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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

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.

credit_guy 6y ago
Google had 5000 employees in 2005 [1]. And no, in 2005, Google was not just a start-up, it was the same search juggernaut that it is now. There was no youtube yet, google maps was less than 1 year old, and android was 3 years in the future. But in terms of search, it was the only game in town. Their revenue was $6 BN [2]. Airbnb's revenue in 2019 was around $4 BN. Now, Google is and was an exceptional company, and it's not totally fair to compare a business to Google, but still, people who wonder why AirBnB has so many employees have a point. [1] https://medium.com/gabor/timeline-employee-count-growth-for-microsoft-yahoo-google-and-facebook-9ede22a37824 https://medium.com/gabor/timeline-employee-count-growth-for-... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-global-revenue/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl...
- r00fus 6y ago
  Larry Page famously said at some point that he doesn't believe in customer support. I believe a large number of the AirBnB employees are support related (either for hosts or guests). It's an apples-oranges kind of comparison.
- digianarchist 6y ago
  Google has notoriously bad customer support which I believe you can get away with for digital products but not for short-term lets.
- filoleg 6y ago
  You answered your own question there. Back then, Google was primarily a search juggernaut. They didn't have many real life situations that they needed to resolve or take care of. They didn't need to deal with any sort of insurance for their clients (like AirBnB does for their hosts), they didn't have nearly as many tricky questionable real life situations to resolve (the host cancels your housing reservation a couple of days before your have your already reserved flight, what do you do). Google was just providing search results, and almost all their work was limited to the virtual space. Pretty much a pure software company providing only virtual space services. You don't usually get a complicated real life situation to resolve every time there is an incorrect search result, almost every issue is resolved by making a simple code change. Due to the inherent nature of AirBnb, it just has magnitudes more non-purely-technical problems to deal with. And you will also need technical work to resolve them too, but it is just a small component of those. For example, how do you deal with verifying hosts? You need to build some verification mechanism, but it will almost always need a human in the loop. So not only you have to implement the technical flow for it (like a verification portal or whatever), but you also need to pay people to process all of this and resolve any issues arising. And I expect that with every heavily human-centric problem, you will need a lot of human resources to deal with it effectively. Add the fact that AirBnB has to deal with those "physical world" problems in 191 countries (all with wildly different legalities that come with short-term rentals, which is the core of their business), it doesn't seem to have such a large number of employees at all. Disclaimer: I am not saying that AirBnB is NOT overblown in terms of employment numbers. They very well could be, I cannot tell without understanding the entirety of their business. But I can definitely say that it makes perfect sense in my head that AirBnB in 2020 would need significantly more employees than Google did in 2005.
- sushid 6y ago
  Airbnb is a successful company but why are you comparing it to a company that is literally printing money? Have you worked at a big company before?

credit_guy 6y ago

Google had 5000 employees in 2005 [1]. And no, in 2005, Google was not just a start-up, it was the same search juggernaut that it is now. There was no youtube yet, google maps was less than 1 year old, and android was 3 years in the future. But in terms of search, it was the only game in town. Their revenue was $6 BN [2]. Airbnb's revenue in 2019 was around $4 BN. Now, Google is and was an exceptional company, and it's not totally fair to compare a business to Google, but still, people who wonder why AirBnB has so many employees have a point. [1] https://medium.com/gabor/timeline-employee-count-growth-for-microsoft-yahoo-google-and-facebook-9ede22a37824 https://medium.com/gabor/timeline-employee-count-growth-for-... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-global-revenue/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl...

r00fus 6y ago
Larry Page famously said at some point that he doesn't believe in customer support. I believe a large number of the AirBnB employees are support related (either for hosts or guests). It's an apples-oranges kind of comparison.
digianarchist 6y ago
Google has notoriously bad customer support which I believe you can get away with for digital products but not for short-term lets.
filoleg 6y ago
You answered your own question there. Back then, Google was primarily a search juggernaut. They didn't have many real life situations that they needed to resolve or take care of. They didn't need to deal with any sort of insurance for their clients (like AirBnB does for their hosts), they didn't have nearly as many tricky questionable real life situations to resolve (the host cancels your housing reservation a couple of days before your have your already reserved flight, what do you do). Google was just providing search results, and almost all their work was limited to the virtual space. Pretty much a pure software company providing only virtual space services. You don't usually get a complicated real life situation to resolve every time there is an incorrect search result, almost every issue is resolved by making a simple code change. Due to the inherent nature of AirBnb, it just has magnitudes more non-purely-technical problems to deal with. And you will also need technical work to resolve them too, but it is just a small component of those. For example, how do you deal with verifying hosts? You need to build some verification mechanism, but it will almost always need a human in the loop. So not only you have to implement the technical flow for it (like a verification portal or whatever), but you also need to pay people to process all of this and resolve any issues arising. And I expect that with every heavily human-centric problem, you will need a lot of human resources to deal with it effectively. Add the fact that AirBnB has to deal with those "physical world" problems in 191 countries (all with wildly different legalities that come with short-term rentals, which is the core of their business), it doesn't seem to have such a large number of employees at all. Disclaimer: I am not saying that AirBnB is NOT overblown in terms of employment numbers. They very well could be, I cannot tell without understanding the entirety of their business. But I can definitely say that it makes perfect sense in my head that AirBnB in 2020 would need significantly more employees than Google did in 2005.
sushid 6y ago
Airbnb is a successful company but why are you comparing it to a company that is literally printing money? Have you worked at a big company before?