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So nice of pg to mention AirBnB as one of his examples of what a successful startup who "doesn't cheat" means. They just were great people with a great idea who
by tsimionescu 4mo ago
So nice of pg to mention AirBnB as one of his examples of what a successful startup who "doesn't cheat" means. They just were great people with a great idea who found a market for something people wanted that no one had thought about before, and poof, exponential math billionaires who earned it!
Of course, we'll ignore the huge issues that Airbnb created for cities, customers, and providers. We'll ignore the way they knowingly helped ignore any regulations on tourism as much as they could. We'll ignore the business model of simply being the biggest middlemen around. We'll ignore the fact that their business is slowly being outlawed in major cities, at least in Europe, because of all of the above.
And, surprisingly, if we ignore all of the things these founders do to ignore the law and cheat the market or their competition, we can say that they earned their billions without cheating!
We'll also ignore the fact that the brilliant magic math that us lay people and politicians just don't understand also predicts that the founder whose business is growing 93% per month will not only be a billionaire in 9 months, but a trillionaire 9 more months after that, and surely the world's first quadrillionaire within 5 years. You might think this is implausible, but that's just because you don't understand how exponential growth works!
- cma 4mo agoThere was also the whole Craigslist spam stuff airbnb did to bootstrap growth
- reactordev 4mo agoPaired right next to the “personals” ads they used to have.
- Findeton 4mo agoNo, that problem was not generated by Airbnb. There’s growing demand and, because of regulation, not enough is built every year. For example, according to INE, 250k new families are formed in Spain (more than 500k people) and only 100k new houses/flats are built and the yearly deficit has been accumulating for 12 years. That is the real issue and blaming corporations is just the politicians’ easy path to deflect blame, which unfortunately too many citizens eagerly buy into.
- ahartmetz 4mo agoYou can exacerbate a problem (which Airbnb is doing) without being its major cause. Doing that is still bad.
- hilariously 4mo agoExternalize all the problems, but its "not cheating!" - its just making us all pay for your growth while you take advantage of the current structure of society and generally making things worse.
- ahartmetz 4mo agoJerk arbitrage
- tsimionescu 4mo agoEven if it were true that the problem of housing affordability was not affected by Airbnb (it's not, at best it only exacerbated an existing problem), that would not mean it didn't create other problems for cities. Having tourists concentrated in places that are not designed for it, where a hotel license would never have been issued; the problem of too many tourist accommodations, causing an overflow of tourism; problems for neighbors with parties and similar nuissances; problems with untaxed income from the smaller owners; and probably others I'm forgetting.
- Findeton 4mo agoI know the Spanish case. The hotel lobby does not only push for airbnb restrictions but also for banning new hotels (so that they can push prices up). For example famously there are no new airbnb or hotel licenses since more than 10 years and obviously the problem has only worsened. Regardless, the problem is in general still a demand that grows roughly at 2.5x the supply growth rate.
- tsimionescu 4mo ago