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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

This is something I've struggled with as well conceptually. The company has 12000+ employees and is essentially an online marketplace.

I mean at what point will people stop valuing a business like that like a tech company and start valuing it like a rental company? Because the defining feature of technology is essentially low marginal cost at scale, and these companies just seem to keep growing in their human labour.

This seems generally true for a lot of companies in the "sharing economy" space.

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I think a good counter example is Etsy. They're like an old dog in the startup unicorn space. They took an existing market and commoditized it. Grew too fast behind a sneaky CEO and well-publicized tech culture. Went IPO, got sued, fired the CEO, let go off a bunch of staff working on projects outside their core business. And since then have been kinda cruising for a while earning a lot of revenue and keeping their business stable. They have <1000 employees to do all of this which seems like a reasonable number.

> Because the defining feature of technology is essentially low marginal cost at scale

Outside of the current crisis I think this holds true doesn't it? I'd be curious to compare how many employees AirBnb has per bedroom compared to a hotel chain (and then factor in that they are still in the process of scaling).

The issue now means they have pretty much zero revenue, but that's kind of beside the point. I'd venture to guess they can manage costs better than a hotel since they don't actually own any buildings, or employ the folks that maintain those buildings. As far as property costs, they take a one time hit on cancellations.

I feel like it’s unfair to suggest they stop valuing the company like a tech company while simultaneously calling them nothing more than an online marketplace.

Google suggests Marriot has 176,000 employees, and Hilton 169,000. So AirBnB is massively smaller, still.

Underestimating employee counts is a phenomenon similar to underestimating software rewrite costs/time. The happy path seems simple... but then there's thousands of marginal features or requirements that have come up over the years that make the thing more viable that all take more people and more time.

AirBnb doesn't operate any properties. I'd bet 90% of Marriott and Hilton staff are running hotels. Not applying machine learning to the check-in process.

Well, yes, exactly. That's the theory behind their valuation: that they might be able to capture the revenue with much lower overhead.

Your guess of 90% seems in line with AirBnB: 0.1 * 170,000 = 17,000, which is still more than AirBnB's current headcount, right?

A marginal amount considering you need to have far less operational staff "below the line" when you don't have thousands of properties to manage.

Its understandable why a global hotel chain would have so many employees. Each location needs management staff, supervisors, front desk attendants, housekeepers, etc. Makes sense why AirBnB is so much smaller. It's still curious why they have so many employees. Probably a lot of regional support staff but idk.

> Google suggests Marriot has 176,000 employees, and Hilton 169,000. So AirBnB is massively smaller, still.

Marriot et al employ hotel staff, cleaners, chefs, restaurant staff, bar staff... people to run a hospitality business.

Should Airbnb start counting every host on the platform and then every cleaning person that cleans the apartment?

Fairer comparison would be booking.com with 17000 people. Which still seems quite high to be honest.

The core strength of tech startups is the scalability without increasing headcounts. AirBnB is throwing that strength away in the pursuit of growth.

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