I still can't wrap my head around the fact that they have 14,000 employees. Fourteen thousand. For a company that owns no hotels or motels, no real-estate (other than their offices, of course). The website is decent (but no amazeballs), which is all there is to AirBnB (other than customer service, of course). I don't understand why this all can't be done by, say, 1000 or so employees.
Every single time there's a thread about a company like Airbnb, there is a comment like yours. I am genuinely curious why you are so surprised that a company of their size would be that big? Particularly with a high touch business that works with so many businesses - between sales and support alone this number seems reasonable.
First of all I don’t think AirBnB currently has too many employees & when they were 85 employees they were adding 2-3 employees per day[1] Likewise their team has also grown due to a couple of acquisitions/acquihires – Crashpadder, Accoleo and DailyBooth.
The reason why AirBnB needs a team of 800+ employees is because, they’re trying to expand as quickly as possible into as many countries as they can – leveraging the growth they already have there. For example they have 20,000 properties listed in Asia[2] & are focusing heavily on increasing this number & have just opened offices over there.
The [2] post also highlights some of the reason for the number of employees as each location requires, “a team of dedicated local customer support agents and a hotline for queries” due to AirBnB offering 24/7 support to its users.
As well as having, local customer support agents who help the company provide 24/7, AirBnB also requires: Management, Finance, Accounting, Legal (Recently they hired David Hantman from Yahoo[3] to help tackle some of their regulatory issues), Human Resources, Business Development, Customer Support, Other Operational Staff etc alongside their developers to build out the company & leverage the market opportunity.
Wait till you see that AirBnB has 14,000 employees. That's fourteen thousand! For a site that's barely a step up (in complexity) from Craigslist (which has .... 50 employees).
AirBnb was doing about $4 billion in revenue per year before the crash with 7,500 employees. That's about $500k revenue per employee, which is on the high end of tech industry standards. How is that bloated?
Wikipedia lists ~12K employees at AirBnB, so I agree that some additional clarity would be needed to understand the discrepancy.
If you compare the ratios of operating income vs headcount between the two, the companies are nearly identical based on the metrics available in Wikipedia today.
AirBnB has to do this just to recruit employees since there are plenty of other companies with the same or better comp (and equity not on the downhill).
Maybe, but just the last August bootcamp of new hires was north of 100 people. If Airbnb wanted to do this for a while, I'd imagine they would have hired less even around then.
Ugh, to be honest I get tired whenever I see the "Why did company XYZ need so many people, they're just a website!"-type comments. While it is definitely possible AirBnB was bloated, it's not hard for me to imagine at all what all these people did.
AirBnB is a relatively high-touch business, so I imagine a huge number of those people were in customer support/customer relations, both for travelers and for property owners. AirBnB also operates in a huge number of countries, and each of those countries need (a) marketers, (b) people with regulatory knowledge (often at a level much more granular than the country level - and to head off any 'but AirBnB ignores the regulations!' comments, while that may be true, I guarantee they still have people that know what they are), (c) again, customer service people knowledgeable with the local language and customs.
I'm curious, what are the costs of running a company like airbnb? I'm still curious about what they need money for. Are they just hiring every programmer they can find? Are there a lot of customer service hotline calls?
Airbnb has over 5 million listings and 150 million customers around 190 countries and they don't make enough in commissions to pay rent, salaries and server costs?
A little scary to me that their entire business is dependent on another business. Yeah, yeah, Airbnb is successful, but I imagine there are a bunch of ways Airbnb could mess with them if they ever felt the need.
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