How The Hell Is This My Fault?
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Arrington's editorializing has been fairly tame in this story. A lot of the mess has been due to EJ's posts and Airbnb's attempts at damage control.
If you look through the original post, there are only a couple of lines where Arrington says Airbnb isn't financially responsible and that is, imho, a fair interpretation of what the spokesperson/Lukezic told him. TC has also done a fair job of publishing Airbnb's side of the story - guest posts, updating their posts, etc.
Airbnb's real problem here is EJ, not Arrington. Airbnb's image isn't getting tarnished by posts on TC, it is getting tarnished by EJ's blog posts which make Airbnb's people seem cold and insensitive.
If you look at PG's comments on the earlier thread, he seemed to imply that Airbnb disagreed with EJ's version of events (they called her before her second post, etc). That could be Airbnb's big problem - it seems to me they want to say EJ is lying but can't in public.
PG has come out in explicit defense on AirBnB's behalf when they are very clearly falling short in the ethical and "right thing to do" department, not to mention trying to censor somebody by pressuring them. Taking about closing funding rounds to a person who has their house burgled and trashed is beyond ludicrous. Disappointing...all in all.
Well, he is invested in them, and he is only human.
While I am not saying that is why he is backing AirBnB, it's good not to forget where people are coming from and where their interests lie.
I'm really surprised how definitive PG sounds. He's not saying "The CEO reassured me in a private chat ...", he's acting like he was a fly on the wall, and saw it all take place.
For example:
"1. What the hell?" is a dramatic and confrontational expression of anger, frustration, and indignation. Justified or not, it reads like a flame war, not journalism.
No, Airbnb's real problem here is their own behaviour. (Unless EJ is simply lying outright about what they've done and what they've not done.)
PG is a thinking man, and an effective one at that. Reading (not that deeply) between the lines, clearly every sensible person initially "has doubts" about the concept, but then apparently meeting the team is supposed to address those doubts.
Sounds like the AirBnB team are excellent as bs'ing people.
And dear PG:
Cheering for AirBnB to become as big as eBay circa 2009's business plan seems to indicate that even the adults here were not giving any weight to the safety and security issues inherent in an eBay scale operation. I would very much appreciate hearing your thoughts about this topic (if any) that informed your decision.
Paul, if you actually read the statements made by the CEO on news.ycombinator.com, it's very clear that AirBnb are the primary, if not only, ones at fault here.
I don't want to call Paul a liar, since it seems likely to me that he has just made a mistake of believing someone else. But he's putting his own reputation behind AirBnb, and AirBnb is lying. That's unwise.
Let me compare a different response that I'm familiar with. A friend of mine had her apartment destroyed in the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks. Insurance companies came and set up booths in Manhattan and were cutting checks left and right, without even SEEING the damage. My friend had a check in her hand on 9/13 if I recall correctly. She didn't get in to SEE her own apartment until a month later, and the insurance company didn't see it until much later than that.
As of today and yesterday, there are articles in newspapers across the land. There are phrases like "As of Friday afternoon, Airbnb had not returned calls from The [Washington] Post requesting comment." - that's a quote from a WashPost story, of course. One thing I know: when the Washington Post calls and a company has something good to say about themselves, they take the call (calls, actually).
It's apparent from the latest newspaper stories that AirBnb is now reacting in a cover-it-up fashion - they're trying to offer the woman a sum of money with the condition that she shut up. That's fine, I guess - very corporate of them.
But frankly I expected better. I guess I sort of expected that even if AirBnb was being dumb, that when the first article hit news.yc, that someone would call them and straighten them out. Instead it seems that PG, also, is blinded by "going to be as big as Ebay".
They technically have no obligation to pay in the case of any damage.
For them, the best possible course of action was to bury this case. However, now that it's come into the public light they're torn between (a) trying to re-iterate to everyone that they do not have liability and (b) trying to look good by doing the "Right Thing".
As a business owner, I feel for them. As a human being, I feel for her. I too am torn, and think that there is going to be no satisfactory resolution to this situation. Someone is not going to come away 'whole', and most likely it will be AirBNB.
I've ripped on them for asking her to take down the blog -that was a huge d-bag move. But, it's not their jobs to be this woman's counselor. I imagine if I was in a similar position I would rely on family & friends. Not a company & their investors. I mean, after they cut a check (which doesn't sound like it's happened) how often are they supposed to call and ask how she's doing?
I'm not one of those who feels that Airbnb has to compensate her for everything or even anything.
BUT, I do think Airbnb needed to do more to inform potential users about the risks involved. No, I'm not talking about a microsite or bolding fine print on their terms of use... I'm talking about messaging along the process.
As I said in another part of this thread, Craigslist does a good job of messaging on the search results page and on the actual posts itself by displaying links on how to avoid being scammed.
On an eBay product page, there is a large buyers protection module and additional text near the product description like "Seller assumes all responsibility for this listing."
While some people aren't going to read them, they at least help set expectations.
I think that's absurd. Would you say the same thing about Craigslist?
> The fact that they don't know the identity of the parties is openly misrepresented by their materials which indicate that the transaction is safe and intentionally try to distract the customer with jokes about the difficulty of moving grand pianos
That's not how I read it at all. They don't claim to know the identity of the other party; they claim that the transaction is safe. Which, it appears, it is. If they've had 2 million nights booked, that's maybe a quarter of a million bookings, and (they claim) this is the first time anything like this has happened. That's pretty safe!
I read the joke about the grand piano as an admission that the only thing that's preventing people from using Airbnb to rob people is that robbing people is generally hard and unprofitable.
Separating the two is what causes situations like this.
No. Some terrible human being who should be in jail is at fault here.
Airbnb and YC are all run by great people. Responding to a crisis like this is never easy. Responding to your first crisis like this is hardest of all.
I wouldn't blame Michael Arrington at all, either. I think he's done a great job at reporting this. But it's not his first rodeo, for some of the other people involved it is, and so I'm not surprised they've made some mistakes.
Also, in regard to the so called "coverup", it's totally natural when someone says bad things about you on the internet to ask them to take them down. That's not a "cover up". That's "being human". Imagine if someone posted a diatribe against one of your children. As a parent, wouldn't you want to get that taken down? Airbnb is these guys' baby.
I grew up in a political family and all the time my father and my family would get slammed in the paper and online. I used to have a knee jerk reaction and email people asking them to take things down. It hurts when people say shit about you, especially if you haven't developed really think skin. EJ is a great writer, so it makes the post that much more stinging. It shouldn't be taken down, but we shouldn't imagine Airbnb's asking for it to be taken down some nefarious "coverup". It's only human.
Not really, at least where the unfolding PR catastrophe is concerned.
It's totally natural, but it's dishonest. It's destroying the historical record. It's depriving the public of their opportunity to make up their own minds about what the truth is. Cheating and stealing and killing are part of "being human", too, but that doesn't mean we have to condone them.
And how well did that work out for you (and your dad)? The knee-jerk reaction is as primitive and counterproductive as it is understandable. The AirBnB founders aren't naifs to the Internet. They understand the Streisand Effect. It might be understandable for them to want EJ to take down her blog post. But to actually go out and ask her? That's inviting trouble, and the executives at AirBnB had to have known that.
I believe PG used the word "bullshit" in his slander against Arrington's reporting. This isn't PG's "first rodeo" either and so such strong words can't easily be chalked up to just "being human" IMHO.
Arrington's a report and PG's an investor. They both have their motives for acting/reacting in certain ways.
I think the mistake being made here is to assume that any party is necessarily "great people" without actually knowing them personally (YC, AirBnb, Arrington, PG, etc.). Even EJ has motivations in making as much noise as possible (ie. her compensation for damages will likely be much better now).
Why anyone would believe somebody with a vested financial interest is beyond me.
In this situation, when the scandal has matured it's too late to cover up. If Airbnb guys believe in their rightness, they are obliged to defend it openly and strongly in all media. Then they have a chance to get unscrewed. And if these guys will continue to fuss and to get nervous it will only make things worse. The main thing is not to make more stupid and unnecessary mistakes
It seems that every time a story breaks about a successful company, a bunch of envious and disgruntled people come out of the woodwork and jump onto the bandwagon headed straight for the founders' heads. A community of seemingly intelligent and rational individuals turns into the most rabid, emotionally-charged group of catty girls I've ever seen. We only have one side of the story here. What if the've offered help and she's rejecting it? What if there are some very legitimate reasons that AirBnB is not going totally public about it? You don't know, and you have not heard the other side of the story.
The same thing happened with Dropbox. You guys were so ridiculously quick to foam at the mouth with your theatrics and conspiracies.
It's pretty revolting. Envy is just not a good color on many of you.
Edit: Spelling. Thanks, Jacques.
Perhaps the anti-commercialism has seeped in too.
This issue is very emotionally charged because:
- everybody that uses AirBNB thought 'this could be me'
- everybody that has a sister thinks 'that could be my sister'
- everybody that runs a start-up thinks 'this could be a
shakedown' (including some preposterous claims about
hotel chains putting her up to this)
- everybody is wondering if AirBNB is sitting on a huge
stack of cash why they didn't just put it right and
changed their terms of service / signup process
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Looking forward to the period after this incident has blown over when AirBNB will be a company that is that much stronger and that will put action to their claims of transparency and being a 'trusted marketplace'.
If they can make that work they'll be fine.
Because ransacking the home of my brother is no big deal, according to modern gender politics, right?
This is the most old-school HN insight I've seen so far, thanks. Quite often, what a business appears to do for it's users (allow you to read your mail on line, hook landlords up with renters) and it's competitive advantage (spam fighting, ad targeting, fraud detection, &c.) are very different things.
Back when I was young and rode a nice, sporty dinosaur to work, I made software for publishing classified ads. On the surface, it's a publishing business. But in reality, it's an operations business, because classifieds used to have very high revenue per column inch, but the transaction costs were also very high. So the profitability of a page of classifieds was driven by how efficiently the paper could take ads.
Anyways, I agree with your speculation. Running a c2c business is going to be all about fraud and other bad actor detection as well as operation efficiency.
* Respond quickly
* Respond in the open so that there's no he-said / she-said
* Be fair, and err on the side of the customer
* Don't spin the company line - be thoughtful, especially if someone has lost money / time / confidence / data / faith in humanity
* Think "This could be me / this could be someone I know & love"
* If relevant, get the authorities involved quickly so that you can be sure it's not a shakedown.
* Assume the customer is telling you the truth unless you have specific and verifiable reason to believe otherwise
* Get insurance
* Don't let others (especially those with interests) speak for you.
* Try to establish a single point person for all contact with the customer, and make that person easily and quickly available to the customer at the customer's behest
* Try not to respond to what's said in the press
Did I miss any good lessons here?
What when you can't establish a single point of contact because you don't have the resources? What current state of your company will you deprioritize to make that a priority?
What does "don't spin the company line - be thoughtful" mean? If your company line changes as soon as you put thought into it then (a) where did you get it in the first place? and (b) in what way does it represent your company, anyway?
What if it turns out AirBnB believed they did respond quickly, fairly, thoughtfully, got the authorities involved, didn't officially let anyone else speak for them, etc. and this situation still developed because human communication is like that and other people didn't perceive the same intentions in their behaviour as they did?
Did I miss any good lessons here?
You can't please all the people all the time? You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs? No gain without pain? Whatever you plan for won't be the thing which trips you up? The best laid plans of mice and men? Shit happens? It's what you do with it that counts?
In particular: "With regards to EJ, we let her down, and for that we are very sorry. We should have responded faster, communicated more sensitively, and taken more decisive action to make sure she felt safe and secure. But we weren’t prepared for the crisis and we dropped the ball. Now we’re dealing with the consequences. In working with the San Francisco Police Department, we are happy to say a suspect is now in custody. Even so, we realize that we have disappointed the community. To EJ, and all the other hosts who have had bad experiences, we know you deserve better from us."
Looks like I wasn't so lame after all in taking some lessons learned. If AirBnB can learn some "obvious" lessons from this incident, so can I... and you.
We're not really thinking that the AirBnB founders, if asked last year, would have said "don't communicate sensitively to a crime victim" or "good customer service means responding slowly" of "don't work with the police", and now they've been hit by this and learned these lessons they know better, are we?
Planning to do everything right first time is a common failure mode and procrastination mode, that's all.
This isn't rational, but we're talking about hearts not heads here. Look at the damage Dow Jones has taken by association with the News of the World.
What happens next time? Airbnb will either settle with the person quietly (as they've done successfully in the past), or the renter will sue the person who damaged or stole their property. That's all there is to it.
Viewed from the future with hindsight, perception shifts to show them as a large company with a shady past "a very insecure system to gain traffic followed by a switchover to a legitimate system".
(This is not the same thing as saying AirBnB planned bad things, it's a musing on how things happen and how things are perceived.).
That said:
People attacked the founders because, for better or worse, they got directly involved in this. And if one of the co-founders really did tell her to take down that blog post to make sure their valuation doesn't take a hit, that'll draw a lot of ire.
Plus, Airbnb has millions of dollars. They have the PR capacity to deal with these scenarios. If they aren't framing their true side of the story, whose fault is that? Like it or not, people are going to speculate especially when there is a long history of corporations side-stepping responsibility. (I am not at all suggesting that Airbnb is not trying to help. I'm saying why I can see how people can assume the worst) The fact that PG has to publicly defend them is ludicrous. It's like a father defending a fully-grown son.
The core issue here beyond the Dropbox security folly and the previous Craigslist/Airbnb debacle (which both sparked a ton of vitriol) is that this exact scenario this woman went through was bound to happen and should not have gotten out of hand. Credit cards get stolen. The process is: phone a 24-hotline, cancel a card, get a new one in the mail, challenge the fees, hopefully get money back. With this Airbnb scenario, the woman had to contact Airbnb through a freelancer who worked for them because no one initially responded to her e-mails or phone calls!
Craigslist does a very good job of warning people of the dangers all across the process. If you click on sublets, there are huge links at the top warning of fraud, scams, and personal safety tips. If you click on a post, there is a giant yellow box that warns the user of scams. On Airbnb: Nothing on the homepage, nothing on the lists of properties, and nothing on the listing itself. Airbnb isn't liable for the damages (as stated by their agreement) but they should have made more of an effort to educate the users of the potential hazards of the site and liabilities for the buyer. Hell, I used Airbnb in Paris and I genuinely thought that Airbnb would have a very responsive team in case shit hit the fan. With Craigslist, there is no false sense of security: every step of the way, they warn you.
The whole situation far bigger than it needed to be.
When users work themselves into a frenzy over an ordinary issue and upvote a stream of mostly duplicate stories about it, we can just kill most of them. But with controversies about YC companies we can't or we'll get accused of censorship.
I don't know if there's a solution. We may just have to resign ourselves to the collective IQ of HN decreasing for a few days whenever there is a controversy involving a YC company.
Huh.
> ...an ordinary issue...
Nice.
I think this is a good illustration of part of what's wrong here. To the woman whose life has been upended by this, this is not "an ordinary issue". Similarly, everyone that's said so far that this has not been handled as gracefully as it could have been, and that there might be something we could all learn from that, should not be dismissed as just being envious of another company.
Actually, it is. Nobody here should be making personal attacks or accusations without knowing the full story. And nobody here knows the full story, yet everyone feels entitled to act as Airbnb's PR team. It reminds me of the redesign attempts where the guy comes in and says "here's what you should do!" and they don't really understand why the decisions were formed or what lead up to them. Weren't we just here with Groupon and Yelp being ripped apart for supposedly being involved in extortion? It turned out to be a bunch of flailing business owners who were on their way down, Groupon and Yelp were just the catalyst. For every one of those complaints, you can find another happy business owner who says those companies have helped them tremendously. What do we see now? This woman is pissed off, and you can see another person who had the same problem happen to his apartment. Everything stolen, horrible experience. With meth addicts. Exact same story, Airbnb settled, he's happy and using Airbnb again.
Airbnb has no financial obligation to this woman. Yet we all still feel entitled to let them know how to run their business because of what happened to one of their customers, and with hardly any information. As if that's bad enough, some people have gone as far as calling Brian psychotic. I hope you realize how absurd that sounds to those of us who know him.
Classy, Paul.
After many years of being faked out, I gradually learned to reserve judgment when my indignation buttons were (intentionally or unintentionally) being pressed, but I still had incomplete information.
Unfortunately brianchesky's comments here are brief and he ignores the replies:
http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=brianchesky
AirBnb are giving low-key responses given the coverage it's received. Perhaps this is for privacy or legal reasons, or for PR / reputation reasons, or they don't think their response will be perceived as adequate by the so-called "angry mob" here. Maybe it's just they don't think it's any of our business how they deal with this situation.
The incomplete information you mention is frustrating. I'm sure many people here like me would like to know how a company should deal with this kind of PR - and personal - crisis, and were hopeful we'd see more of this played out in public after EJ's blog. The visibility this story has received from the upvotes on the TechCrunch, FT, and blog post stories has led to us getting more information than we otherwise would have had.
Are we really being manipulated or "faked out" into voting, or is it not a rational response given that the visibility tends to lead to more information leaking out?
Now the accuser can easily clear all this up by publishing her original communication with airbnb and their exact responses. Instead she continues to post summations which the public here seems to take as a definitive word(wrongly, in my view).
I've a hunch that when the dust settles, we'll be reading a lot of mea culpas from HN users who rushed to judgement against airbnb.
Exactly. To me it seems very suspicious that the airbnb accuser won't release original communication between her and airbnb. She can do that voluntarily. However, airbnb being a corporation cannot do the same unless as a court proceeding. On the same note, airbnb also cannot publicly indulge in setting the record straight and calling out a former customer no matter how much she may be at fault. Folks at HN simply appear oblivious to these finer points.
There's a very obvious solution: Airbnb need to do the right thing. Right now. Publicly and privately.
It's really not hard. Whatever they've done wrong in the past few weeks, they can make right pretty quickly, and the conversation will shift just as quickly.
Until then? All public evidence indicates they're still doing the wrong thing. Really, what do you expect? This is an issue of basic human empathy, and the apparent lack thereof. Business issues have been very much a secondary concern in all discussions about this.
The full story is pretty irrelevant. What we have is clearly sufficient to know that Airbnb doesn't have a clue how to handle this, either with regard to the particular customer, or the wider PR disaster.
One thing I didn't see from this was a response by PG. Only silence.
But I didn't assume his stance. After all, there's a lot that happens behind the scenes. (And I can't track all responses to stories on HN.)
But now we have this story. I'm still open to seeing how things play out and finding out what's really happened. But, so far, it's not looking good for AirBnb or PG. All the sympathy is going to EJ IMO.
And I did see a response by PG which essentially called Arrington's reporting "bullshit." His comments also seemed to directly contradict what EJ said. So someone's not being completely honest.
Given that EJ's the victim and PG's an investor, most readers are likely to be biased in favor of EJ (unless they are an HN/YC/PG fanboy).
So I wouldn't call it shadenfreude. I see it as AirBnb/PG having at track record based on other, recent, controversial events. I think to blame HN or its "collective IQ" is somewhat ignorant and self-serving.
The crux of your (and their) problem is this: Why, if, as you say, airbnb was being as helpful as possible from the get-go, did the victim write that second post?
That's it. You cannot have a claim to credibility until you answer that question. Even if that answer is, "she was paid off", the existence of her second blog post puts the lie to airbnb's (and your) claims. Either she's telling the truth, or they (and you) are. They are mutually exclusive stories.
Bringing Arrington's Arringtonity into this is a red herring. The story isn't about him. There are two involved parties, here, and you've aligned yourself with airbnb. The victim's story isn't being run through the TC filter; it's there for everyone to see. So far, the collective 'you' have not addressed it, refuted her points, or shown how the two accounts are compatible.
It's easy to hop on the "Michael Arrington is a sensationalistic dick" bandwagon, because he is. That doesn't address the issue, though, and it comes across as a deflection.
To me renting your home to a stranger and then failing to check up on them for an entire week is incredibly naive. 10 year old naive. I don't care if airbnb said that they would provide 100% insurance, I would still not do this, it is simply against how I know the world works. And don't tell me about the 'good human being assumption', this is a fairytale, anyone making that assuption will get burned sooner or later.
It's important to have a belief that most people are not looking to screw up your life specifically. It's also important to not be so naive that you take dangerous gambles, like the ones made in EJ's story. Better safe than sorry.
There's an important equilibrium to be struck here.
I'm sorry, but I can't understand this "most people are good" argument in this context.
Call me old fashioned, but I personally believe that we, the technical elite who effortlessly can integrate new tech into our lives and understand the deeper implications of technology being used -- here is looking at you Google founders in context of privacy -- are a form of a pseudo nobility and have responsibilities to our less fortunate brethren (who yes, sometimes DO need big warning stickers on comforters and coffee cups containing excessively hot liquids).
imho, this affair is simply a manifestation of a larger problem:
the profit motive has diluted hacker ethics.
Day 1: A woman had her house trashed by a rogue guest. We do not believe we are legally responsible for this. All AirBnB users, while this is an isolated incident, please take care when taking in guests, especially if they are new users. See our guide to safer AirBnB here...
Day 2: We are working with the police, and have turned over all details relevant to the case. We are also in talks with the unfortunate host, seeing what we can do to help her with through this difficult time. If you wish to leave a supportive note to here, please leave it here:
Day 3. As we have stated, we do not believe we are liable for these actions. However, we overhauling our safety information, and offering support to the victim.
...
Really, it's not hard. OK, it is hard if you think you did no wrong, and everyone should see it from your point of view.
Speculation:
Airbnb offered money and support if she agreed not to sue them and not to feed the press the negative story about the service. She refuses to commit to this, they refuse to pay her without it. None of the two parties wants to be transparent about this part of communication. Technically, no one lied.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?entry_i...
They sound to me like she's slightly walking back her criticism of AirBnb, attributing it, at least in part, to the emotional stress she was feeling.
I spoke to Airbnb about EJ’s situation. They won’t reimburse her for damages, they say, and they do not insure against losses. They are helping police track down the person who did this, but their help ends there.
...with how Arrington now casts the spokesman's statement...
Airbnb’s Christopher Lukezic told me on Wednesday that the company was not responsible for EJ’s losses, that they are just a service to match people and that they were helping the police find the people who did this.
There's a subtle but very important difference: 'not responsible' is not the same as 'their help ends there'.
Did Arrington choose to punish the 'no comment' by using words carefully chosen to make AirBnb look worse? His latest post does not disprove that hypothesis!
And when Arrington says, "What he said is what I wrote [above], and what was in the original post", well that's not true. The original post had a stronger implication AirBnb wasn't helping. Which is exactly what PG was objecting to.
Right now it seems that the whole situation is full or misunderstanding due to massive lack of communication between the people who are actually involved. EJ, AirBnB and SFPD seem to not be exchanging what they know very well. That was echoed in EJ's 2nd post where she says that the police might be giving different info to AirBnB and what not.
Seems like Chesky and Lukezic spent more time talking to Arrington trying to do "PR damage control" rather than talk to their customer EJ. Which, given Arrington's new post, totally backfired, too:
"At least have the decency to stand up and say you’re wrong, Airbnb, and apologize for the lies. Because hiding behind investors, and attacking the press, is both dishonorable and stupid. That’s no way to gain customer trust."
Ouch. If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
Techcrunch have always provided favourable coverage to YC companies, but if that relationship is going tepid because of this affair, the negative fall-out could be far worse for YC than for AirBnB. Most consumers will forget about stories like this after a while, journalists tend to hold grudges (see Arrington vs Calcanis).
I think MA's been treated worse by others. If he's worth his stripes, he'll report on other YC ventures as they deserve to be reported on.
Human nature may creep in, and if YC ventures continue to act in the manner of AirBnB (as reported), I can see a justified negative slant.
Now, if PG wants to sue MA and see what sort of press that generates ....
All this would not have come to this if Airbnb guys asked themselves a simple question. How would I handle this if this happened to my sister of wife.
The main problem is Airbnb had about a month to fix this before it became 'viral'. It was only the post by TC that made me realise this issue was about a month ago (30 days!).
As a fan of Airbnb, (I have not used the service, but i have given them a few customers), I am a bit disappointed in the response. I do not blame them for waat happened to EJ. The problem that has happened is as a result of their reaction to what had happened.
I am kind of amazed that after a month, not one of the founders has gone to see the house (they have the address) but rather they have been doing "everything" to help. This is politician talk, not startup talk. Why startups were really cool was the possibility of getting in touch with the founder of it rather than the "automated customer service of big companies".
The only actionable thing Airbnb have done during the last few days fiasco is try to cover their asses. i.e change the security page, write a blog post on TC and defend themselves. Now anything they do will not be perceived in good faith but in reaction to the angry mob (as PG calls it). It is never good to be reactionary.
If I were the CEO of Airbnb, I would do this:
Go and look physically and look at the house.
Go and look for the victim and be sincere in my apology and request for another chance to start again.
Behave as if it was my sister this thing happened to.
I really hope some good "no win no fee" lawyer has not got to her first. When you are successful, people are out there trying to hang you, please Airbnb, do not give them a rope.
I wish you guys all the best!
They said they're trying to help catch the perpetrator right? In my eyes that's all they really can do and the only thing that matters. The damages are primarily the girl's responsibility but the criminal is partially Airbnb's fault.
It's cheap, considerate and probably much more effective than a simple "sorry" press release. And it has nothing, nothing to do with legal responsibility/liability at this point. When someone is distressed enough to ask specifically for my help, it's the kind of things I'd eagerly do, whether it's my fault or not.
I'm almost absolutely certain Airbnb would have asked the question "How can we make this right?" Anyone would ask that question.
What I suspect is that the girl was not able to answer that question when Airbnb asked it and thus doesn't know what she needs to fix this situation. So naturally she needs an outlet and so she blogged about it.
Totally irrelevant. This has obviously gone beyond "technical liability".
I had the opportunity to hear the founders speak a number of times. They're one of the very few founders that are incredibly genuine about bringing a positive change into the lives of their customers. They live and breathe positive change they bring to the world, to the point where they carry letters from customers that thanked them for saving their lives because the bank would have repossessed their home if not for AirBnB. Jumping on them because they didn't have a chance to give a complete response while handling a crisis is really uncalled for.
I don't know the victim but it's easy to misinterpret events after going through an emotional trauma. Most likely it's a misunderstanding, but even if it isn't, it's really inappropriate to insult people given the information currently available. In fact, it's never appropriate to insult people, and it's best to hold back criticism until more information is available, lest you do some real damage to real people.
There are some valid concerns about where personal responsibility ends and liability begins (legally and ethically), and how AirBnB's service will evolve to address these issues, but there are different ways to discuss these concerns, and discussions here so far have been nothing but poisonous.
EDIT: I posted this comment in the other thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2825045). Sorry for the crosspost, but this is getting ridiculous.
The lack of a complete, definitive account from AirBnB (that is also consistent with EJ's) means that those curious about the event have to speculate about what REALLY happened - a recipe for nastiness.
Edit: Also consider how many doubted EJ's account as well - or even that anything actually happened. More speculation due to the lack of clarity regarding this event.
> I had the opportunity to hear the founders speak a number of times. They're one of the very few founders that are incredibly genuine about bringing a positive change into the lives of their customers.
> * I don't know the victim but it's easy to misinterpret events after going through an emotional trauma. Most likely it's a misunderstanding*
People aren't all good or all bad, and sometimes good people do bad things. Even people you admire. It doesn't mean they're bad people, or that you're a bad judge of character. It just means they screwed up.
You made a judgment about the character of the AirBNB folks and seem unwilling to question them now. But you haven't met the victim, and you're more than willing to imply that this is her misunderstanding while masking this in the faux compassion of saying she's just traumatized.
That's not fair.
He said there are valid concerns here, but is urging people to consider that there may be other factors.
Come on, people.
> I had the opportunity to hear the founders speak a number of times. They're one of the very few founders that are incredibly genuine about bringing a positive change into the lives of their customers.
Don't judge someone's genuineness by listening to them speak or promoting their testimonials. Watch what they actually do.
EJ said as much in the first post. But offers without follow-through are worthless. And the problem is that, from EJ's perspective at least, there has been absolutely none. And swinging a bat at Arrington won't change that.
I'd like to know his philosophies and how he came to his decisions to do what when, his thought processes etc.
Also the important issue here is not just the (terrible) handling of this specific incident by Airbnb but the fact that it puts into question their entire business model: Is it really smart to rent out your personal residence to a complete stranger? Does the potential benefit($$$) outweigh the significant risks(being completely violated)? Yes, they could put in some more checks but will that be enough to make people feel SAFE?
Personally I think the risk is too high and the problem will only become worse as the service tries to expand to more customers and scammers become more aware of it. That nice "guest" may simply be casing the joint, copying your keys and snooping in your mail. Who needs that risk?
I suspect I'm not the only one that thinks that there's a lot of willful ignorance underlying this boom we're all enjoying.
Facebook, Groupon, AirBnB, Twitter and Zynga. All of them without a clean history. My feeling is they all try to go public as fast as possible as long as the Buzz is still there and don't try to create a sustainable business. All of them have bad finances or questionable business models. I would trust Zynga financially the most, but i assume they make their big bucks from people with compulsive gambling disorders.
I think all these people involved know about this and they try to cash out as fast as possible. This is why everyone is so stressed.
Airbnb did see it coming and were careful to cover it in their TOS section 1.2 and 1.4. They have, however, been marketing their service very differently. They've now taken down the FAQ answer about security that had only a joke about grand pianos, but it shows that they were deliberately trying to obfuscate security issues in order to make more sales.
That makes it even more amazing that they had no PR or operational plan in place to deal with the inevitable criminal user.
That is already happening:
http://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-ransackgate-paul-graha...
Honestly, I think a big problem here is that you have men handling a situation in which they were completely oblivious to the feelings of their customer. Men can't possibly appreciate the sense of vulnerability most women have walking down the street alone at night, let alone the sense of violation that occurs from events like this. What the woman in question implied in her blog post was anger that the men were cold and not paying attention to her feelings. My advice would be to find a woman with great customer service experience and give her authority to personally handle this situation, in-person.
That would take care of the immediate problem. Long term, AirBnB needs to develop a strategy for handling these sort of cases. Reports of insurance being offered is a good first step. But they need to think about having disaster teams in place similar to the ones airlines and insurance companies have. They are in the same boat as these companies; when something goes wrong, it goes very very wrong. That leaves people in severe distress and it takes more than just a standard customer service response to deal with situations like this.
Why don't they understand this? Why are they not incredibly active on this and other forums? Have they no conscience? Do they really not care? Is this really still seen by them as a PR problem rather than a a horrible event that they at least partially enabled and thus should feel terrible about and seek to help the victim in any and all ways they can?
The success of eBay, a P2P business, was initially driven by its community, and members treated each other with respect and were happy to trade with each other. AirBnB is behaving as if it doesn't care about its community, its customers.
Is that the death knell sounding? Perhaps. To me the only recourse now is a new person or team at the top, folks that actually live the desired values of the company.
Unfortunately, I believe the best option at this point for AirBnB is to do nothing about it for this specific case, and brace for the next impact by preparing the field in advance (centralize comments in order to assimilate and answer public questions).
This story should not be bigger than what's happened/happening to the victim - and that's huge enough already. Make her feel better first, then see what you can do about your "image". Tell your side of the story in one place and be receptive for critics. Something good can come out of this mess, but they won't find it if they think hiring more people to monitor/participate in more forums on the internet is a solution.
San Francisco is a tiny city (heck, I've walked from one end to the other; it's just 7 miles x 7 miles, or 11km x 11km for the rest of you). Most of the principles in this sad tale live in San Francisco. HOW HARD IS IT TO JUST WALK OVER AND MEET THIS PERSON?? Instead of relying on PR and telephones and email and blogs; just walk over, give her a hug, talk to her and treat her right! Put a human touch on all this interaction, people! It's not like she's living in Podunk, Nebraska (no offense to Nebraskans) and out of reach. She's living right here!
Close your laptops. Put down your iPhones. Just meet her in person and solve her problems. I am willing to bet that a face-2-face with the principles will solve more problems than all the articles in TC, blog posts, etc.
From AirBnB's page: "Airbnb HQ is located in the heart of San Francisco, CA."
The shortfall of AirBNB over here is that they might care, but they aren't coming across as someone caring, and a little bit of empathy coupled with a genuine act of kindness will go a long way over here.
I think the reason they don't do anything to really fix it rather than lip service and lawyer wrangling and dirty PR tricks is they are afraid of setting a precedent. However, they should have thought that through a bit more. They are saying they've had a million rentals or some such with no incident. If that is true, covering someone's damage for the 1 in a million case should be something they can do. Let's say it costs $10,000. That's nothing compared to their profit for those million cases where it didn't happen. By not doing this they are sending several possible messages. One is that they believe that a lot more robberies are going to happen and they have been lucky so far. It's not going to be 1 in a million it's going to be 1 in a 100, and they can't afford to fix 1% of all stays that turn into robberies. This message also means they believe it is impossible to fix, they give up on the idea of ever being able to truly identify renters (the rentees are not as big an issue to identify since their names are on the deeds). I think that's crazy since it's really obvious they have been severely legally negligent in not actually acquiring real identities of renters, though they have certainly implied to rentees that it was safe as if they had. That's probably going to end up being determined by some court or consumer advocacy agency like the FTC to be a misrepresentation. The other bad message they send with this is that if they truly believe it is 1 in a million and they don't want to help her out by finding a place to stay and fixing her apartment, then they are obscenely greedy. There are costs to doing this sort of business after all, you can't just starve the business and take it all for yourself. Some money needs to be set aside for these sorts of 100% predictable and inevitable occurrences.
Whoever is on their hack legal team is should be fired and they should get some real lawyers in there. Obviously they are obsessed with CYA and avoiding responsibility. If that is where they want to be fine but then they have no business running this sort of business. This business is going to have robberies, rapes and murders from time to time. They should have had a plan. Yelling "it's not our fault", threatening the victim, playing the hypocrite, and attacking people who reasonably comment on the story (and through a third party, what cowards) is absolutely not the right approach. What you mentioned is pretty good though, but it's pretty clear that was brought up and dismissed as something that might cost a couple hundred bucks they were too greedy to let go of.
Keep in mind the other story doing the rounds here about the guy in Germany who go stuck with fraudulent rentees charging him money to stay in a house they didn't own, and having to deal with the house owner showing up and asking what he was ding there...
Fact is, before anything else, this is a personal matter, so do it as a person - ideally on your spare time (if you ever can make some) with your personal funds if you can - everyone will accept a founder doing this, it will not engage any responsibility/liability whatsoever, it will not establish any precedent, and it will change the reception radically, for both the victim, the company and the public.
This is a person offering another person to meet, talk aaaaaand 3 years from now we have "Beds & Breaks" hitting the theatres, a movie loosely based on real facts, starring...
As a side note, how big are those appartments in San Francisco? Here in Paris for that kind of money each month you get 60 square meters and no single person can afford those. Most live in a third or a half of this surface.
they are afraid of it to become systematic, that's why they are trying to keep it secret that they are helping her materially etc, but it really doesn't need to:
such a thing happened for the first time, the next times anybody suffered would have to blame only themselves, because they knew the EJ story but handled their keys to stranger without the extensive check.
I think the original sin in all this was yanking the original AirBnB support person who was helping EJ and replacing this contact with CYA bullshit. From EJ's perspective it probably looked very much like AirBnB turning their back on the problem and clamming up. At that point, any offer of financial help just looks like AirBnB trying to pay her to go away.
Once it became clear yesterday that the empathically-challenged kids in charge at Airbnb had no clue of how to manage the problem, and that the company was hemorrhaging tens of millions in notional value every time Brian Chesky opened his mouth and a bunch of lies and half-truths came tumbling out, the investors called an emergency meeting and tried to figure out a way out of this mess.
Clearly, as the situation had been left to rot for a month, giving the victim plenty of time to become more upset and alienated, it was too late to pretend that the situation itself had been handled in any way properly.
There was also no longer any subtle way to silence to victim - that bridge already been burned by the ham-fisted attempt to bully her into deleting her original post... attempts made, incredibly, OVER THE PHONE!
And, as those attempts were now part of the another blog post, it was too late to act like fucking professionals, meet her in person, put her up in five star luxury while they arrange and pay to have her home cleansed, fumigated, redecorated, refurnished, blessed by a witchdoctor, whatever it took to shut her up.... it was too late for all that.
So, Paul Graham, an intelligent man with a good eye for small details, noticed the one and only sliver of a chance Airbnb has to get out of this mess with it's valuation above the billion mark, rather than far below it: the universal antipathy towards Michael Arrington!
So, now, the course is set and, from here on out, Airbnb and their investors are going to completely ignore the truth that it was the victim's own account which contradicts Airbnb's rapidly shifting assertions, and, instead, they are going to pretend that the whole controversy is a link-bait concoction by Silicon Valley's favorite super-villain, Dr. Arrington. What actually happened will not matter and, right now, you can bet the Paul Graham is down on his knees praying that Jason Calacanis will take the tasty Arrington bait and run this story in the other direction.
Of course, the only reason this story has legs is that Chesky's article turned out to be so astonishingly and needlessly untruthful that the victim felt compelled to sit down and write a practically line-by-line rebuttal. It was truly one of the most remarkable own goals I have ever seen and, if you weren't already questioning the sanity of the CEO of a supposedly $1.3bn company not identifying, a month ago when it happened, that this could be a serious IPo blocker and, as such, promptly nailing it down, you have to wonder just how psychotic he is to have written something so bold, to have put himself in the position of being publicly exposed as a complete and utter bullshitter.
So, that is why Micheal is getting it in the neck and, on this occasion, undeservedly so... but you shouldn't let that spoil your enjoyment of it ;)
Nothing incredible there - had these attempts been made in writing/email then there would be no arguing about what was/was not said.
Lesson: Do your shady dealing in person. Failing that, do it with an unscheduled phone call.
However, there is alternative that looks possible(not knowing enough about the story to feel sure about the truth) which is that our victim has lied through her teeth in pursuit of Payout From BigCo - entirely possible given Airbnb's current prominence, and given the wildly over-the-top nature of the story we've been told(worst guests ever, worst service ever, etc). The Airbnb team recognized it for what it is, and chose to fight it. So now they have to battle their way through the bad PR.
EJ is real, she's a real person, it really did happen, just in case anybody was still wondering about that.
I've passed her contact info to PG and him being the smart man that he is I'm pretty sure that he can come up with a solution that will satisfy everybody and will allow the victim to move on and get AirBNB past this crisis. Any words to the effect that AirBNB is 'setting precedent' are null and void, of course they aren't and even if they were it would not matter one bit, sometimes you just need to do the right thing, even if that hurts you financially. Sometimes lawyers are good, sometimes they muddle the water. In this case I'd advise to leave the lawyers out of it, this is an emotional train-wreck and lawyers are only going to make it worse.
The future can wait until after this has been resolved to EJs satisfaction. Customer = King. Be happy that so far the mainstream press seems to be ignoring this story, the last thing you want at this point is to leave that clock ticking to the point where they do pick it up and who knows how many more EJ stories start hitting the news.
Yes, this could be an isolated case, but given the numbers involved it probably isn't.
Whoever lied will have to come clean about it at some point, maybe PG will owe Arrington an apology, maybe not.
Note that 'offering help' and 'giving help' are two very different things, and PG has not said anywhere that AirBNB has given her help, just that they've been offering it from the beginning, it may have been an unconditional offer, or it may have been a conditional one with conditions unacceptable for EJ. If they did nothing tangible for the last 30 days that really is a problem, but that means that PG can still stand by his words. Whatever hang-ups that stop 'offering' turning in to 'given' need to be resolved immediately.
Time will tell, all that depends on what really happened and other than EJ and one or two people at AirBNB nobody knows, the rest is hearsay. It is very well possible that PG is acting on incomplete or wrong info. The fact that AirBNB is willing to move to keep this out of the media during a funding round may tell us a bit about their attitude towards being truthful with investors, assuming that that is true, which we can not take as read at this point.
As far as damage to the apartment, pictures with some proof would help (and would indicate the extent of the damage), and if the truth is to come out about the interaction with AirBNB then someone would have to dump their email cache.
Personally I don't think that is the best way forward (other than for EJ if she's telling the truth and wants to make that more than plain, and AirBNB turns out to have not done anything tangible other than saying they will 'support her' and have 'offered help'), what this mostly needs is to be taken care of, whether that happens in the public eye or not is not relevant.
I exchanged some email with the lady, EJ is right now literally scared out of her wits, concern for her safety and well being should come first, after that, when the situation has been normalized as far as possible there will be a time of reflection for everybody involved, including PG.
YC companies are hitting bigger home-runs each year and with that comes a need for a more professional approach to PR. When you're dealing at this level and you have this many interactions with your customers (2 million nights booked = 4 million chances for someone to be dissatisfied) there will always be trouble. It is unavoidable, so you have to plan for it and you plan for the worst case scenarios.
Luckily, there was no bodily harm in this case, the perps were gone when she returned. But that is just about the only icing on this cake, other than that there needs to be some real hard work done to set this right and to do what can be done to avoid a repetition in the future. And if there is a repetition (imo inevitable) that person should have been warned up front about the risks in an un-ambiguous way.
Best of luck to all involved, especially to EJ and the AirBNB team.
It's not that difficult to figure parts of her identity from her prior postings and personally, if it happened to me and I was concerned for my own safety, that's what I would have done.
The companies exist because they have customers. Therefore, your statement is self-contradictory.
She's already lost her home and her possessions, I think that to ask her to wipe out her online life as well would be a bit much.
I've given her some hints about the ways in which she could tune her postings and some other little details that will make it much harder to track her.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2822877
I figured PG needs to hear both sides of this story and needs to be able to ask questions to get to the bottom of this.
If he doesn't want to get involved at that level I understand, but then it probably would be better if he didn't comment on the matter at all, lest this somehow ends up reflecting bad on YC.
Oh, wow. I don't think you could be more wrong. From her point of view, PG is a going to come accross as a concerned airbnb investor. She is already upset about brian chesky complaining that this incident will affect his ability to raise money for the company which she mentioned in the blog post. A phone call from PG could be like adding petrol to fire, even if he is genuine and wants to help.
What this lady needs is to have one point of interaction with a single person at Airbnb. That person needs the ability to make decisions about financial assistance etc, so preferably one of the founders.
What made you decide to do so and did you ask her for permission to pass on her details to a third party?
Maybe.
> What made you decide to do so and did you ask her for permission to pass on her details to a third party?
I think that PG is a very smart guy and I have some personal reasons to believe that PG has his heart very much in the right place when it comes to things that are this personal. I can not go in to details there, you'll have to trust me on that one.
I did not ask for her permission, but I think that her information is in very trusted hands with Paul and I am 100% sure that he would never ever abuse it.
I would be surprised if these companies have not offered the support of their PR teams to help Airbnb dig themselves out of this hole.
PG to me is the 'father' of all these start-ups, and as I wrote I have personal reasons to believe that he is exactly the right guy for this.
What is needed most at this moment in time is someone with a capacity for empathy and some adult supervision.
PR can come afterwards, my own view of PR is that is mostly about putting something bad in as favorable light as possible, right now there are two parties that simply need some help and some mediation.
Consider that:
- the basis of your very questionable action [1] is precisely the type of taking-shortcuts-due-to-x-factor reasoning that this event is all about.
- the 'perceived cost' of your asking EJ "May I forward your contact info to a man who I fully trust and believe well positioned to address this to all parties' satisfaction?" was apparently deemed [2] to be excessive in the same way the simple prominent and bold statement "AirBnB takes NO responsibilities for actions of either providers or renters".
[1]: forwarding identity to PG.
[2]: you seem like a very smart guy. this can not have been an omission.
[edit: fix notes]
> : forwarding identity to PG. : you seem like a very smart guy. this can not have been an omission.
All I passed was her email address and her first name, both of which were very easily found*, and I told her exactly how those were obtained.
If you think that I did that purposefully bypassing her permission then I can simply respond with saying that that is not the case, you can believe whatever you wish.
> the thought that she would object never crossed my mind, my bad.
I believe you!
And here then is the point for all geeks present: Clearly even smart, informed, people make mistakes. The notion of 'buyer beware' is the ethics of hucksters, not Hackers.
Yes, PR people are professionals whose jobs are to make something look good; companies don't hire PR pros to rip the company.
So yes, the cynical take is that PR will spin bad things into a positive light...but which major stakeholder of a company --including its founders -- wouldn't? Even when a founder or lead developer of a large company issues a mea culpa that starts with "We screwed up...", there has still been a calculation made that such an admittance is good public relations and relatively free of legal liability.
Your implication may be that PR pros are more likely to have less of a conscience, and since they aren't hard-working developers and builders like the rest of us, they are more likely to lie with a smile...
I can't point to any empirical evidence that they do or don't, and I predict neither can you. But what you did, and what the coffee-drinking co-founder reportedly did (from EJ's perspective), make a very strong case for the importance of a competent PR person.
Quite simply, that competent PR person is the overseer of what has been said so far by the company, by the plaintiff, by the lawyers, and by the media. He or she, ideally, when queried by any of these parties, will answer such queries honestly with what he knows has been previously stated and/or promised by the other party, or will say "I don't know that, let me ask [x,y,z] and I will get back to you."
I understand how that's not a good enough decisive answer for anyone here, but that's the limits of human communication when dozens of stakeholders are involved. Some things are delayed because due diligence requires it...such is the complexity of life.
So who knows what really went on in the mind of the co-founder when he asked EJ to coffee. But according to her, we might assume that he himself assumed that EJ was properly comforted enough to send her a get-down-to-business email. She apparently was not. How could such a drastic misunderstanding happen when a co-founder, in your perfect world, is ostensibly the end-all point of proper decision and action?
To compound the problem, Brian Chesky writes the prototypical PR statement that looks downright shady in retrospect after EJ swiftly responds with a dramatic blog post that also accuses someone at airbnb of attempting to silence her blog.
Let's give Chesky the benefit of the doubt that he didn't know or condone such a request. Well, some well-intended white (from the investors' perspective) or black (from many other people's perspective) knight from airbnb apparently did so.
On top of all of that, EJ accuses airbnb of cold shouldering her until the blog blowup at HN. Hell, I don't remember the exact timeline, but I doubt even most of the avid participants in this thread do...certainly none of the newcomers won't bother sketching out a flowchart for themselves.
Boy, having one competent person be the sole point of contact -- even just a smooth-talking PR underling -- sure sounds good right now. Even if we give the co-founders the benefit of the doubt of being as upfront and willing to help as possible, the apparent innocent miscommunications have made many people, including MA, very jaded.
And now you've thrown yourself into the mix, in the belief that this is all caused by the immature incompetent behavior of the airbnb executive team (boy, that's a great message to future airbnb investors) and failed PR...don't you think it's a wee bit ironic to make your "I-tracked-her-down-and-gave-her-info-to-PG-because-I-can't-see-PG-screwing-this-up" comment in a HN thread based on a TechCrunch post in which a self-professed fan of airbnb accuses PG of outright lying?
If providing fodder for another top-voted HN thread that accuses airbnb of a coverup isn't a screw-up, then, well...
In any case, you might be a well-intentioned, smart developer and entrepreneur. But you've made mistakes that I hope even an undergrad in communications wouldn't have. I hate to be the one speaking out for PR professionals, but for godssake, hire one in your next large-scale venture.
Wow, how exactly is that your decision to make?
With what I know about PG and the situation as it has been presented to date if he gets involved he will resolve it, if he does not then it will quite probably blow up with as the only winners the lawyers.
Note that technically EJ is not entitled to any compensation, but morally she definitely is.
Someone that can influence AirBNB to do the right thing here and that has a very good idea on what the public opinion on this thing will do to AirBNB when - not if - it will hit the mainstream is what's called for.
Judging by the speed with which HN has turned from 'gung ho pro AirBNB' to ripping it to shreds I think that there is evidence enough that the public opinion will not be favorable to AirBNB and that PG is well aware of this.
Jesus I wish these self-important fucks would stop bragging about how fucking great they are. Actually, just stop talking, all of you. Shut up, and do some fucking work.
Also, take your language back to 4chan whence you came.
[1] Other than offering pitty.
This is not a movie. This is not a case of a burning house and you're the only one in the vicinity to rush into and rescue a child stuck in his room. In fact, if there is a burning house and the firefighters have already arrived, your well intentioned actions may put their lives at risk
Not all "good" actions remain "good" in every context.
1. The expectations of everyone involved. Does EJ have an expectation of privacy? Could she be expecting to keep her personal life, as much as possible, separate from the whole flap on the internet? Does AirBnB have an expectation of handling this without PG's assistance? Does PG have an expectation of not being dragged into a situation in which he could have involved himself if he so wished? (I think it's pretty clear at this point what my opinion of jacques' actions here is.)
2. All of the possible outcomes, and the likelihood of each one. Is it possible that tracking down someone's contact information -- using information gleaned from their blog -- will emotionally harm them in a situation that has already made them feel extremely vulnerable? Is it possible that there are currently unknown legal complications now, and that PG cannot become involved? Is it possible that attempting to involve him could make the situation even more complicated?
3. Whether or not the interference is even needed. Look, EJ has managed to get her story into the print edition of the Financial Times. It's spreading like wildfire online. I think it's very clear that she can handle herself. And, if AirBnB can't handle themselves, with all the money they recently raised and all of the resources they have at their disposal (monetary and advisory and otherwise), then they have no business being in business.
I've interfered in others' lives and situations on numerous occasions. I've seen the results of my actions go sideways. I've put more and more effort into understanding and considering a situation before leaping in. I've, finally, more recently, resolved to quit screwing around in other people's situations as much as possible.
Perhaps putting his internet detective skills to work only to let the woman know that her identity was at risk would have been a smart thing to do. Passing her contact information on to a third party -- regardless of who that party is or why -- without either her permission or that third party's permission, was a rookie mistake. It might have been well-meaning, but it was still a mistake.
The guy getting unfairly downvoted up above is exactly right: we should all be shutting the hell up and getting some fucking work done. (Myself included.)
PG dragged himself in to it by standing up for AirBNB's actions in a public forum.
He probably should not have done that.
> Passing her contact information on to a third party -- regardless of who that party is or why -- without either her permission or that third party's permission, was a rookie mistake. It might have been well-meaning, but it was still a mistake.
Agreed, and I have apologized to her that I did not seek her consent first, based on the note I received afterwards it seems that she is ok with it, but that does not diminish my mistake and I should be more careful with stuff like that.
First, PG has a financial interest in keeping the company growing strong.
Second and most importantly, if PG intervenes here against the will of other investors, they may not want to invest in future companies where PG is a shareholder. So it is vastly in PG's interest to not act on the contact info you gave him.
Overall, all you did was seriously creep out a vulnerable lady.
I figure PG not talking to all parties is what caused the bigger mess.
> You're telling us to calm down, to not be so brash, but you should have asked for her permission.
I don't like witch hunts.
AirBNB has obviously done a lot of things wrong here but I think they can still recover from this if it gets handled 100% good from now on forward.
I agree, I should have asked for her permission, it never crossed my mind because I feel that it was the right thing to do, and because since PG is an investor he might as well have that information, it's not like he is an outsider to this whole affair, but he is uniquely positioned to see both sides of the story.
But I hope you see how you have potentially mucked things up, and that if this doesn't add more fuel to the fire it's only because all the interested parties are enjoying their weekend. I admire your idealism but there are way too many moving parts and potential for miscommunication for someone to make an act of intervention based on his personal faith in one of the investors involved
> I did not ask for her permission
Jacques, that is not cool. Extremely, extremely not cool. Did you at least tell her you'd done it? Ask for forgiveness? What did she say? (Edit: downthread, jacquesm reports, "I have apologized to her that I did not seek her consent first, based on the note I received afterwards it seems that she is ok with it, but that does not diminish my mistake and I should be more careful with stuff like that.")
Look at it from her perspective. You passed the contact information of a homeless victim of a serious crime to a powerful, world-famous venture capitalist who has a billion-dollar incentive to shut her up. Against her will. If this was a movie plot, we wouldn't see any more blog posts from her, ever again.
I don't know how it usually goes, but I'd like this blind spot to be cleared. She published a number, an email address and a nickname on her blog, but no postal address. So the keys weren't shipped.
She never called the number, and can't tell the gender of her perpetrator. Only the neighborhoods acted as mere witnesses of a "group of people" coming in. This suggest that nobody else was involved in the transaction, no friend or neighborhood to give the key and see the guy.
So the guys "came to her house" and got inside, but it doesn't tell us how. Nobody has been in physical contact with them, and the keys weren't shipped.
I don't want to sound insensitive, but this blind spot buggers me a little. Wonder if she can tell more about it, even if it doesn't sound relevant to her horrible experience. I believe her, maybe the key transaction process was bit naive as well and it wouldn't be relevant (hiding the key somewhere), but it could also mean that the burglary might have happened after the host left (while still being an improbable hypothesis, it would just open a new possibility). It's just a small bug that I'd like to be squashed.
Nobody here is claiming that she is 'on trial', but when you go public with a story there will always be questions.
That is because people will align with your story and your interests if they consider you to be the party that is speaking the truth.
This is a fairly normal thing and has nothing to do with trials. You are seeing this much too black-and-white.
Please tell me who she owes this responsibility to?
To the people, if she cares about public opinion.
> That is because people will align with your story and your interests if they consider you to be the party that is speaking the truth.
This summarizes it all.
But she did this on her personal blog! She didn't go running to the media or fan this story. The story got picked up here then exploded. That was not her choice, and it caused her privacy to be invaded again -- by folks like us trying to figure out who she is, how credible she is, what she should or shouldn't have done, how she's feeling, etc. -- all while she's still recovering from the initial episode.
If you're referring to her follow up post, don't you think she's entitled to speak up to address this discussion, given how the circumstances unfolded (again, which she never chose)?
And it worked, very well.
By now, it should be pretty clear to everyone that she is 'on trial', although perhaps not by choice. I've observed with events prior to this that anyone can start one of these public trials by posting an accusation publicly. Then that opening statement is responded to by the defendant, also publicly. At which point its 'game on' as it were.
I suspect it is a natural consequence of the desire to know by the folks involved, whether its poor EJ here or 'geohot' or Charlie Sheen. Everyone wants to know "what is right?" or "what is the real story here?" and that process that people go through and the community that participates in it, has all of the elements of a trial. Evidence is uncovered and presented, testimony is called for and presented from various people involved, pundits line up to endorse or discredit evidence and/or folks testimonies.
So there are a lot of questions. Clearly there is a lot of outrage here and elsewhere. Hopefully it will be sorted out to everyone's satisfaction, and it certainly will provide a test of AirBnB's management team.
Like many here, I share the outrage and the commensurate desire to help. I recognize that being effectively outside the event horizon (wasn't a witness, not a personal friend, not an investor, not a freelance plaintiff lawyer, etc etc) I'm limited to offering moral support.
There you go again Jacques with your wording that is designed to raise suspicion on the crime victim and her motivations. You pass her personal identity to an investor with a billion dollar reason to silence her, you say she should show proof she was really robbed in the form of photographs on the internet of her personal private home that was already violated, and now you are implying that she went public because she is greedy and is leveraging negative publicity in a negotiation of settlement terms. Yes, you will respond to this that you are not implying any of that and, but that is bullshit. You know exactly what you are doing Jacques, it's quite clear. Jacques, I want an answer for you, what are your financial and professional relationships with YCombinator. That's two questions there.
Putting her on trial and stalking her is disgusting. Your claiming you are not doing it as you are doing it is not fooling anyone. You are a psychopath. Stop what you are doing right now.
You want to know why she went public? BECAUSE AIRBNB DID NOT KNOW THE IDENTITY OF THE PEOPLE THAT THEY ALLOWED TO ROB HER HOUSE. That is legal negligence on their part, but it also created a situation where she is not safe. Not that she "feels unsafe". This has nothing to do with feelings. She IS unsafe because the people who robbed her apartment stalked her by email, manipulated her, and were still out there at large a month after the crime was discovered. Their stalking was almost but not quite as malicious as you are being right here right now with your public insinuations.
None and None. That's two answers.
Whether you'll believe me or not is another point of course.
On the other hand, she had the good luck to be criminalised by people who went to all the effort of using a service to make sure the home they robbed was empty instead of chancing it on one that looked empty, to lie to her during the crime to keep from being discovered, to be gone before she returned, and to have not returned for a month afterwards.
I wonder if there are any studies indicating if she would be at statistically significantly higher risk of crime than most people now?
THE PEOPLE [AirBnB] ALLOWED TO ROB HER HOUSE.
And you accuse jacquesm of manipulative wording.
AirBnB gives tools to pick your guest, the first one being the track record and ratings. Was the rating of Dj Pattrson Good/Bad/Virgin?
They also have a pretty straightforward safety tips page ( http://www.airbnb.com/safety ), but not a single precaution was taken. It appears she didn't even try to call her future guest. No neighborhoods or friends warned, nothing.
AirBnB is taking all the shit for an objectively irresponsible behavior. Nobody deserve what has happened to her, it's just horrible. On the other hand, AirBnB taking all the shit for this doesn't seem fair as well. They handled the crisis in a poor manner, but the perpetrators should be the ones paying for the damages.
AirBnB aside, she doesn't seem to take some responsibility for it (the rape victim analogy), and it's just not fair or reflective of the whole picture, if you're being objective for a minute this is the simple truth. I truly hope she will recover and learn from this awful experience.
Visual proof has already been obtained by the police. Why does the victim have to provide photos to the general public?
For that matter, why does she have to "dump her email cache"?
Are we putting her on trial on HN?
Obviously not, maybe you should re-read that sentence in context.
Pictures of the extent of the damage would go a long way towards explaining why she feels the way she does in a way that words will never be able to.
For that matter, I think you've got some nerve tracking her down, handing her contact details over to an Airbnb investor and claiming to be helping her to find an objective independent mediator.
AirBNB has - in my opinion - been doing the very wrong thing here for much too long and this will blow up at some point if something isn't done pronto.
Tracking her down sounds like it was real work, believe me it wasn't, and as I explained below I gave her some hints on how to make that a lot harder than it was last night.
I figure that if by Monday this hasn't been resolved to everybody's satisfaction that it could get really ugly with losers all around, and EJ who has already lost more than anybody should go through still stands to lose the most. Once lawyers get involved all bets are off.
If you don't trust Paul to be objective when given the opportunity then that's your call.
EJ says that AirBnB didn't offer to help and stopped communicating with her after the 25th of June. That's in direct conflict with pg's report to TechCrunch.
It's one thing for AirBnB to say "hey, buyer beware – you know the risks". (In fact, that's a perfectly valid response, albeit not a great business move.) But it's an entirely different thing to dispute the victim's story.
Now we're in a situation where someone is not telling the truth. On one side, you have a group of people with a lot of money and time invested into a business. On the other side, you have an extremely sympathetic victim of a crime. And somewhere in the middle is the fact that these kinds of unfortunate eventualities should have been obvious to both AirBnB and to their users.
If it turns out they attached a bunch of conditions to their offer (for instance: you have to remove your blog posts or you have to write something positive) then they might as well not have made these 'offers'.
An offer of help should be unconditional. And from EJs point of view being muzzled would obviously be unacceptable.
That's pure speculation on my part, but it is one interpretation that would be consistent with what everybody has said so far with nobody having told a falsehood.
I don't think that's factually correct. I believe she says communication stopped after the 30th of June.
pg says this, "I’ve just learned more about this situation, and it turns out Airbnb has been offering to fix it, from the very beginning. From the beginning they offered to pay to get her a new place and new stuff, and do whatever else she wanted."
I suspect they may have said that on June 30th. And then they went dark. It seems no one at AirBnB has actually said they made contact with EJ during the month of July at all, until the night before her second blog post on this incident.
To me it sounds like it may not have been malicious on AirBnBs part, but rather a dropped ball. Someone probably had tons of other work on their plate and didn't follow-up with her. After a week forget about it. Until her first blog entry went up...
Now, if they tried to wash their hands by handing it over to their lawyer to "solve", that might be different, but still reprehensible.
Lots of people (including the parent and grandparent post here) have been treating this as a 'cutoff'. That's how EJ felt. That feeling comes across in how she chose to describe everything, but the real message she's sending is that she stopped liking the communication after June 30th, not that it ended.
My theory is that's because some initially empathetic support people were replaced with a 'just-the-facts' cofounder. Let's say he's trying to help by concentrating on the tangibles – do you have a place to stay? ok. is the perp caught? ok. will you call if you need anything? ok. is there any way we can twist this ending for you so you wrap things up on your blog more positively so people know AirBnb helped? er...
That style of communication could rub a still-stressed victim the wrong way. And a request like the last one could have been intended as a way of asking, "how do we help you so much that you can balance the fear and anger of your June 29th post with something better in an update?"... but instead be misinterpreted as untoward pressure.
That's just a theory, but it's a better theory than the one that AirBnb are jerks, or the false idea (based on various misreadings of EJ) that no offer of financial support was made and no communication happened for weeks. EJ's own posts refute those ideas.
When dealing with contentious, emotionally-charged situations, give everyone involved the benefit of the doubt.
I know we're posting on the HN temple of the YC church, so I always expect a little bit of fanboyism in attitudes towards PG, but you've really gone off the deep end if you think that in this situation Graham is anything but just another investor.
Yes, PG is an investor (or, more accurately, YC is an investor), but I've seen enough of Paul to know that he's more than 'just another investor' and if it turns out I'm wrong about that I'll be most surprised, I have not seen any evidence to date that PG does wrong by anybody when he has all the facts.
And that last bit is where I think the problem lies.
Calling YC a church and HN a temple is really ridiculous.
It's okay to connect her to Paul because...
- he's smarter than a typical investor? - he's more involved than a typical investor? - he's more wise than a typical investor?
If anything, PG and YC are much less involved than a typical investor (VC) when the company is at this stage. No board seat (for starters. But also he's invested in 100+ companies over the last few years. The other VCs involved here focus all their time on the 3-5 investments they have made over this period.
So I guess I just don't see the point. As far as I can think, either you're saying he's different because he's way better, which may be true but not fair to assume all would know or agree (see the church/temple posts above), or because YC's investment model is different, which to me would be true but with the opposite implication.
Both EJ and Paul stand to gain from resolving this situation quickly and orderly.
And both could lose considerably if this is allowed to drag on much longer and/or hits the mainstream press.
This honestly sounds borderline threatening. But judging from your recent actions, I don't expect you to take care with how things are said.
So, in this situation, Paul Graham is definitely not "just another investor" - he's a mentor too.
We believe you when you say your intentions were good, but that doesn't really excuse the actions.
This is the creepiest thing I've ever heard. She's had her personal space and privacy violated in a terrible way, and you're passing around her contact details? Did you ask her permission?
I passed her contact information to the one guy that I think can keep his head cool enough to solve this in a way that is beneficial to her. You may disagree with that but that's fine with me.
> She mentioned in both blog posts that she is trying to keep her personal details private.
Yes, and I helped her doing just that by pointing out which parts of her blog allow people to figure out who she is.
PG has a vested interest here -- he's an investor, not a neutral party.
Hearing both sides of the story is crucial in that, as long as he's hearing just one side he probably should not be commenting on this.
The alternative is that he will let AirBNB solve this by themselves, based on the data available so far I think that will not work out well.
Based on the data so far, many people would agree that EJ seem spooked by he fast moving world of innovative startups, social networking, and venture capitalism. Based on the fact that she has been saying how terrified she's been to release even the basic info about the situation yet didn't have the foresight to remove past entries from her blog, I'd say it is also safe to say that she is naive about the state of privacy in the online world.
So you take it upon yourself to not only track her down, but give her personal details to someone with a financial stake in what has been described as a billion dollar hyperstartup.
Think about that, from her perspective and from the perspective of her sympathizers.
We saw yesterday how she interpreted what may have been the sincerest of emails by a cofounder to get coffee as a calculated uncaring attempt to quiet her.
And now she receives correspondence from someone with no apparent connection to airbnb who, btw, sent her info to a well known backer of a billion dollar company.
What the hell do you think she'll do? Spend an hour siting on whatever couch she has managed to find for temp residence and read yours and pg's HN profiles and threads and see that you and pg are indeed standup guys??
Look at her past behavior She has already insinuated that airbnb has tried to overtly intimidate her, a tactic, that until yesterday, very few of HN readers would have thought possible of the savvy founders of airbnb.
And now you have faith that this reluctant participant in the ycombinator world will give you the full benefit of the doubt and take the time to learn from secon hand sources that you're not some creep?
When journalists new to this whole debacle come across this thread, how much benefit of the doubt do you think you'll receive?
Do you think that there's a way to fit in "Some hackernews user tracks down fearful airbnb victim and gives her contact info to airbnb backer" AND "airbnb backer had proven track recor of bring unbiased and kindly" into 140 characters.
People thought EJ was naive. I think you've set a new bar.
Maybe you think you are doing the right thing - but think about this from EJ's perspective: A stranger contacts her and points out all the ways she can be identified from her blog... he then passes her contact details on to an investor in Airbnb. He goes on hacker news and comments about how easy it was to identify her.
If I was in her position, feeling vulnerable and suspicious, I'd start to wonder whether your "helpful advice" was in fact a veiled suggestion that she should take down her blog post, or face the risk of being publicly identified and humiliated.
Considering that EJ was already in communication with AirBnB customer service and CEO, and has been publicly asking for more attention from AirBnB, she wouldn't be too surprised that another one of the founding leaders would get involved.
A better way would have been to pass PG's details to her.
The victim shouldn't have to go around knocking on doors to get help. Sometimes it's nice if the help comes to victim on its own volition.
Did you do it with her permission?
Wow, that is some crazy talk. Given that PG sees her as the enemy and his friends at Airbnb the good guys beyond reproach he should not be contacting her. He has absolutely no business doing so. Also, unless she asked for it, it was a massive privacy violation to release that information to a third party. Outrageous. What is he going to do now? Hire thugs to intimidate her? His only connection here is he is a freaking major investor/sponsor of the company that has displayed massive negligence, cover up, and intimidation of the victim. Nothing whatsoever good or proper can come from you, whoever you are, violating her privacy in this way.
As far as the rest of your screed where you suggest she needs to be on trial and provide proof of damage with photos etc, wow, what a psycho douchbag move. Yes, you are a psycho. Please sue me for libel, I would love to go over this claim in court and call attention to your post above in the months leading up to the case. So Jacques, are you the lawyer or PR rep for bnb, or are you an investor? Why do you have her private contact information? Your position that you have explained here is utterly deplorable and insane and you are revealing yourself to be a dangerous person and menace to society.
Wow, that is some crazy talk.
That you don't see a problem with passing on her personal details onto an investor is somewhat disturbing. It's obvious you have an affection for PG, I've read many of his essays, he's a smart guy who has what I'd classify as a mini god complex. But that's irrelevant and so is his intellectual abilities. What is relevant is his very close association with AirBnB.
Honestly, if he HAD to choose between her well being OR AirBnB's, who do you think he would choose?
they should just cut it straight and adress all their users on their own site
First, this whole thing just wreaks of a big disaster of miscommunication between all involved parties. Many commentators I think are being overly sensitive and pedantic (I commented yesterday on the shocking revelation that an airbnb founder would "enjoy meeting" EJ). The following points seem clear to me:
* EJ's perspective is tainted by her negative experience. While she criticized the founder for an impersonal meeting request, she could have disparaged the founder just as easily had it gone the other way: "Oh, the founder sent me this mail gushing with concern... if he really cared, he would have done X and Y differently, now he is just backtracking like a coward in light of media attention"
* airbnb believes that they are helping and is trying to do what's feasible, but is weighed down by concern over insurance, regulation, fault, and other pertinent issues involved in this precedent-setting incident. airbnb also is likely to (subconsciously) give a story that is perhaps unrealistically positive to one of its earliest mentors and investors, who readily believes and defends one of his earliest and most successful investments; I can't help but think there are child-parent-type instincts on that kind of relationship.
* Arrington is writing the story mostly accurately, perhaps not with the rigid journalistic method that ensures precision in retelling, as we generally expect to find lacking in the casual vernacular of a blog. In fact, I think a lot of TC-related controversy stems from nothing more than the casual format that leaves much room for misreadings (and miswritings). While it may not be fun to read or write an article that follows classical journalistic procedure, there is a reason that that procedure was put in place...
* Commentators jump to the defense of EJ prematurely, partly because of white-knight impulses and partly because of the victim's emotionally-charged writing.
I hope that people calm down over this. We need to allow all parties involved some time, I think. This is a major thing in the history of airbnb and the logistics require careful attention -- they may not get it perfectly right, but I believe they're operating out of good faith and trying to do the right thing. I also believe EJ is struggling to get a grip on her new circumstances and would also benefit from some time apart from the sensationalism. As for PG/TC/others, it just causes volumes of unnecessary drama to get publicly entangled.
I'm not sure that anything else productive can be done at this point by continuing to expound on the issue, it merely seems to create more controversy for controversy's sake.
The incident happened a month back and AirBnB didn't resolve it properly for a month. That's enough time to build her a new home if AirBnB wanted to.
If he hasn't done it already you will see PG bring in a top PR person who is experienced in handling a crisis. Not just to get AirBnB out of trouble but to be a resource for future YC companies in handling episodes of this sort. Quite frankly I am shocked their VC's aren't helping them out this way.
But for this event TC is a bit prolonging the situation. Why not talking millions of happy transactions instead of a unlucky bad one? In 2011 bad news still sells.
I can understand them. It's hard to just sit idle when someone irrationally attacks you. At the same time, if you have a customer-business relationship, airing the customer's dirty laundry may be strategicay bad no matter how wrong she is. On the other hand, the customer can write piles and piles of questionable content.
Here's what I'd love: for EJ to post the ordinal emails or to show them to techcrunch or arstechnica for an independent take on the situation. At the moment TC is just a megaphone for both parties. May be this can investigate this at the root with original communication between EJ and airbnb, assuming ej agrees to it. And if she doesn't, I would be as suspicious of her as I may be airbnb having read her posts.
In the end, this won't hurt it will help. (Think of all the weird stuff selling on ebay like dead bodies, dead body parts etc that were constantly publicized many years ago. At times it seemed like there were new stories weekly.)
He's obviously on HN regularly - if he had a problem with the way he was characterized in a HN comment the easiest way to respond to that is right there. Anyone reading pg's comment would see his rebuttal, pg would see it, and people could directlly make up their own minds.
Instead he makes a "oh god look at this liar" TC post because he enjoys using his bully pulpit to shape public opinion. No wonder he lets people like MG call out random CSR lies on twitter and get them fired at AT&T.
In his own forum, MA responded and made a big deal of out this comment.
I think it is a fair response. Not to mention, why would anyone expect MA to not jump on it?
In order of culpability, here are the mistakes they made:
AirBnB's clearly inexperienced leadership has done a horrible job at communication. Sadly, this makes any real action they have taken to help the victim irrelevant to the public. Then again, their business has a fundamental risk, one of crime, which they seem unprepared to address or mitigate. Given their past resourcefulness, I have a feeling they will find ways to improve their product to make this less likely. I am not so sure about their ability to improve their communication.
Michael Arrington's job is to draw more eyeballs to TechCrunch and he invariably picks stoking controversy over responsible journalism. If it wasn't already clear to everyone including pg that he will do this at any cost, it should be now. Michael could have done some real journalism and talked to the police to find out more details, probed AirBnB for more details up front and may be even the victim on the one hand. On the other hand he should certainly have avoided comparing AirBnB to scamville, I don't think anyone thinks AirBnB is scamming users. But that's just who he is. He also takes great pleasure in calling people names. Notice that his latest post about pg has "Liar" emblazoned on the top. Can't say I expected any different, given his past behavior but at least pg will remove his blinders now that Arrington is treating him exactly like he treats non-luminaries.
The fact that PG had to jump into the public fray may have seemed inevitable given AirBnB's incompetent response, but it is almost always a bad tactic to have multiple people presenting the public face of a company. Even minor differences between what they say will be highlighted and will cause more confusion. PG even made the tactical mistake of responding emotionally to Arrington's "make the story more interesting without giving a shit about anyone else" approach, but in the long run this is a good thing. As I said, he'll now remove his blinders about Arrington.
EJ is not at fault except that she should have known that she was taking this risk when she rented her home to complete strangers sight unseen. This may be a flaw in AirBnB's model and their lack of focus on safety on their site, but if EJ had been my 6' 5" wrestler brother, I'd have waited a sufficient amount of time before giving him a knock upside the head and asking him what he expected when he handed over keys to an apartment that held all his belongings to a complete stranger while he was abroad. If EJ were my sister I'd tell her the same thing, minus the knock upside the head!
Obviously we know very little about what's going on behind the scenes right now. There are conflicting messages coming from all sides.
I am not saying that EJ is lying. But calling AirBnB are completely cynical and lacking any sense of PR seems incongruent with the skills they have otherwise shown and also with the empathy that they at least managed to convey in interviews etc.
I'm siding with pg on this one. I can't imagine any intelligent person making this PR trade-off just for some cash. I don't want to analyze the he-said-she-said, but I've been up to date since this went viral, and I don't see any logiacl reason that AirBnb would refuse to pay for her expenses.
Think about it logically... rather than emotionally.
There is a huge difference between the two. Companies go out of their way to fix issues where they have no legal obligation to do so. However, they can still claim that they have no legal obligation with the offended parties to do so, they're just doing it out of the goodness of their hearts (and reputation of the business going forward).
I'm actually finding this entire thing distasteful from all possible sides. I'd rather just wait and see what happens while the various parties work this out in relative private.
Typical America were drinking hot coffee leads to lawsuits.
(Which doesn't mean i'm not sorry for the person, or that risks shouldn't be stated (more) prominently, or that insurances should be here)
FYI, this is a really terrible case to cite against "Typical America" unless you're trying to tear apart AirBnB, because it's a good example of a corporation trying to screw over someone they were found to have injured and held liable, as determined by a jury in a court of law.
Liebeck, the victim in the "coffee lawsuit", received third degree burns to 6% of her body, required skin grafts, etc, it's not like someone just scaled their hand due to a splash or something.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Can someone explain to me how this is anybody's fault other than the jerk that robbed the lady (and maybe the lady's naïveté)?
I know AirBnB has made a lot of people angry with their business tactics, but how are they responsible for this crime? Can you imagine if the Hampton Inn sued Expedia for someone vandalizing a hotel room or expecting restitution from Kayak for what a vandal did in their hotel?
AirBnB should listen to their lawyers and not accept responsibility for the act of a criminal or the poor judgement of a user.
Paul Graham waded into it by posting on HN[1] with a statement that directly contradicts the victim's version of events. It's relevant, and TechCrunch covering it should come as no surprise to anyone.
> I know AirBnB has made a lot of people angry with their business tactics, but how are they responsible for this crime?
Per PG's post: "Airbnb has been offering to fix it..." Whether or not they're legally responsible, they've got a PR problem on their hands.
The AirBnB service depends on this simple premise. This is the first axiom of their business. No matter how insured everyone is, the axiom has to hold. Otherwise, you end up with an infinite streak of disputes.
If you invite strangers to your home, then you assume that people are good, either. It is that simple. Frankly, only a good person would invite strangers to her home. It might be slightly too naive, but it does not change the fact it takes a lot of good faith, and trust. (It might be too much, I agree, but it is not her fault, as it was not BitCoin begginers' mistake to commit into the idea of the digital currency _too much_. It is more experienced ones' responsibility to share their knowledge.)
Once you find the property destroyed, your world view is going to collapse. It turns out, basically, that some people are not good. What's worse, bad people were physically close to you, just few days ago.
It is _extremely_ stressful.
Here and there I've read comments suggesting that EJ extrapolates a bit. Even if so, so what? She is so distressed, I'm very surprised that there's so little understanding about her current position.
The way the AirBnB folks behave does not reveal that they do genuiely believe that people are good. The way the public sees it right now is that they're very cautious, as well as lawyers, and all that stuff, is rather a defensive, and unsafe, behaviour.
While I somehow understand them, the problem is that the service relies on the assumption that people are good. After all, it is about _sharing your property with complete strangers from Internet_ (no matter if it is your home, or the other one.)
The reason why the story reads so bad is that it mixes up the social context of sharing per se, with the formal context, relying on lawyers and PR firms. All comments points out that getting her a new property sets a precedence for further refunds are totally off the took. To come up with such comment, it takes to view the world as a distrustful place. The view that, basically, contradicts the whole idea.
To me, the whole story is about nerds facing social complexities. The business they've created is not about numbers (i.e. brokering rooms, without having to incur the costs of building a hotel), but about sharing. The sharing, in nearly all cases, of single most valuable thing in your life.
I'm so frightened with lack of common sense.
First of all, the AirBnB folks should ensure her that people are good. I mean, people _are_ good. That the unfortunate event was a nightmarish accident, not the correct image of the world (no BS here, as, statistically speaking, the event is an outlier.)
Ensuring someone that the world is a trustful place definitely does not involve communicating publicly, or privately, with lawyers, or PR companies. I don't know how to explain this but it is all about showing that you're a human (of course, it still makes sense to speak with a lawyer before, though to avoid some simple misunderstaindg.)
We don't know her. We have no idea what are the actions necessary in order to make her safe. I think, though, it takes nothing more than showing your real, not faked, care, and, what comes as a surprise, asking her, not a PR company.
Once this is solved, the community should be somehow informed about the solution. If she wants to, EJ could write the explanation. She would have control over the amount of private informations shared, giving her power she has lost due to the abuse. Also, the really case closed means a good story about the world within that people are good.
Personally, I think it makes a lot of sense to offer her a job. She is an extremely talented writer, and seems to care about people. The AirBnB business operates heavily in the social context, so so good person, coming from inside, would be priceless for a now a bit dry company.
Of course, meanwhile it makes sense to get constant updates on legal implications. This is mostly the internal process, though. It takes very little to commit an honest legal mistake, so it cannot hurt (keep in mind to ask EJ is she needs legal help, too.) The same goes with the PR firm. I'm under impression, though, they would recommend similar steps to me. The PR folks I know are really good people.
It might be that EJ does not want to speak with the founders anymore. There is already a lot of misunderstanding, and I would understand her if they've lost her trust. If so, either the investors or the directors should step in. I realize that it sounds _too much_. However, PG is already involved, and members of both groups signal that there is a more mature instance that overlooks the things to be fine.
I do not believe that the solution cannot be reached. It does. It takes, though, understanding that people are good.
(On a more formal side, the reason why it was really a bad idea to mention lawyers publicly is that the AirBnB itself operates within a grey area. Depending on the local laws, the service is either illegal or not covered with all hospitality laws.
It means that signing up the property to the service takes valuying the social relationships more than legal matters. It cannot be otherwise given that, it turns out, some guests were completely anonymous (guests of the guests?), to say nothing about lack of cameras in most buildings.
The lawyers, and formalities, raised so frequently create a state of understandable confusion. If renting the property is dubiously insurable (I'm not sure whether insurers were that happy if knew that they insure hotel rooms per se; the fact has to spread, yet, though), and there are no legal protections, there is nothing but the social trust to rely on.)
That said, I wish all the parties involved the best.
I wish EJ only good things from now. ;-) And, I wish AirBnB more luck, as they've faced a huge sh*t-storm, and I like their service for the reason it relies on _good_ behaviour.
With that said, no company with AirBnB's business model can publicly say they will assist victims whatever the cost. It's just impossible. It would be a blatant lie. They must at least maintain some sort of windshield against insurance frauds, and doing that requires tons of hard PR and legal decisions to be made, and the assistance of lawyers. And everyone hates lawyers. Companies are sometimes inherently good, sometimes not, but they should never be inherently so stupid as to sign their own commercial/financial/legal doom. You can get up from bad PR, but you can't get up from bankrupcy.
Now after this argument in favor of an actual public silence, let's see what we have: 1) a victim 2) there is no 2. There is a victim and that's all.
Just fix the victim. No need to go through internet flamewars or PR messes, no need to even listen to that. Airbnb should just send a team of 24/7 dedicated people with quasi carte blanche (within what the company can afford, of course) to see through that victim gets better, if that objective can even be met. If the "get better" project goes so wrong as to lead to law suits or whatnot, then let justice decide, because in the end, yes, someone has to pay for what happened, and the legal system is here to decide who should pay.
Now about PR: switch the debate from a "what did AirBnB do in that situation" witch-hunt to "This is what we are doing, this is how it's going from our point of view, now what do you (Mr/Mrs Customer) think we could improve on?". Open a public discussion on your social network and dedicate someone to analyze public input. And use it the next time something like this happens (because unfortunately, it will happen again). Centralize this debate somewhere where you can handle all this information, and by "handle" I don't mean "censor" but of course "assimilate".
...and just ignore those stupid emergent flame wars between big internet guns who are mostly in for pride (white knights & trolls) and money (journalists, consultants, lobbyists & investors). Let them deal with the crap they fling around themselves, and keep focusing on the "get better" project: the victim asked specifically for your help, and that's what really matters here.
Related link: an analysis of an excellent online PR crisis management by Monoprix (in French only, sorry) http://guybirenbaum.blogitexpress.com/91728/html The "victim" (an employee who got fired for taking home unsold & trashed goods) explained that he "tried hard to make a fuss and a buzz" of his situation because he felt that nothing short of prosecution and trial could make him feel better. This is a case of a failing "get better" project with exemplary PR - and to be honest, it's only when the project fails that PR become important. What did Monoprix do? They centralized the debate on their Facebook page, switched the focus from "Monoprix is bad" to a laconic "here's what we are doing, tell us what we can improve on" and they have dedicated Community Managers assimilating and discussing the comments instead of censoring them.
It's not a "real" issue, it's more of a temporary difficulty. AirBnB's business exists since the dawn of time. A setback, if you prefer.
Change is often a good thing, but I don't think they should make hasty "significant structural change" because it's clearly not what's needed right now. Subtle evolution is much better to improve trust.
Why isn't AirBnb implementing solutions 5 weeks ago to prevent this from happening again to their users? Why haven't their users heard about this until now?
Why don't we have any tangible proof that AirBnb is actually helping this poor woman? If no, why don't they do it now, instead of saying they are trying?
Are there any grownups in AirBnb? This is not a side project selling cereals that you have fun with anymore. It's a real business! What a sad, pathetic group of people. 1000X valuation for a company that lets 'daddy' do all the dirty work, while they go hide in the corner.
above all else. MA you are not helping just shut up.
Remember, a midst all this BS, there is still that woman who still doesn't have her house back.
I certainly don't mean to make light of what happened to the lady who's home was ransacked.
I'm more interested in how the issue is resolved, not how it's escalated. Does the women get compensated? what does this mean for the future of online business that, literally, makes its way into our living rooms? will legislation result? new insurance products? etc.
I suspect that most, if not all, of us are interested in those things. That doesn't mean one can't also appreciate certain sub elements of the story from other angles. But to be fair, maybe it's still too early and maybe emotions are still too raw (especially since the woman in question still hasn't had this resolved to her satisfaction) for any indulgence in the possibly humorous aspects of this. If so, I was wrong to post my original post, and I and apologize to anyone who is offended.
But in a more abstract sense, I'm very interested in how AirBnB (as a semi-responsible party) and YC (as a seed investor) handle and respond to the situation. Here on HN we talk a lot about treating your customers well and being as transparent as possible.
But something here is amiss. The victim is saying one thing, and the company and investor in that company are saying things that don't quite jive. We may never know where the truth lies exactly, but AirBnB doesn't seem to be handling this very well.
Regardless of whether or not AirBnB is legally responsible, they need to step up. Personally I think the best thing for them to do is to just fix the problem. They need to reach out to EJ, and not just in the "what do you need?" sense. They need to just do things for her. She's traumatized and in a very bad, vulnerable state right now. Who wouldn't be? Asking her what she needs is not the best approach, because she likely isn't really sure what she needs. They need to just go right out and help her find a new place to live, and help her replace some of the things she's lost, to the best of their ability.
I don't know if PG is checking his facts or is just trusting the AirBnB founders and telling us what he's been told by them, but, frankly, in this case, I don't care what he has to say. The AirBnB founders need to go all out on this, probably accept more responsibility for what happened than they are really responsible for, and just make it right as well as they can. It won't be perfect, but they have to show the community that the community comes first, and AirBnB's bottom line comes second. Because perhaps non-intuitively, putting the community first actually does put their bottom line first. But from what I've read and seen so far, they haven't done that.
1. AirBnB is a broker and carries not responsibility for the parties after the deal is done. They are sympathetic, but they are right in not commenting or otherwise participating in these affairs.
2. AirBnB is building a new model and has significant responsibility (socially, perhaps legally) for ensuring end-to-end integrity of its engagements.
I think this will all go away shortly, but I think we're bound to see very similar situations with other companies that change how people interact. Seems like Arrington and pg are working on totally different information, but I suspect they're both rather removed from the situation.
But Arrington so often finds himself at the centre of these idiotic exchanges and personal attack-fests that it's very hard not to believe PG about this.
It's just a real shame that the reputation of a really cool company rests on that level of exchange between folks. It must be really frustrating for them.
Yeah, what a shame that completely fucking over one of your customers is enough to damage your reputation.
One such solution could be, for example, to have ALL the rented properties daily cleaned up by Airbnb-hired people (contracted 3rd party companies will be happy to do this in most civilized cities). This would be a cool service the renters would appreciate, and would provide the rentees at least some level of trust their home is not being vandalized.
A concierge service could also help.
I am sure many other ways exits to add Trust to the model. This must become Airbnb's most valuable product feature... This should be considered an important "enabling technology" without which the business cannot survive in the long run.
Would you:
a) go into hiding at a friend's place and lay low?
b) go extremely public and take on a startup?
Take a step back and stop the tinfoilesque blame the victim game that you've decided to engage in.
go into hiding at a friend's place and lay low? ... for a month, and then
go extremely public and take on a startup? ... after a month.
Yeah, I think I might just do that.
Bullshit!
No, it's not your job to fix the mess other companies create through stupid policy or bad decisionmaking. But it's also not your job to pile on and stir up everybody's passions when something goes wrong.
Michael Arrington is a huckster -- Walter Winchell and Drudge mixed together. For years, he's picked fights and written stories that destroy reputations. Then when he's called on to the carpet for his behavior, he reacts in the 'typical Arrington fashion,' by protesting his innocence and calling on his readers to save him.
I'm not an apologist for what Airbnb did here. But Michael Arrington and TechCrunch helped fan the flames. Not because they reported on it, but becausse of the WAY they reported on it. And now when they're called on it, he reacts by wrapping himself in a flag of righteousness.
Yep, smells like bullshit alright.