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Comment by ericabiz | Hacker News Reader

"As property listing sites go, Airbnb did not produce any true innovation."

Strongly disagree. As an Airbnb host (I rent out my master suite on Airbnb), there simply wasn't a site where I could do that before. Craigslist? Forget it--spam heaven, and no calendar or payment system. And VRBO has always been designed for "vacation homes", not "rent a single bedroom in a house you occupy" (which is why I use Airbnb.)

I live in Austin, and Austin has responded to Airbnb by making hosts pay hotel tax, and requiring us to register with the city. While an inconvenience, I'd rather do that than not be able to make extra income renting out the room. I hope San Francisco can do something similar (and I really hope Airbnb builds this into their site so I can stop filing paperwork and mailing paper checks every quarter!)

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Maybe the reason an alternative didn't exist because others realized it was against a lot of laws, regulations and tax codes?

For example, I could start a service that allows people to make food in their house and sell it online. The reality is that in most municipalities you cannot simply cook food in your kitchen and sell it.

The difficult part in Airbnb, Uber and my imaginary sharing economy food service is managing to get big enough before authorities catch on. And getting big fast just happens to be something the VC model is very good at.

In my opinion it's more an innovation of hyper growth VC funding as a means to out run authorities enforcing regulations, laws and tax codes as opposed to the innovation of something built into the individual service of Airbnb, Uber etc.

So, guess what Airbnb is doing next?

http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/10/airbnbs-stealth-home-dinin...

haha, yeah, I was just about to point this out.

It's quite a bit easier to die from "disruptive food" than "disruptive lodging" in my personal experience from roughing it once upon a time.

> The reality is that in most municipalities you cannot simply cook food in your kitchen and sell it.

Lots of stuff sold at food co-ops and farmers' markets skirt these rules and no one bats an eye. Yet they're doing pretty much the same thing as Airbnb and Uber -- performing valuable services while entering questionable regulatory territory.

It's weird how baking pies in your own kitchen and selling them is considered a very wholesome activity, yet using your own car to drive people around is somehow objectionable.

Its because the result of buying from a terrible baker is I might get food poisoning. On the other hand, a terrible taxi driver could very easily get me killed.

The regulations in place don't do a huge amount to fix either of those problems, but having something in place makes people feel better.

so... the worst case in both scenarios is that you die. The odds of a negative outcome are similarly negligible both ways.

I'm not sure you thought this through.

>no one bats an eye

Some people bat an eye.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/08/03/the-inexplic...

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