varunjuice

I think they can build a lot of ways in which the "community" angle adds value to a guest.

For example, they could encourage hosts to provide a list of top 3 things to do / eat / see, and aggregate this for guests.

Based on a guest's FB profile, they could suggest neighborhoods where they would enjoy staying, or connect guests to hosts who share similar interests.

There is so much potential, and I won't hold the current lack of community oriented benefits against them. Startups put a stake in the ground, and then build towards it.

Thanks. This is helpful. Given choice, would you apply directly or through an internal referral?

Non sequitur. The discussion here is about how AirBnB's unregulated supply of rental property is impacting long term rents in NYC.

FWIW

NYC has added 30,000 new hotel rooms since 2007. It would seem that AirBnB is adding nearly the same # of rooms.

Zillow lists 25,000 rental units in NYC. This is the same order as the # of rooms being rented on AirBnB.

Why can't we accept that AirBnB is contributing to increasing rental prices in NYC? What's the point of pointing to hotels every time someone mentions AirBnB?

I would expect that the founders of AirBnB genuinely care about communities where they operate, and would be motivated to advance the community's interest.

Is it? Driven is a strong word. It suggests significant causality.

I think its important to compare the AirBnB stock with the available stock of units, not entire stock. I would posit that rent is driven by marginal availability instead of total size of unit stock.

This makes a ton of sense. Role and salary should be discussed up front, so necessary conditions are established.

Follow up - what stops you, as a candidate, from discussing this upfront?

This is just recognition of the fact that productivity is divorced from # of hours at the office, or # of hours spend "working'

It's that sweet sweet recurring + expansion revenue.

Edit: I should add -- this is what makes SaaS companies such a lucrative yet risky investment. It takes a lot of inside knowledge, and reading tea-leaves if a SaaS co will take off or not.

This is great. Having helped create a SaaS business, and seen it through 5 years of struggle and growth, a few questions come to mind (especially for investors)

1/ The quick ratio is handy, but it merges new sales & upsell. The underlying issues are very different between the two. Wonder what the motivation is behind combining the two, as it mashes two issues together.

2/ Lifecycle of the company (years since it was founded) probably matters quite a bit to how you compare / evaluate the ratios. Any thoughts on that, given your examples?

3/ No mention of logo churn. With SaaS, new sales effort goes into landing into accounts, and therefore, losing accounts is painful, relative to losing revenue to contraction.

4/ While revenue is the rubber-meets the road indicator, I felt that our user engagement (often a business specific metric as opposed to the canned DAU or MAU) was the leading indicator. Revenue growth (new or expansion) could mask issues. Any commentary on this?

Amazon should've focussed on an inexpensive handset with Amazon services for shopping built in to it, and launched it in emerging markets. This would give it a shot to get to the next billion. Heck, it could've even provided free data if a user does a certain amount of shopping on Amazon a month.

Bret Victor is doing some amazing work in this area. http://worrydream.com/#!/InteractiveExplorationOfADynamicalS...