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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

We don't know for sure because we don't track such things, but I'd guess they have around 1000 employees total, not including the founders.

If you include jobs created indirectly, the number might be higher. And of course there are lots of people who make most of their money using Airbnb, although that is not a formal job. There may also have been jobs eliminated, if a startup's new technology makes it possible to do the same work with fewer people.

This stuff is hard to measure.

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Going by linkedin employee count the ten biggest YC companies have 1500 employees between them (heavily dominated by 845 at Airbnb).

Doing a back of the envelope estimate based upon some sampling, companies 10-50 have about 500 combined, and the long tail is probably another 500 (inclusive of founders).

Thanks, I didn't realize that info was in LinkedIn. I was trying to be conservative, but looks like I overdid it.

Does LinkedIn know how many employees every company has? Where do they get that information?

Its based on the number of people that say where they work at in their profiles.

This is AirBnB's http://www.linkedin.com/company/309694?trk=tyah it says it has 902 employees.

Its based on the number of people that say where they work at in their profiles.

Thanks for making that clear in this thread. My company used to have some faker in another country claim that she worked for my company. Nope. She never has. It took me a while to figure out how to notify LinkedIn of that kind of resume padding. I wonder how many people right now are claiming things on their LinkedIn profiles that are totally bogus, and how much that inflates the employee count of some trendy companies.

The count seems to be fluctuating between 895 and 905 every time I refresh. Curious what this is attributed to, simply some different cache hits or do they have a fuzzy calculation or something else.

If anything it seems that metric would also be understated.

It is important to take some of the LinkedIn employee counts with a grain of salt. Often times it clusters companies into different categories of sizes (i.e. 1-9 employees, 10-50 employees) so an 11 person company could appear larger than it is.

The employee count categorization is completely independent of the search count that people are discussing here, it's not based on the number of employees who are on linkedin but rather it's a manually configured field on the company profile set by whoever manages it.

Good to know, didn't know larger companies could manually update the count.

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