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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

I imagine that AirBnb needs a very large customer service team, for one.

Our customer support team is primarily home-shored, and works around the world in over 15 countries - less than 5% is in SF. The majority of people will be product, design, engineering... plus marketing, bd, operations, G&A, etc.

Completely sincere question that I'd love to hear your thoughts on: why in the world do you need 1000 people doing that stuff? I get how sales/marketing/customer service require high headcounts -- but product people?

Is there really something useful for 500 developers to do that the top 50 of them couldn't have done?

I've always assumed (since I don't understand it) that it's just a momentum thing. Did you ever consider keeping Airbnb under 100 employees? Would your investors have freaked at that idea? Would it have hurt your growth?

I'm guessing the 10 year plan is they're going to start competing with orbitz, travelocity, priceline, tripadvisor, flightcaster, hipmunk, everyone in the travel space basically.

Let's not forget about cars, trucks, bikes, why not start competing with zipcar, Hertz, Budget, Enterprise? Sometimes you need a car when you travel, right?

Commercial REITs are getting into the rental space as well, they might have some sort of deal lined up with large players. Let's also not forget about coworking spaces for when you want to get work done on the road...

Airbnb for play, airbnb for work, airbnb for commercial real estate, airbnb for wheels, airbnb for...

To get big, you have to grow your headcount. Staying lean forever will not support the kind of growth that AirBnB is currently enjoying or would like to achieve. The "lean" mentality is fine when you're searching for a business model or want to run a lifestyle business. It's suicide if you want to build a large company to service a large customer base. And there's nothing wrong with wanting to grow big. In fact, it's admirable.

I don't think that's a global rule- look at Instagram (nothing to do with the sale, just the number of users served by a company with two employees). Obviously, AirBnb is a very different business, but it is possible to grow by orders of magnitude without also growing headcount.

It's about revenue, not user count. Money changes everything: when customers pay, they expect a different level of service.

A company's revenue per employee is a common benchmark, and is usually around $600K-$1MM or so for successful companies at or near scale, up to $2.2MM for outliers like Apple(1). A company cannot grow to $100MM revenue and higher without having a large number of employees just to manage those revenue streams, partnerships, contracts, and support issues.

I should add that Instagram had ~13 employees, not two. That is a very low number, but mobile apps are easier to scale, support-wise, than web apps – users are just less likely to bug you, especially with a free app.

(1) Comparing Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon's Revenue per Employee: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=revenue+per+employee+ap...

A different level of service means customer support, it doesn't mean 10x-100x the number of developers working on the product.

So honestly, I'm curious---what is AirBnB going to do with ~1000 developers. Facebook expanded their headcount and created a whole suite of products glomped onto their original vision. I'd like to know if AirBnB intends the same and if so what are their plans.

Ofcourse, they have no obligation to blab about them early.

1,000 developers? Downvote.

Instagram has a few moving parts (and no revenue). AirBnB has millions (and millions in revenue).

Interesting. I used to work for an accommodation company in a similar space to AirBnb (in fact, I was tasked with cloning you guys before I quit...) that had customer service operations centralised in two continental hubs. Sounds like your approach will work a lot better than that.

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