Airbnb to Halt All Marketing, Most Hiring as Losses Mount | Hacker News Reader

Airbnb to Halt All Marketing, Most Hiring as Losses Mount

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50 pointsjustswim24 comments

I think there was a previous discussion on this article a couple of days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22707365

The link there is non-paywalled.

It would be surprising if marketing wasn't already down by 99% a month ago. Travel industry is going through an existential crisis. Even when the pandemic is controlled, it would take atleast 1-3 quarters for consumer confidence to be back enough to sustainable tourism industry. Corporate will also reduce travel because of scare and in general financial pressure.

Places like Maldives, Bali, Hawaii will be badly hit, as most of the economy is based on tourism.

This is precisely why I’m largely against bailouts. This is a time for the better run companies — whose CEOs were prudent, saved up for a rainy day, and are all-around better operators — should be snapping up inferior run companies at bargain prices.

The sick companies should be allowed to die a peaceful death so the better ones can multiply.

> The sick companies should be allowed to die a peaceful death so the better ones can multiply.

I don't quite buy that for travel, though, which is in a depression that has never been seen before. It's not like putting some antibiotics on a petri dish and letting the "strongest" microbes survive to reproduce. It's like throwing the petri dish in an incinerator and saying "Oh yeah, just waiting for those fire-resistant microbes to get stronger!"

This virus is not just going to kill sick companies, but also plenty of otherwise healthy ones.

I wonder, in such moments is it better to layoff completely or put the employees in perhaps pre-aggreed 20 to 25% work regimes, in order to be flexible when the times are good again? Because eventually, they will.

Most employees will not accept this and would rather go work somewhere full time, and can find such work since the FAANGs shouldn’t be too harshly impacted.

Right but you'd be utterly naive to expect companies which are still hiring to hire on the same generous terms of one year ago. I fully expect compensation, perks, and the "hiring bar", to begin to strongly favor the hiring companies who now get an even better pick of the litter.

I think you're being a little overly optimistic. FAANGs will have pick of the litter, they're not just going to absorb all refugees from travel tech.

Right, but I feel like almost any Airbnb engineer can get more than 25% of their salary somewhere.

But why do you feel that way?

Because software engineering is valuable even in a recession, and someone will be willing to pay someone more to work than Airbnb will pay them to not work.

You are right that most won't be happy, but any hiring will only occur after the pandemic is over because there's not enough personnel to do interviews right now. As for what happens after the pandemic, things might be back to normal.

During the 2008 crisis, EMC^2's CEO Joe Tucci announced a company-wide cut in salary instead of laying off people... I think that was a prudent decision. Keeps morale high, team culture intact and plans in place. They did change the ESPP rules (close price) but never restored the old ESPP (min of open and close) after they restored the pay :-P

I doubt it as the great employees will find jobs elsewhere and you’ll be left hanging onto the bottom of the barrel that knows they’re not worth the %25. They won’t leave until laid off as they’d know they can’t find meaningful work elsewhere.

Best bet is to lay-off fast as possible, as much as needed, so that’s it’s done and not hanging over the heads of your workers. Nobody wants to wait on the deck of a sinking ship.

It's called 'Kurzarbeit' (short work) in German. That's what brought Germany comparatively well through the financial crisis 2008.

The cost of hiring and training new personnel are pretty high, actually. It's usually much cheaper for a company to keep its staff than being forced to hire new people after a (short-term) crisis is over. "Kurzarbeit" does allow a company to keep their employees and only pay a part of the wages. Some of the rest is paid by the government, and wages are a bit lower than usual. That means: The cost is distributed between company, state and staff. Which seems a pretty good way to get through a crisis.

It's going to be interesting to see what they do about their IPO, it seems like their RSU's "are set to start expiring in November 2020 and in mid-2021" [1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/technology/airbnb-employe...

Say bye to that projected 2020 IPO

Ironically the amount of people that want to get out of town for a weekend is likely higher than ever. Was just looking at flights tonight, $42 round trip from Columbus to San Diego on Spirit (pack light!) and $200 on pretty much any airline to any spot along the west coast. I'm working from home, my kids are either unencumbered or schooling remotely, really never been a better time to book a place for a month and get out of this undecided Ohio weather. Tis a shame...

Edit: I'm not really going to travel folks, lol.

AirBnB has always had a really high concentration of units in cities, though, were people are leaving, and a lower concentration of units in "typical" vacation destinations like beaches and mountains when compared to a site like VRBO. That has changed a lot over time as AirBnB has expanded and VRBO has tried, especially after it was acquired by Expedia, to get more urban inventory, but my guess is it is still largely true. The more traditional vacation homes on VRBO are also the types of homes where I would prefer to be in a quarantine, as opposed to a place that looked (and felt) like it was obviously someone's primary residence most of the time.

Yeah we almost exclusively used VRBO for 10+ years as the family was growing. The thing here is i wouldn't want anything to do with a metro or vacation spot. I'd be looking for a place in some backwater town that nobody would have any interest vacationing in. That kind of setting seems like the domain of AirBnB. My local town has three properties on AirBnB, for example, and nothing on VRBO within ten miles.

"Start up" companies need to also cut down their frivolous expenditures such as office deco, unhealthy snacks, company boondoggle trips...and a long list of pareto tail items that if added can be a significant recurring cost to the business. It almost feels like when economy is good, instead of capitalizing on efficiency and perfection; the choice is instead to ship broken products and waste insane amounts of money - reminds me of pre-dotcom bubble when people were spending VC cash like there is no tomorrow. Use capital to increase business leverage. Employees are also at fault - startup folks demand such cool places to work because that's what everybody does. The effect compounds with no one looking at it from the bird's eyes perspective - not company leaders, not employees and not investors.

really not sure what you're getting at and how this is connected to the pandemic. Contrary to what HN may peddle, "startup" is not an industry. Many startups are in industries that are doing extremely well right now. E.g., with people spending so much time inside, online entertainment in all its varieties is thriving.

I am just speaking in general - nothing to do with this pandemic. If we look at the difference of company culture in say Munich, Boston, Osaka, etc vs. Silicon Valley; there is a huge amount of waste:

Airbnb Office: https://www.google.com/search?q=airbnb+offices&client=firefo...

I am sure there are exceptions but I am commenting on what I perceive as a person living in the silicon valley. "Start up" companies - meaning the unicorns - sink a lot of money into things to attract people. What they have a simple office and benefits, provide more pay to the employees or invest back into the company to increase leverage? I also heard that Airbnb CEO was grilled by the board for all this spending, quoting WSJ [1]

> Executives were grilled at a board meeting late last year on why overheads such as its head office and employee expenses had been allowed to balloon, outpacing even the then-rapid growth in revenue.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/airbnb-racks-up-hundreds-of-mil...

This seems to be a pattern in silicon valley. Get a ton of VC money, spend it on nice stuff because profitability is 10 years down the line.

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