I'm late to the party, but here's what bothers me about Airbnb: It's being treated like a technology company and not what it is, a retail company. Which is bad because wall street hates retail, but not as much as venture capital hates retail. And when people are delusion thats when mistakes are made.

Look at this way, Airbnb is a broker for rental inventory that they never own or control. Since they don't actually control the inventory, the owner of the inventory is free to take it anywhere they want. Airbnb has no secret sauce.

This leaves Airbnb's business totally unprotected and vulnerable to an unlimited number of competitors coming up. Eventually Airbnb will make a mistake, maybe they'll push hosts too far, maybe some catastrophic thing will happen to a guest, the point is something will happen that will shift favor to a competitor. Maybe not tomorrow or next year, but someday.

But it gets worse, Airbnb is going to spend a lot of their vc funds fighting lawsuits, lobbying, and paving the way for their competitors. If I were to compete with Airbnb, I'd spend my time building a better platform and marketing strategy. Then wait for Airbnb to solve short-term rental legislation, then slip into those markets with a far lower cost to entry than Airbnb paid.

But what about technology you say? They've built a great platform that will take time for a competitor to replicate you say. Well if your business defense is solely based on having a complicated website, you're going to have a bad time.

They've hit on a great idea: home sharing. But they don't own the idea, they don't own the homes and those homes are free to list anywhere they want.