This might be a stupid question but what do you do after you secure such a large series of funding? Go on mass expansion? Would anyone mind telling me how startups typically use this kind of money (closing Series with 100+mil)?
* Mainstream promotional marketing
* Direct sales efforts (identifying target markets, staffing sales teams to pursue them)
* Business model changes to ramp up customer acquisition at the expense of profitability
* Rollups of related companies and acquisition of complementary companies.
* International expansion
* Lobbying
And there's just always something to be said for having a war chest; in today's climate, if you can lock in a very long runway at favorable terms because it's obvious you have a great shot at financial success, why not? The saying goes, "when you're hitting your numbers, you're in charge; when you're not, your investors are in charge". Even with more outside investors, Airbnb probably isn't giving up control over their destiny.
The overall point is that business is still conducted by people. Even in today's e-commerce era, people still want to be treated like a human beings by human beings - and us Americans are bloody expensive human beings.
"They're probably going to need the money for customer acquisition. AirBnB is in the highly competitive travel space, where it's very expensive to acquire customers. From Paris, AirBnB has the top Google ad for "vacation rental", which has to be a pretty expensive click. "
via http://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-billion-funding-dst-an...