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He then addressed his concerns about my blog post, and the potentially negative impact it could have on his company’s growth and current round of funding. Durin

• danilocampos 15y ago
  It gets worse. "Note: a second co-founder did email me for the first time around 2am yesterday, suggesting we meet for coffee as he 'would enjoy meeting' me. He made no inquiry into my current emotional state, my safety or my well being." Speechless. The lack of compassion for another human being here is staggering. Utterly oblivious — or indifferent. How does this happen to people?
  • jrockway 15y ago
    Writing well is extremely hard. It could be that the "second co-founder" is bad at writing rather than oblivious or indifferent. He did want to meet her in person, perhaps to lend assistance, after all. If he was oblivious, this is probably not the action he would have taken.
    • danilocampos 15y ago
      > Writing well is extremely hard. Please. Writing like Michael Chabon or Aaron Sorkin is hard. Having some basic compassion in how you interact with people is not. This email didn't need to win any awards — it just needed to have some minimum level of sensitivity. As I said in a cousin: "he 'would enjoy meeting' me" I don't think she really gives a damn in her current state what this guy would "enjoy" doing, is really the point here.
      • zachinglis 15y ago
        I have to agree with you. If someone falls over in the street, you probably ask if they're okay. If someone worse happens to them because your website failed to make someone safe, then you don't tell them you'd "enjoy meeting" them.
      • nmcfarl 15y ago
        I completely agree with your last sentence. However, I at least, find writing about emotional matters to be extremely difficult. When I sit down with a goal of saying something nice, to show some compassion, to show what I'm actually feeling - what I usually end up doing is twisting the knife. So in general I write less, and see the people face to face ASAP. Any other way is just harder for us both. I could have easily made this mistake.
  • Confusion 15y ago
    Well, isn't that what he would probably talk about over coffee? We don't know how the conversation went. He may have said something like: We're very sorry about what's happened to you and seek to resolve it. Let's have coffee as soon as possible to see what we have to do to resolve the situation for you. Would that justify the criticism that he should have asked about how she was at that moment, when it would seem from the conversation that there was every intention to do so only moments later?
    • danilocampos 15y ago
      "he 'would enjoy meeting' me" I don't think she really gives a damn in her current state what this guy would "enjoy" doing, is really the point here.
      • Confusion 15y ago
        Apart from jrockway's explanation: it may also be the way she currently construes and represents the email and is not a literal quote. Given 'her current state', you can't really trust her to be an honest judge of peoples' intentions. Nor should you fault her for that, but that doesn't mean her statements can be taken at face value.
        • danilocampos 15y ago
          EJ has demonstrated a keen grasp of English language, punctuation and rhetoric. I think regardless of her state communication is clearly her strong suit. What I'm saying is that I'd bet good money she knows what quotation marks mean.
          • Confusion 15y ago
            True, but the rest of the point remains: you don't know the rest of the message and how well she's presenting it. That particular quoted phrase may have annoyed her so much, that it doesn't really matter anymore what the rest of the email said. Even though an objective outsider would say the email was otherwise decent and acceptable. What I'm saying, and why I'm responding, is that I'm seeing classic lynch mob behavior: people are out with their pitchforks, making all kinds of sweepings statements about what is happening, based on very little actual information. You are making rather bold assertions about someone based on only that quote. Doesn't that strike you as perhaps a bit rash?
  • cookiecaper 15y ago
    Now this part I think is overdramatic. I agree with jrockway. Criticizing a person for stating he would "enjoy meeting" a person is more than a bit pedantic imo. I'm sorry if she "doesn't care" about what anyone else may "enjoy", but seriously, I don't think it indicates any lack of sympathy. It's not like EJ is bleeding all over her keyboard while people nonchalantly schedule appointments later in the week or something, the crime is over now and it's a reasonable way to request a meeting. What do you want him to say? Really a silly thing to make a fuss over, and fussing over trivial matters just weakens an otherwise strong case.
    • danso 15y ago
      Not disagreeing with you, but just wanted to point out: this is why there are such things as trained spokespeople and customer service reps. I know these jobs aren't looked upon with much respect by those of us in the engineering and development community who would rather say things directly to the customer...but here, an innocent attempt to cut through the redtape and get to the bottom of things may have been misinterpreted by the customer to look much worse than it was... I can totally see how the co-founder had the best of intentions and in his mind, was thinking "She'll be grateful to see me cutting through the layers of BS and giving her a straightforward invitation to meetup". Unfortunately, she saw the terse message and interpreted it in the worst light possible...and then reposted it to the world, with her interpretation. When my car got wrecked by someone else's poor driving, I dreaded making the call to my insurance company to deal with it, even though all I had to do was report it to get my reimbursement. The very first thing the customer rep said to me after I said why I was calling was, "Are you OK? How are you doing?" I was totally fine, and though this is most likely a script that they teach to anyone qualified to answer the phones...even if I were angry, it'd be difficult for me to rip on the customer rep (at that particular point). In the airbnb case, if the co-founder had taken the five seconds to go through the motions of expressing the empathy that he felt, at the very least, this disgruntled customer couldn't claim on her blog that he had expressed no empathy for her situation and just wanted to get to deal making...which was probably quite the opposite of how he felt. But yeah...it is a trivial bit in the big picture. It's a shame it could taint the discussion between her and airbnb regardless.
  • kevinpet 15y ago
    What's the problem? Co-founder wants to meet with person who was harmed by using his company's service? Or the fact that he didn't phrase his request for a meeting appropriately? You must have a lot of trouble walking down the street if you find such trivial things staggering.
• moonlighter 15y ago
  Once the mainstream press is going to pick this up (probably a WHEN, not IF the way it's going), they might not have another round of funding to give a shit about in the first place.
  • pseudonym 15y ago
    It's depressing, because AirBnB is a solid idea, if they can work some of the minor (ha!) kinks, like this, out of the system. But after falling flat on their face like this, I wouldn't be surprised to see the idea of "social housing" go the same way as the Zeppelin did after the Hindenberg. It's going to be forever tied to every homeowner's worst nightmare.
    • moonlighter 15y ago
      It's certainly going to be interesting to see how AirBnB handles this going forward. So far, it's pretty much been a textbook version of how not to handle it, and given the HN audience, there are a lot of lessons to be drawn from this.
    • protomyth 15y ago
      The problem is that this is AirBnB's 2nd to worst case scenario and it doesn't look like it is going to turn out well for them or that they gamed the possible problem scenarios out before hand and created a set of responses. No one died, so there is no "AirBnB Killer" in the headlines, but it might make the host side a little more scarce. Hysteria and PR can both overcome facts. Heck, look at the people in the articles comments quoting the McDonald's coffee incident and believing the "common wisdom" it was a lawsuit happy lady. McDonald's PR did a heck of a job on that one given how absolutely, positively wrong they were and how bad their behavior and actions were. I just cannot believe they didn't think this might be a consequence of the scaling of their service. It happens to every community based service as soon as it gets out of the initial, early adopter group. Startups need to take the time to figure out how to deal with "bad actors" in their business model, particularly when the potential damage is high and of a new type.
  • subbu 15y ago
• markbao 15y ago
  I had doubts about whether this was just a misunderstanding or that EJ was blowing it out of proportion, but after reading that in her post, that's all that needs to be said. Dreadful.
• jcc80 15y ago
  So bad, she's traumatized and he's trying to steamroll her just like he has everything else probably in the last couple years...Ooops! It was time to be a human. Should have let the CS rep keep talking to the woman.
• temphn 15y ago
  Edit: bring on the downvotes! That's right, downvote a difference of opinion, and forget about logical or reasoned counterargument. Next time the internet lynch mob will come for your startup; hope that someone takes your side when they do. ---- Don't you think the CEO has to worry about the people he's paying? Who knows what their burn rate is; that funding could have been a life or death event, and in the event of death then a bunch more unemployed people would be hitting the streets. And that wouldn't help anyone, least of all this woman. AirBnB reported this to the police. They said they had someone in custody. What more do you want them to do? Go after them like Dirty Harry? Dollars to donuts this woman is planning a lawsuit and looking for a payday. Not against the drug addicts who trashed her apartment, but against AirBnB. She rents out a room to people she's never met in person and then acts surprised when sometimes it goes wrong. It's depressing to see the mob mentality here on Hacker News, and the extent to which Arrington delights in playing the organ grinder. A pedestrian is hit by a DUI driver, does he sue or blame Honda? No? So why all the hate on AirBnB when it was a bunch of drug addicts who committed the crime? Sell them into old school bondage and send the income to her, by all means, but let's be real: it was the criminals' fault first, her fault second, and AirBnB in a distant third.
  • bmj 15y ago
    I think you're missing the point--the CEO asked the victim to take down her blog because it was bad press. If you were considering funding the company, wouldn't you want to know about potential issues?
  • ColinWright 15y ago
    Putting aside the questions of blame, and the eventual intent of the individual. Putting aside the question of culpability, and whether anyone acted inappropriately. Thinking about this entirely from the perspective of AirBnB. Doing what a company is supposed to do, by law, and considering only the shareholders. Given what they've done, do you think it's the best thing to have done to give the company the best chance of long-term survival? I don't. Leaving out the morals and the ethics, assuming we only care about the company's survival, this issue has to be dealt with in an open, transparent, and above all seen by all to be fair manner. Providing for the short term care of this customer is vital. Whether it's right or wrong, ethical or moral, if they don't do it, people will say "That might have been me." Above all else, that will kill AirBnB, and they are seeming to do nothing about it. Leaving aside the moral and ethical considerations, working only according to the game theoretic standard of doing right by the company, what they are doing is clearly not in the best interests of the company. ======== ADDED IN EDIT: From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html : Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you. FWIW - I didn't down-vote you. I think you're wrong, and I don't think you've thought it through enough, but I didn't down-vote you. I took the time to reply because I think your view is common enough, and you had the courage to say it out loud. But as I say, the current actions (as we understand them to be) are not in the best interests of the company or its employees - really, they're not.