guests. Airbnb describes the company as having “a zero-tolerance policy for discrimination on the platform.”

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Airbnb describes the company as having “a zero-tolerance policy for discrimination on the platform.” For example, when a gay couple arrived at a Texas bed-and-breakfast and were refused accommodation, Airbnb removed the host from its listings, refunded the money paid for the booking, and paid for a night at the hotel that the couple ultimately stayed in. The company condemned the incident: “Airbnb has clear guidelines that a host or a guest may not promote hate or bigotry.” After the Harvard experiment became public, the hashtag #AirBnBWhileBlack went viral on Twitter. Airbnb responded to the findings and outcry by creating stronger anti-discrimination policies, requiring users to actively sign a commitment to anti-discrimination, and changing the way profile photos are displayed.

Side Hustle: From Idea to Income in 27 Days by Chris Guillebeau

Airbnb, buy low sell high, content marketing, inventory management, Lyft, passive income, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, subscription business, TaskRabbit, the scientific method, Uber for X, uber lyft

• SIDE HUSTLE STARTER KITS: Brief guides to several popular hustles discussed in the book • HOW TO VALIDATE AN IDEA WITH $10 AND A FACEBOOK ACCOUNT: How to use Facebook ads to get immediate feedback • WRITE A LETTER TO YOUR IDEAL CUSTOMER: A template for learning more about your target market • BUY A RENTAL PROPERTY WITH A $1,575 DOWN PAYMENT: A quick primer from my go-to expert on real estate hustling • RESOURCES AND FREE STUFF: Various resources and referrals APPENDIX 1 Side Hustle Starter Kits PUT YOUR COUCH OR SPARE BEDROOM ON AIRBNB!*1 With more than one million listings, Airbnb has changed the way people travel all over the world. At the same time, it’s also opened up a gold mine of opportunities for side hustlers. If you have any kind of space where a stranger can sleep, you may be able to publish—and make money from—it on the site. Creative students have rented out their dorm rooms over semester break.

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Tenants have leased additional apartments and then sublet them every single night, pocketing the difference between what they earn in nightly fees and what they pay in monthly rent. Homeowners have built tiny cottages in their backyards to house guests. In short, you don’t need to be a real estate baron to profit from Airbnb. Here’s all you need to know to get started: BUSINESS MODEL: Rent your home (or part of your home) to a visitor. The process is safe because both parties’ identities are verified, and a mutual rating system encourages responsible behavior. WHY: A huge market of people are actively searching Airbnb listings every day, and the business is very easy to learn. AVERAGE STARTUP COST: Variable. EASE OF STARTUP: Low. LONG-TERM POTENTIAL: Medium. SKILLS REQUIRED: Customer service (quick response time matters).

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Her fiancé was from the United States, and after traveling together for a couple years, they decided to marry and settle down in Austin. Andrea enjoyed her work as a nutritionist, but her real love was animals, especially dogs. One day while she and her fiancé were staying in a rental apartment on a trip to Canada, she had an idea: “What if there was something like Airbnb, but for dogs? You know, so their owners could travel and leave the dogs somewhere better than a kennel?” A year later, she stumbled on Rover.com—a service that did exactly what she’d described, essentially providing a platform where animal-loving hosts could rent their spare doggie bed out to canine guests.

Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It by Scott Kupor

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Blue Bottle Coffee, carried interest, cloud computing, compensation consultant, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, family office, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, index fund, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Lean Startup, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Paul Graham, pets.com, power law, price stability, prudent man rule, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, VA Linux, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

But what if the service expanded to other constituents over time? Maybe then the existing hotel market would be a good proxy for total market size. Okay, but what if the ease of booking reservations and the lower price points that Airbnb offered meant that people who never before traveled decided that they would now do so—what if in fact the market for travelers needing accommodations would expand as a result of the introduction of Airbnb? As it turns out, the success of Airbnb to date seems to suggest that the market size has indeed expanded, owing to the existence of a new form of travel accommodations that never previously existed. Fortunes can be won or lost based on a VC’s ability to understand market size and think creatively about the role of technology in developing new markets.

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Perhaps the founder had a unique experience that exposed her to the market problem in a way that provided unique insights into the solution for the problem. The founders of Airbnb fit this bill. They were struggling to make ends meet living in San Francisco and noticed that all the hotels were sold out locally whenever there was a major convention in town. What if, they thought, we could rent out a sleeping spot in our apartment to conference attendees to help them save money on accommodations and help us meet our rent obligations? And thus was born Airbnb. Perhaps the founder has simply dedicated his life to the particular problem at hand. Orion Hindawi and his father, David, founded a company called BigFix in the late 1990s.

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Those are all good questions, but most VCs would probably be fine assuming that a startup going after the database market, if successful, has a big enough market to build a big company and thus become an investment home run. The more challenging aspects of market size estimation come from startups going after markets that do not exist currently or that are smaller markets today because they are constrained by the current state of technology. Take Airbnb. When Airbnb first raised money, the use case was predominantly people sleeping on other people’s couches. One could have asked the question of how many starving college students there were who would do such a thing, and have reasonably concluded—similar to the size of the mac and cheese and ramen markets, other products purchased by starving college students—that the market simply wasn’t that big.

Nothing But Net by Mark Mahaney

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Burning Man, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial engineering, gamification, gig economy, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), knowledge economy, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, medical malpractice, meme stock, Network effects, PageRank, pets.com, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, subscription business, super pumped, the rule of 72, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

Many other net stocks and companies have added to the sector’s allure and investor attention—including Booking (nee Priceline), Chewy, eBay, Etsy, Expedia, Grubhub, Lyft, Pinterest, Shopify, Snap, The Trade Desk, Twitter, Uber, Wix, and Zillow. 2020 was one of the strongest IPO years on record in terms of funds raised, and several of the highest-profile, highest-popping IPOs were Internet stocks—Airbnb and DoorDash near the top of the list, with both rising close to 100% on their first day of trading. The blockbuster Airbnb IPO was particularly noteworthy because it occurred while the company was still recording—thanks to the Covid-19 crisis—30% year-over-year declines in its bookings and revenue. Growth companies are typically expected to be, well, growing when they stage their IPOs. Airbnb was declining. And it still pulled off a highly successful IPO. Wow! Reflects a lot of trust and hope by investors in Airbnb’s secular growth opportunity post-Covid-19. A lot. And imagine how much interest there would be were TikTok—one of the fastest-growing Internet apps of all time—to announce its IPO intentions!

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Like Xerox and Coke in the past. Like Google or Twitter or Uber or Airbnb today. There’s much more to the net sector than just FANG, however. Many other net stocks and companies have added to the sector’s allure and investor attention—including Booking (nee Priceline), Chewy, eBay, Etsy, Expedia, Grubhub, Lyft, Pinterest, Shopify, Snap, The Trade Desk, Twitter, Uber, Wix, and Zillow. 2020 was one of the strongest IPO years on record in terms of funds raised, and several of the highest-profile, highest-popping IPOs were Internet stocks—Airbnb and DoorDash near the top of the list, with both rising close to 100% on their first day of trading.

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And Microsoft’s success left the desktop for the cloud long ago. Yes, the Internet is the obvious Big Change. Add up the market caps of Google, Amazon, and Facebook at the end of 2020, and you’re over $3.5 trillion. Add in the market caps of some of the other major Internet companies (Netflix, Booking.com, DoorDash, Airbnb, Spotify, etc.), and you’re well over $4 trillion. Add in the major Chinese Internet companies (Alibaba, Tencent, etc.), and you’re well over $5 trillion. That’s $5 trillion in shareholder wealth that simply didn’t exist 20 years ago. There are lots of interesting debates around how much of an impact the Internet has had on the US and global economies.

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back by Bruce Schneier

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Automated Insights, banking crisis, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Brian Krebs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computerized trading, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark pattern, deepfake, defense in depth, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake news, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, first-past-the-post, Flash crash, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, late capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, payday loans, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Skype, smart cities, SoftBank, supply chain finance, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, union organizing, web application, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, WikiLeaks, zero day

In the US, California passed legislation in 2019 requiring companies like Uber to treat their workers as employees; litigation ensued, and continues. Other cities and states are trying to do the same, although most states have preempted local rulings on this issue. Airbnb is a similar hack of the hotel industry. Airbnb lodgings are not the same as hotels, although they serve the same purpose of short-term lodging. But Airbnb maintains that because it is not actually a hotel company, Airbnb accommodations should not be subject to any of the laws and regulations—or occupancy taxes—imposed on conventional hotels. Because Airbnb doesn’t own any properties, it maintains that it is just a technology company. The people who own the accommodations are independent contractors, and are responsible for paying taxes and complying with local regulations.

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The people who own the accommodations are independent contractors, and are responsible for paying taxes and complying with local regulations. Of course, most fail to do so. Municipalities either let Airbnb slide without paying its share of occupancy fees or try to fight back. Some sought to limit its expansion through regulation, and Airbnb sued them (while still operating), resulting in lengthy court battles. In addition, Airbnb often deployed property owners as grassroots lobbyists. Airbnb would send a message out to owners saying the city was threatening their ability to make money, even sending information about specific meetings the hosts should attend.

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doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/000154315122000008/uber-20211231.htm. 124It has 3.5 million drivers: Brian Dean (23 Mar 2021), “Uber statistics 2022: How many people ride with Uber?” Backlinko, https://backlinko.com/uber-users. 124Airbnb is a similar hack: Paris Martineau (20 Mar 2019), “Inside Airbnb’s ‘guerilla war’ against local governments,” Wired, https://www.wired.com/story/inside-Airbnbs-guerrilla-war-against-local-governments. 125Payday loans are short-term loans: Carter Dougherty (29 May 2013), “Payday lenders evading rules pivot to installment loans,” Bloomberg, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-05-29/payday-lenders-evading-rules-pivot-to-installmant-loans. 126They also operate as loan brokers: S.

The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology by William Mougayar

Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, business logic, business process, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, decentralized internet, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, fixed income, Ford Model T, global value chain, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, market clearing, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, prediction markets, pull request, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, smart contracts, social web, software as a service, too big to fail, Turing complete, Vitalik Buterin, web application, Yochai Benkler

Think about the multitude of things and offerings that can get smart when they are trusted to perform certain operations without human assistance. Transparency and truth seeking are complementary characteristics of trust. Transparency asks the question: can we see it? Truth asks: can we verify it? HOW AIRBNB DESIGNED TRUST FOR STRANGERS What does Airbnb have to do with blockchain-based trust? A lot. There is a lesson from Airbnb, which has mastered the art of allowing strangers to sleep in your house without fear. At the onset, matching two strangers with each other and facilitating a transaction to completion is very similar to a blockchain facilitating peer-to-peer interaction between two (or more) parties that do not know each other.

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That common element is about sharing identity and reputation details. In the case of Airbnb, guests share a lot of information about themselves—a key step that helps the host in gaining confidence about trusting them. On the blockchain, identity and reputation are the primary entry-level factors that effectively lock the peer-to-peer transaction in place. Says Joe Gebbia, Airbnb co-founder, “It turns out, a well-designed reputation system is key for building trust. We also learned that building the right amount of trust takes the right amount of disclosure.” Whereas Airbnb has designed for the human element of trust, the blockchain was designed for a parallel element of transactional trust, where the human is also part of it, but behind the scenes, and that human is represented on the blockchain via their identity and reputation status.

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The Ledger Looking Back So We Can Look Forward Unpacking the Blockchain State Transitions and State Machines— What Are They? The Consensus Algorithms Key Ideas from Chapter One Notes 2: How Blockchain Trust Infiltrates A New Trust Layer Decentralization of Trust—What Does it Mean? How Airbnb Designed Trust for Strangers A Spectrum of Trust Services Based on Proofs The Blockchain Landscape Benefits and Indirect Benefits Explaining Some Basic Functions What Does a Trusted Blockchain Enable? Identity Ownerships & Representation Decentralized Data Security Anonymity & Untraceable Communication Blockchain as Cloud Getting to Millions of Blockchains Key Ideas from Chapter Two Notes 3: Obstacles, Challenges, & Mental Blocks Attacking the Blockchain with a Framework Approach Technical Challenges Market/Business Challenges Legal /Regulatory Barriers Behavioral/Educational Challenges Key Ideas from Chapter Three Notes 4: Blockchain in Financial Services Attacked by the Internet and Fintech Why Can't There be a Global Bank?

The Jobs to Be Done Playbook: Align Your Markets, Organization, and Strategy Around Customer Needs by Jim Kalbach

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Build a better mousetrap, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, data science, Dean Kamen, fail fast, Google Glasses, job automation, Kanban, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, market design, minimum viable product, prediction markets, Quicken Loans, Salesforce, shareholder value, Skype, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Zipcar

We could see completely new possibilities in how we thought about which problems to solve and what to build... When we realized the product was the trip, we started to see Airbnb as a lifestyle company that could believably extend into more aspects of the trip, like Airbnb Experiences. As a result, Airbnb has introduced new facets of its offering, including Airbnb Experiences. Now, travelers can book tours of a city by locals, cooking classes, museum visits, and more. By moving up from book accommodations to take a trip, they avoided strategy myopia and expanded their business greatly. Accordingly, the Airbnb offering now addresses several related jobs to be done while taking a trip. Although this example doesn’t refer to JTBD specifically, the thinking is the same and is repeatable following the steps outlined previously.

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Design and redesign all aspects of your offering to address the higher aspiration—from products and service design, to marketing messages, to overall portfolio strategy. Consider the recent story about the growth of Airbnb that shows how the young company has already expanded their business imperative and extended their market outlook. Instead of looking at the accommodation booking solution as the product, they looked at the trip or journey a customer was taking as the product. In an interview in Forbes, Airbnb designer Rebecca Sinclair discussed how they used design thinking and journey mapping to change their point of view:11 We started to say “the product is the trip” and began shifting our perspective.

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“Applying Jobs-to-Be-Done to User Onboarding, with Ryan Singer!” UserOnboard (2017) https://www.useronboard.com/ryan-singer-user-onboarding-jtbd/ IBM. “Needs Statements,” IBM Enterprise Design Thinking Toolkit (Aug 2018) https://www.ibm.com/design/thinking/page/toolkit/activity/needs-statements Joffrion, Emily Fields. “The Designer Who Changed Airbnb’s Entire Strategy,” Forbes (Jul 2018) Johnson-Laird, Philip. Mental Models (Harvard University Press, 1983) Keuken, Maxim van de. “Using Job Stories and Jobs-to-be-Done in Software Requirements Engineering,” [Thesis, Utrecht University] (Nov 2017) Klement, Alan. “5 Tips for Writing Job Stories,” JTBD.info (Nov 2013). https://jtbd.info/5-tips-for-writing-a-job-story-7c9092911fc9 Klement, Alan.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers, What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), xv–xvi. 31. Bruce Upbin, “Airbnb Could Have More Rooms than Hilton by 2012,” Forbes, June 29, 2011, http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2011/06/29/airbnb-could-have-more-rooms-than-hil ton-by-2012/ (accessed June 18, 2013). 32. “Airbnb at a Glance,” https://www.airbnb.com/about (accessed June 18, 2013). 33. “Airbnb Global Growth,” https://www.airbnb.com/global-growth (accessed June 18, 2013). 34. Andrew Cave, “Airbnb Plans to Be World’s Largest Hotelier,” Telegraph, November 16, 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/leisure/10454879/Air bnb-plans-to-be-worlds-larget-hotelier.html (accessed November 26, 2013). 35.

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These systems provide significant environmental benefits by increasing use efficiency, reducing waste, encouraging the development of better products, and mopping up the surplus created by over-production and -consumption.30 Sharing Everything Much of what we own goes unused some of the time. Sharing spare rooms or even couches has become a big-ticket item among enthusiasts. Airbnb and HomeAway are among the many start-ups that are connecting millions of people who have homes to rent with prospective users. Airbnb, which went online in 2008, boasted 110,000 available rooms listed on its site just three years later and was expanding its available listings by an astounding 1,000 rooms every day.31 To date, 3 million Airbnb guests booked 10 million nights in 33,000 cities, spanning 192 countries.32 In 2012 bookings were growing at a blistering pace of 500 percent a year, an exponential curve that would bring envy, if not terror, to any global hotel chain.33 Airbnb is expected to pass the venerable Hilton and InterContinental hotel chains—the world’s largest hotel operations—in 2014 by filling up more rooms per night across the globe.34 Like other shareable brokers, Airbnb gets only a small cut from the renter and owner for bringing them together.

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Airbnb, which went online in 2008, boasted 110,000 available rooms listed on its site just three years later and was expanding its available listings by an astounding 1,000 rooms every day.31 To date, 3 million Airbnb guests booked 10 million nights in 33,000 cities, spanning 192 countries.32 In 2012 bookings were growing at a blistering pace of 500 percent a year, an exponential curve that would bring envy, if not terror, to any global hotel chain.33 Airbnb is expected to pass the venerable Hilton and InterContinental hotel chains—the world’s largest hotel operations—in 2014 by filling up more rooms per night across the globe.34 Like other shareable brokers, Airbnb gets only a small cut from the renter and owner for bringing them together. It can charge such low fees because it has very low fixed costs and each additional rental brokered approaches near zero marginal cost. Like all the new sharable sites, the lateral scaling potential on the Internet is so dramatic that start-ups like Airbnb can take off, catch up to, and even surpass the older, global hotel chains in just a few short years.

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5 by Taylor Pearson

Airbnb, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Black Swan, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Hangouts, Hacker Conference 1984, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, means of production, Oculus Rift, passive income, passive investing, Peter Thiel, power law, remote working, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, telemarketer, the long tail, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog

The Long Tail revealed that niche and Andrew took advantage of it.33 How New Markets Create New Markets As the world economy continues to grow, new markets are created then fracture, creating even more new markets. AirBnB was built on the back of Craigslist. Because people would post their rooms for rent on Craigslist, AirBnB would copy over their new listings to Craigslist. People would find out about AirBnB if they were searching for rooms on Craigslist. They took one section of a bigger marketplace—short term housing on Craigslist—and built a company around it. Just like Jake and Andrew, they were able to serve that “small” market better than Craigslist.

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They would pay millions of dollars for a piece of land downtown, millions of dollars to construct a hotel, and then millions of dollars to hire staff to run it. The sharing economy version of that is a company called AirBnB, which allows homeowners to post their rooms online so people coming to visit can stay in them. It’s often less expensive than a hotel and many people like getting to know a city as a resident instead of as a tourist. Let’s say Julian has a house that he owns in Dallas, Texas. He usually has one spare bedroom, so he lists it on AirBnB as available. He has filled a market need that ten years ago would have only been available to someone with millions of dollars that could build a hotel.

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A market opportunity that would have been available to a few thousand people that could afford to build a hotel is now available to a few million people that may have a spare bedroom. There are not many more houses now in the U.S. than there were 5 years ago, but AirBnB has created more inventory (extra rooms to stay in) without creating more supply (building hotels). Uber and Lyft have done for the taxi industry what AirBnB has done for the hotel industry—anyone with a car can become a taxi driver by signing up online to drive for the service. In the past it was difficult and expensive to become a taxi driver. Some cities require drivers to invest tens of thousands of dollars to buy a medallion just to drive a taxi.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

Frankin Foer, World Without Mind (Jonathan Cape, 2017) p.191. 11 Foer, World Without Mind, p. 114 12 You find the petition on the www.change.org web page under ‘Save Your Uber’. 13 The Uber Privacy Policy is available on their website. https://privacy.uber.com/policy 14 This website is archived at www.web.archive.org. Search for www.google.com, and search for the date 18 January 2012. 15 Biz Carson, ‘Airbnb just pulled out a clever trick to fight a proposed law in San Francisco’, www.uk.businessinsider.com, 7 October 2015. Shane Hickey and Franki Cookney, ‘Airbnb faces worldwide opposition. It plans a movement to rise up in its defence’, Observer, 29 October 2016. Heather Kelly, ‘Airbnb wants to turn hosts into “grassroots” activists’, www.cnn.com, 4 November 2015. 16 Since 2015, Facebook has been the biggest driver of traffic to media sites.

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Alongside it, though, is another world, inhabited by the people who are left behind in the mad rush towards progress: the ignored women in tech start-ups who complain about misogyny, the Uber drivers who can only afford to live 70 miles away and have to work on zero-hour contracts, the long-time residents who are turfed out so their landlords can rent out their homes on Airbnb. It’s a place where minorities struggle on low-wage service jobs, serving the largely white affluent tech workers. The median house value in both San Francisco and Silicon Valley is now around a million dollars, and the average rent is over three thousand per month for a two-bedroom flat: beyond the reach of almost anyone but tech workers.

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Thousands of businesses apply every year to access Y Combinator’s funding and guidance, in exchange for a small slice of their company. Sam is a Princeton dropout and frequently wears a hoodie, yet when I met him, he was only 31 years old and already a multi-millionaire. He is often described as ‘the man who invents the future’. The companies Y Combinator have funded include Airbnb and Starsky Robotics, and are now altogether valued at $80 billion. Aware of the potential turbulence that AI might unleash, Y Combinator recently started to fund a pilot in universal basic income. UBI, as it is commonly referred to, is an increasingly popular idea to deal with the possible rise of joblessness and tech-fuelled inequality.

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

Critical Legal Thinking, May 14, 2013. http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/. Williams, Chris, Eli Brumbaugh, Jeff Feng, John Bodley, and Michelle Thomas. “Democratizing Data at Airbnb.” Airbnb Engineering & Data Science, May 12, 2017. https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/democratizing-data-at-airbnb-852d76c51770. Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Williamson, Ben. “Calculating Children in the Dataveillance School: Social and Ethical Implications of New Technologies for Children and Young People.”

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For example, see book IV, title XIX of the Compilations, in particular the first law, which allows all subjects (including Indians) to benefit from the mines, and the fourteenth law, which specifies that Indians can own mines. Nevertheless, the fifteenth law allows Spaniards to “manage” the mines on behalf of the “naturally lazy” Indians, who do not know how to exploit them. 87. All quotes are from the corporate websites of the respective companies. The quote from Airbnb is from blog.atairbnb.com/open-letter-to-the-airbnb-community. 88. Benjamin, Illuminations, 253. 89. Harris, “Untimely Mammet.” Harris notes that automata such as the Mechanical Turk were referred to as mammets, a word deriving from the proper name Mohamet or Mohammed. He adds that “medieval Christian theologians used the word ‘mechanicum’ as a synonym for Muslim sorcery: they regarded Islam as a mechanical religion incapable of true life and of a meaningful future, and thus consigned it to a dead, unusable past.

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There is also the growing field of data brokers and data processing organizations such as Acxiom, Equifax, Palantir, and TalkingData (in China) that collect, aggregate, analyze, repackage, and sell data of all sorts while also supporting other organizations in their uses of data. And, finally, the social quantification sector includes the vast domain of organizations that increasingly depend for their basic functions on processing data from social life, whether to customize their services (like Netflix and Spotify) or to link sellers and buyers (like Airbnb, Uber, and Didi). Beyond the social quantification sector is the rest of business, which has also been transformed in the “great data transition.”10 Much of what ordinary businesses now do is crunch data from their internal processes and from the world around them; most businesses also depend increasingly on the work of the social quantification sector to target their ads and marketing.

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs by Alexa Clay, Kyra Maya Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, collaborative consumption, conceptual framework, cotton gin, creative destruction, different worldview, digital rights, disruptive innovation, double helix, fear of failure, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer rental, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, supply-chain management, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Zipcar

Since the Internet revolution, with information so readily accessible, products, services, even whole businesses can be cloned and copied with ease. The Berlin-based company Wimdu, for example, is an exact replica of the successful platform Airbnb, a peer-to-peer rental market that provides an alternative to hotels. Wimdu was built by reverse-engineering Airbnb’s functions and borrowing from the site’s look and feel. Illustrating the power of iteration over pure invention, Wimdu created in a matter of months what it had taken Airbnb four years to develop. By June 2011, the company had raised over $90 million.7 Wimdu was started by three now-infamous German brothers—Oliver, Marc, and Alexander Samwer—who have a history of reverse-engineering U.S.

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Julie Zaveloff and Robert Johnson, “China Unveils a Knockoff Version of an Entire Austrian Village,” Business Insider, June 4, 2012, http://www.businessinsider.com/china-has-built-a-copycat-version-of-an-entire-austrian-village-2012-6. 7. Robin Wauters, “Investors Pump $90 Million into Airbnb Clone Wimdu,” Techcrunch, June 14, 2011, http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/14/investors-pump-90-million-into-airbnb-clone-wimdu/. 8. Matt Cowan, “Inside the Clone Factory: The Story of Germany’s Samwer Brothers,” Wired, March 2, 2012, http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/04/features/inside-the-clone-factory/viewall. 9. Oded Shenkar, Copycats: How Smart Companies Use Imitation to Gain a Strategic Edge (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2010). 10.

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These platforms permit unemployed and underemployed individuals to exchange what they do have for goods and services that they need. This trend toward “collaborative consumption” is taking place worldwide. As Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers chronicle in their book, What’s Mine Is Yours, sharing, trading, and selling idle items, time, and services is a rising trend. From Airbnb (a rental website that has gone from 120,000 listings in early 2012 to over 300,000 at the time of this writing) to Zipcar (the car-sharing service that was sold to Avis for $500 million in January 2013), people the world over are moving away from the fixed, formal “own it” model to a more fluid “exchange it” approach.

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, gamification, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Google bus, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, medical bankruptcy, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, power law, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software patent, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Future of Employment, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transportation-network company, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Feeding more activity to the ledger simply cedes more of humanity and business alike to a growth-centric industrial model that was invented to thwart us to begin with. That’s the problem with any of the many new ways we have of earning income through previously off-the-books activities. On the one hand, they create thrilling new forms of peer-to-peer commerce. eBay lets us sell our attic junk. Web site Airbnb lets us rent out our extra bedrooms to travelers. Smartphone apps Uber and Lyft let us use our vehicles to give people rides, for money. Unlike many of the other platforms we’ve looked at so far, these opportunities don’t lead to power-law distributions, because a car or home can be hired only by one person at a time.

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If you need a ride, you can open Uber and see a map of the area along with tiny icons for the available cars. Pick a car based on its location, the driver’s ratings, and the estimated price. The driver finds you based on your own GPS location and your profile picture. Payment happens automatically, tip included. Airbnb is equally seamless. Enter a place and date and the Web site instantly renders a map with available options clearly indicated. Roll over any location to see a photo, details, and ratings for each. Book the room, and you’ll find out where to meet your host or pick up the keys. Like Uber, it’s unparalleled for choice and convenience.

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Only it’s not really sharing; it’s selling. In fact, just as there used to be an Internet that ran entirely on “shareware,” there were originally free versions of these new asset-renting platforms. Couchsurfing.com created a global community of people who both give and receive space in their homes. Airbnb, its commercial successor, pitches itself the same way but operates very differently—not only do boarders pay for lodging, but the vast majority of rentals are for entire apartments. Their ads show people sharing an extra bedroom and a place at the family table, but the statistics reveal that the vast majority (87 percent) of hosts leave their homes in order to rent them.37 Homes become amateur hotels, as the original residents try to live off the arbitrage between the rent they pay, the rent they earn, and the cost of living somewhere other than home.

Perfect Sound Whatever by James. Acaster

4chan, Airbnb, butterfly effect, Donald Trump, Etonian, gentrification, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Rubik’s Cube, side project

The news story made us out to be victims of misfortune, but in reality getting stranded was the best thing that could’ve happened to us. Our holiday doubled in length, we got a new Airbnb and we continued having a fantastic holiday. Pretty soon other news outlets wanted to talk to the four of us: newspapers, TV shows and radio programmes, all wanting the scoop on our holiday for no good reason. John and Lloyd did a live interview with Sky News during which Lloyd unintentionally looked like a mobster. He thought it’d be funny to wear a USA medallion he’d found in the Airbnb, but the camera framed him in such a way that you couldn’t see the USA pendant. Plus he’s watching himself on the living room TV while the interview is taking place so he looks confused and angry throughout.

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It is Saturday, early evening, don’t leave me alone.’ • Reading 2016 music lists and buying 2016 music was now having the same effect on me that walking around listening to my iPod did – it was calming my anxieties and provided an escape at a time when both were very much needed. I bought more music while staying up late in my New York Airbnb than I’d ever bought in one sitting before. One night I veered away from the ‘best of’ lists and decided to search for projects by musicians I already liked, quickly discovering a beaut by an artist who, due to being out of the loop, I’d weirdly assumed had retired. • Andrew Broder began writing songs when he was 11, recording on a tape player with his brother, both of them playing guitars before quickly branching out onto keyboards, drum machines, four-tracks, turntables and whatever they could lay their hands on.

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It wasn’t an ‘interest’ any more; buying music from 2016 was now something I needed to do in order to feel ok. Being in New York immediately after a breakup felt confusing. On the one hand, it was my first time in the Big Apple and it was exciting to visit a new place, but on the other hand I was extremely depressed and wanted to cry all the time. Also, sharing an Airbnb with my agent wasn’t exactly ideal. Early on in the trip things went badly. A miscalculated journey meant I was late for a gig and got kicked off the bill. This one event sparked some tension that would ultimately build throughout the entire year and result in me getting dropped by my management.

Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything by Peter Morville

A Pattern Language, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Black Swan, business process, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Computer Lib, disinformation, disruptive innovation, folksonomy, holacracy, index card, information retrieval, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kanban, Lean Startup, Lyft, messenger bag, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Project Xanadu, quantum entanglement, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single source of truth, source of truth, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Part of the reason I don’t participate in the sharing economy is I’m an introvert, and a shy one too. Hotels are easy. Staff rarely say more than hello. But Airbnb is different. I’m staying in a home with my host. It’s like crashing with a friend you don’t know. Of course, Sophie comes highly recommended. She has a 5-star rating and dozens of glowing reviews. I’m not at all worried about safety or security. And while I’m not sure I’d want our daughters being Airbnb hosts, I’m not a complete stranger to Sophie. She’s seen my profile, references, and Facebook account. She knows I have a verified ID. Airbnb has my home address, phone number, credit card, and driver’s license. I’m about as far from anonymity as can be.

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I’m about as far from anonymity as can be. And her property is protected by a one million dollar host guarantee. Airbnb has invested in an architecture of trust that helps them scale up safely to serve millions of guests around the world. Figure 1-9. Airbnb’s architecture of trust. But like Uber they do have problems. In New York, Airbnb has been declared illegal, and landlords given big fines. In Paris, hosts unwittingly rented to prostitutes who used their home as a brothel. All around the world, neighbors are disturbed by the presence of strangers in what they thought were single-family homes.

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That’s why I’m willing to travel. Systems Thinking I’m in Silicon Valley. I’m in a cab headed to my hotel. Actually, that’s not true. I’m hitchhiking and plan to sleep with a stranger named Sophie. Okay, that’s not quite right either. But that’s how our eleven year old daughter explained my experiment with Uber and Airbnb to my wife. Yes, once again, I’m making myself uncomfortable. I’m an advisor to the School of Library and Information Science at San José State University. Since 2009, the program has embraced a 100% online model. Ironically, I’m here for a face to face meeting. And I’m using this visit to California as an opportunity to dip my toes into the infamous sharing economy.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits