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Comment by alphakappa | Hacker News Reader

It's also crazy that people are buying into the idea of 'Founder Mode' when Airbnb is one of the companies that is very much riding on the moat it created a while back while not doing anything much that can even remotely be called customer-obsessive (which is the lesson they could really learn from Steve Jobs)

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I would argue that, when you get to the scale of an Airbnb, or Amazon, which is where I think the "customer-obsessive" terminology comes from, you need to move beyond focusing solely on your customers. Your business is having a social impact. The house next door to me right now has had contractors going in and out of it for the past three weeks to remove and replace the entire interior because of damage done by a short-term renter. Construction has absolutely boomed around me but nearly all of the new units are becoming short-term rentals. The neighborhood is either empty most of the time, or full of drunken idiots making a bunch of noise, getting the police called on them at 3 AM, and leaving the streets and sidewalks full of trash and broken bottles.

Airbnb may very well be making its customers happy, but when so many of those customers are 21 year-olds looking for party houses they can trash and fundamentally changing the character and safety of entire neighborhoods, is that really the most important thing? Even as the founder or executive or both of a business, you're still part of a human community and you have a duty to that community not to worsen the lives of countless bystanders in order to delight the few who happen to pay you. Make products that are valuable in general, to everybody, not products that are valuable only to your customers at everyone else's expense.

Anecdotally, in my friendship group, Airbnb in Europe seems to be losing ground quite rapidly, especially from a mind share perspective.

Prices are similar to hotels.com, with silly house rules, cleaning fees and hassle vs just turning up and leaving.

I've used Airbnb for years, and it was truly revolutionary back in the day.

Airbnb being customer obsessive would involve much higher labor expenses and liability, which would be counter to the goal of its investors (especially investors from pre-IPO days).

The goal is to make a business out of the higher margin parts that scale easily, and leave the lower margin customer-obsessive parts to others.

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