Ask HN: Why does AirBnb need 800+ employees?

I hear these types of questions about many web companies from time to time in that the assumptions is you just need a small bundle of folks to run the website but in reality when a business gains traction the website is just the tip of the iceberg in many cases. The number of employees needed can snowball as the business starts to take off... legal teams, finance, accounting, QA, HR, BAs, management, ops, etc - it all adds up to usually more than one would assume. Additionally the customer facing product can be a very small part of the overall tech solution in that developing needed internal tools and systems can require large numbers of employees.

Typically your biggest numbers are going to come from sales folks / account managers in that, as an example, if the business model allows for a sales rep to sustainably bring in 200k on an 100k salary you most likely are going to hire as many as you can get. Groupon is a good example of this in action although it obviously has not been as successful as they would like.

Because once you get big enough it makes sense to have specialists working on small parts of the business. Those specialists all should be creating more value than their cost.

Just think about the credit card side of the business. - They should have one person who's whole job is to make sure their interchange charges are as low as possible. - They likely have a lot of float, money from where customers have paid for stays upfront that they hold onto until the housing providers get paid. If a billion dollars flow through their hands a year and they pay 15 days after the recieve the money, there is $41 million in float that someone needs to invest for the short term. - An entire team of people likely has to deal with credit card fraud.

Any webish company past a revenue range is going to have these issues to deal with.

First of all I don’t think AirBnB currently has too many employees & when they were 85 employees they were adding 2-3 employees per day[1] Likewise their team has also grown due to a couple of acquisitions/acquihires – Crashpadder, Accoleo and DailyBooth.

The reason why AirBnB needs a team of 800+ employees is because, they’re trying to expand as quickly as possible into as many countries as they can – leveraging the growth they already have there. For example they have 20,000 properties listed in Asia[2] & are focusing heavily on increasing this number & have just opened offices over there.

The [2] post also highlights some of the reason for the number of employees as each location requires, “a team of dedicated local customer support agents and a hotline for queries” due to AirBnB offering 24/7 support to its users. As well as having, local customer support agents who help the company provide 24/7, AirBnB also requires: Management, Finance, Accounting, Legal (Recently they hired David Hantman from Yahoo[3] to help tackle some of their regulatory issues), Human Resources, Business Development, Customer Support, Other Operational Staff etc alongside their developers to build out the company & leverage the market opportunity.

[1] http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/05/25/airbnb-is-growing-fast...

[2] http://thenextweb.com/asia/2012/11/21/airbnb-targets-2-milli...

[3] http://allthingsd.com/20121015/yahoo-loses-government-relati...

they dont really need 800 employees. they just dont know which of the 80% of employees are the productive ones. They could cut 20% with ease but it's really hard to determine who isn't needed. As business scales it gets really tough to figure out who is needed and isn't. All growing companies face this. Companies should focus on being leaner.

In addition to what others have mentioned, something that came to my mind is that they're also big enough to have people lobbying for legislation against them in multiple places. That's going to require extra people if for nothing else but to be liaisons to the lawyers and anti-lobbyists.

Worldwide representatives/salespersons in each country where they have a presence? E.g. http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2012/11/airbnb-officially-lands-in...