Hacker News Reader

Comment by DamnYuppie | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who is super eager for them to go public so that I can short them?

I'm super eager for the opposite reason: I want to go long. In 3 years people's travel habits will mostly be back to normal, and AirBnb has a very strong competitive moat

What's their moat?

The main one to me is network effect. Hosts will join the platform because there are renters there, renters will join because there are hosts.

You should also be a chef because people will never stop eating.

This is a train that went away a long time ago. AirBNB is slowing down and becoming the yellow pages/TripAdvisor of the internet (that is very clear in terms of the commodification of the review process).

It doesn’t mean they will fail, however you can’t just state they will grow forever.

> You should also be a chef because people will never stop eating.

Not sure how this has anything to do with the network effect point I brought up. I definitely never stated they will "grow forever", I said the network effects of their platform are a sort of moat.

Do you have a source for AirBNB slowing down?

You brought up a very obvious point.

Any marketplace will benefit from network effects. The devil is in the extent to which you can take advantage of these. And you made no points about that.

Sure, my comment wasn't great. Was just surprised by the chef thing since it seemed like a non sequitur.

Do you have the source about the slowdown? Really curious.

As soon as a competitor comes along that is better for landlords, renters or has a good marketing campaign people will move.

The network effect is not that of Facebook where you would have to convince all your friends and family to sign up and start using a new site/app.

I suppose they could just buy the competitor like Facebook does, assuming another large corp is not behind it.

Better how?

Though, I agree the network effect here isn't as strong as for a social network.

I think they're moat is more of a wading pond. They've relied on user interface dark patterns and sleaziness far too much. They're highly political, which has alienated a lot of people who disagree with their politics. People who DO agree are also likely to dislike what Airbnb has done to rents in many places. Basically, a lot of people hate them.

That stickiness goes away when a credible competitor steps in.

I think if an organization like Google were to start listing similar listing on Maps alongside hotels, they'd be done for. If a competitor were to start with listings on several major travel websites (and easy way to do that is by taking them on as investors), that would also overcome any such moat.

I think whether they do okay or not depends more on the credibility of the competition than on any moat.

I don't believe they have a strong competitive moat at all. They don't own the properties they rent, there are a myriad of other services that the exact same properties can list on. They have market/mind share but that can easily wane.

There's the old saying, It's Probably Overpriced. Not just tech stocks, not just Airbnb.

We wrote similar comments at almost the same time. Yes and Yes.

They're a pretty shady experience as a guest, so on a personal level I'm upset (per other comment). There's a pandemic and economic catastrophe, so there's a good bear argument that adds to the already bear argument that cities around the world are cracking down on AirBNB rentals because they're easy political targets.

Good luck with that. In this market stonks only go up.

Why do you think AirBNB will be overvalued?

Because this happens with every SV company that is often in the news.

My zoom stock is doing quite well, thank you very much.

Pagerduty was a letdown, though.

I'm long term bullish too, but most companies don't take off after their IPO. I like the approach of buying the stock and selling calls on top of them (to also capitalize on high IV).

SV Bubble v real world is a 30% discount minimum.

I'm eager for them to go public so people who short them can lose their shirts.

It seems highly likely that you are not, and therefore that this trade is much less of an obvious win than you appear to assume.

What do you mean? If lots of people short a stock, the crowdedness are borrow costs, or a short squeeze if things go south (or should I say north).

It's a see-saw here. The lower it goes the lower it will go.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com