Would you be surprised if AirBnb laid off 90%? Or Google? Or Amazon? It's already built, right, so why do they need so many people just to keep the lights on?
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).
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.
Airbnb is working on pulling out all the stops to try and prevent layoffs. They might not succeed, but if they were a smaller company they wouldn't even have anything to try.
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.
I really wonder how much pressure AirBnB must be feeling from hosts in order to go through with this idea. There's no way that they have done thinking it would not have some downsides. I really would like to know how they calculated that going through with this idea would be a better option than doing nothing.
~40 people work at Airbnb. And a ton of others make money renting their place, or save money when traveling. Massive, massive value creation there in addition to the jobs.
Why shouldn't they be tanking? Everything in the travel sector, including hotels, is tanking right now. They're not highly profitable; indeed they've never turned a profit.
> whereas the fixed costs to run a website are ridiculously low
This is clearly not true. They are a tech company and have a large number of well-compensated engineers. So they do have a large amount of fixed costs.
It sounds like you're arguing from hypotheticals, none of which actually apply to Airbnb as it exists in the real world.
City after city is either severely restricting or eliminating AirBnB entirely. It's golden days are behind it. It's trying new approaches, but nothing unique there.
Why work for AirBnB? You could work for another big tech company that actually has room to grow and produce some solid equity returns.
AirBnb is in an existential crisis right now... it might take years before their market recovers...
It makes absolutely sense to have enough money to weather this storm....
Even firing people costs money... even just keeping their lights on, and service at bay, (with no new features) costs money....
People that usually comment like the above are either: Young and inexperienced, or just not don't have real life experience on running a business. I used to think like that when I was young, but after some years of experience your view on things changes and becomes more nuanced.
You're not far off on your numbers, they laid off around 1900 people back in May, out of ~7500 employees.
I would think the IPO is happening despite the pandemic, not because of it. They had been planning to go public long before the IPO hit, so I wouldn't read into that too much. I definitely have similar reservations about the company as you do though. I get the impression the tide is generally turning against the airbnb model at least within major cities.
AirBNB announces their performance on a regular basis [1][2], especially since they were planning on going public 2020/2021, but Im talking about when they finish their quarter internally and asses how they stand as a company. We will start seeing a lot of layoffs from bigger companies when quarterly results come in. The first wave of layoffs were service industry, front line, immediately impacted by a stoppage of cash flow, there will be a cascading effect on the economy for a long time.
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