Airbnb Is Said to Be Seeking Funding Valuing It at $30B

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/business/dealbook/airbnb-is-said-to-be-seeking-funding-valuing-it-at-30-billion.html?_r=0

by coloneltcb • 10 years ago

35 51 10 years ago

nytimes.com

grillvogel2• 10 years ago

a friend of mine who recently interviewed at airbnb said that the employees have a personal barista that they can sign up to take lessons from, so at least you know that money is getting put to good use

jbigelow76• 10 years ago

If that next round doesn't come in those barista skills might come in handy.

frank_jaeger• 10 years ago

Having a large portion of your staff barista-trained also allows for some pretty big pivots. These guys have their eyes on the longterm.

orky562• 10 years ago

As long as these types of perks continue to get shared in conversation and affect where an employee chooses to work, they will continue to be offered and will grow even more extreme in terms of catering to the needs of employees.

kchoudhu• 10 years ago

I don't want a barista to teach me to make coffee -- I want a barista to make me coffee.

smilingtom• 10 years ago

yikes, the shameless stupidity of this comment is very worrying to me

chollida1• 10 years ago

A $30 billion valuation would make Airbnb the second-highest-valued start-up in the United States behind Uber, which is now valued at $62.5 billion, according to a list compiled by CB Insights.

Is there an age limit to being called a startup? Is there a valuation limit? Revenue limit?

I guess the line used to be when a company went public, but that's not really cool anymore.

Maybe the new definition of a unicorn should be a private company that is profitable and requires no outside funding?

orky562• 10 years ago

Private company is objective but requiring no outside funding is a function of not only the current financial situation of the firm but also its intended growth trajectory and associated costs. As long as companies like Uber and Airbnb believe that it makes more sense to use funding to capture opportunities not possible through organic self-funded growth, we have no choice but to use terms like unicorn and startup.

kartD• 10 years ago

Is there an age limit to being called a startup? Is there a valuation limit? Revenue limit?

This has become a problem lately with companies remaining private longer. You could consider it a start-up because it still aims to grow unprofitably by relying on private capital

Maybe the new definition of a unicorn should be a private company that is profitable and requires no outside funding?

You could call it a grown up unicorn

WestCoastJustin• 10 years ago

Here's that CB Insights list for anyone interested.

https://www.cbinsights.com/research-unicorn-companies

bogomipz2• 10 years ago

I completely agree. Having multiple office locations, billions of dollars in funding and lobbyists doesn't really fit with the perception of 'startup." But it makes for more sensational copy.

sytse2• 10 years ago

As long as you're growing fast you are a startup http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html Size is irrelevant, you can be a small restaurant and not be a startup if you're not growing fast anymore.

untog3• 10 years ago

So when Apple launched the iPhone they were a startup?

argonaut2• 10 years ago

Being profitable and requiring no outside funding is probably somewhat negatively-correlated with being a startup (because growth is often - though obviously not always - slower).

I've always just used "startup" to mean a private company that hasn't exited yet. You just have to qualify this futher. So Uber, Airbnb, Dropbox, Pinterest, etc. are all categorized as "large pre-IPO startups."

lafay• 10 years ago

In my mind, "startup" implies that there is still risk that the company will cease to be a going concern in the near to medium term. The transition from "startup" to "former startup" is more of a process than an event. The magnitude of exit for companies like Uber, Airbnb, Dropbox, etc. may still be in question, but the chance that any of them will fail, go bankrupt, firesale, etc. seems very remote at this point.

iandanforth2• 10 years ago

I have personally swapped AirBnB for the entire hospitality industry in my mind. The only times I end up in hotels now are when I'm booked into one by my employer. I wouldn't, for pleasure, stay in a hotel or motel unless I really had no other choice. I was very happy to discover that AirBnB has a significant presence in Japan which made my recent trip there more pleasant and saved me money.

dbot• 10 years ago

Hmmm...are you mostly using the private room or entire home/apt?

I've found that if you are looking for just a private room, you can get a deal. But then you are also in a stranger's house, which as a 30-something I'm not always that comfortable with. When I travel with my wife, it's not even an option.

When I look at entire home/apt listings, the prices are often very comparable to nearby hotels, and often I can get a cheaper hotel using an "opaque" service like Hotwire or Priceline. As between the two, I'd much rather stay in a hotel, since they are set up for travelers and I can get whatever extra towels, amenities, etc. that might be missing from an AirBnb.

aianus• 10 years ago

But even at the same price, having an entire home in a residential area is much nicer than a small hotel room in the most touristy part of town.

iandanforth2• 10 years ago

I do entire home/apt. Perhaps I've never made enough use of hotel amenities, but so far I haven't missed them in an AirBnB.

untog3• 10 years ago

I used to think that, but I've since gone back to mostly staying at hotels.

AirBnBs are absolutely more unique than hotel rooms, but that isn't always a good thing. I've had too many late nights sat outside a property waiting for the owner to turn up, too many broken fixtures (including heating) with no-one to repair.

And (as the other poster mentioned) I've been very surprised to find out that these days AirBnB rates for "whole property" aren't even competitive with hotel rooms, especially when you factor in the "cleaning fee" and other such spurious fees that seem designed to make it difficult for you to calculate a total easily.

JNaz• 10 years ago

Marriot Intl: 200k employees, 13b revenue, 4000 hotels, 15b market cap

Hilton Worldwide, 160k employees, 11.3b revenue, 4660 properties, 21b market cap

Hyatt, 97k employees, 4.4b revenue, ~600 properties, 5b market cap

lettergram4• 10 years ago

Airbnb takes a percentage of every stay, don't need inventory(I.e. open rooms), nor more than a few hundred employee's.

My guess is they have their valuation about right, assuming they continue to grow for the next 3 or 4 years

kirykl• 10 years ago

That they don't need inventory or more than a few hundred employees makes me wonder what their real value is. Is the brand alone worth $30B ? You could have the same office staff running airBnb and uber.

edit: I'm also thinking of the non existent switching costs for customers.

I guess it works for credit card companies

grillvogel2• 10 years ago

they also don't need to adhere to any government regulation that actual hotels do

fovc• 10 years ago

Not super familiar with this space, but is there a way to look at 'franchised' hotel brands vs. owner/operator brands? This would seem like a better comp. for Airbnb

CPLX2• 10 years ago

I mean I know the stock answers and so on already, but seeing these kind of articles makes me wonder why the hell companies that are so mature, and theoretically at least should be spinning off tons of operating cash, feel the need to raise these really astronomical sums of money.

It's hard to see why the savviest long term strategy isn't just to keep booking billions of dollars worth of lodging bookings, keep their cut, and use it to grow the company.

The last time I saw financing in the tech industry seem so out of step with basic economics was 2001. Not for startups in general necessarily, but for these super-giants like Airbnb and Uber something seems really wrong.

When exactly do they have to start acting like normal boring businesses that are supposed to be good at something, and then make their money doing that thing?

aerovistae• 10 years ago

No kidding! I don't get this mentality that's sprung up in the last however many years to just keep taking funding. What's the point??

Imagine if Apple announced today it was "taking on funding to raise its valuation to $800 billion." What a thought!

wfoweoi• 10 years ago

Getting investors who can help with regulation challenges in certain cities seems worthwhile.

adventured2• 10 years ago

Because they can raise a large amount of money at a modest dilution, it's really that simple. It's a way of guaranteeing their seat at the table, whether that's in regards to hiring or acquisitions or otherwise. When you're going up against huge companies like Priceline.com ($60b market cap, $3.3b cash, $9b sales, $2.5b profit) and Expedia ($15b market cap, $2.1b cash, $6.6b sales) - the more cash the better. Further, who knows if these relatively easy capital raising days will last (for Airbnb types at least), or whether we're rolling into a recession.

Oh yeah, and because they wouldn't be worth $30 billion if they were publicly traded. They're raising money far beyond what their business is going to be worth at any point in the next five years based on comparables to either Priceline or Expedia.

CPLX2• 10 years ago

Oh yeah, and because they wouldn't be worth $30 billion if they were publicly traded. They're raising money far beyond what their business is going to be worth at any point in the next five years

Indeed. And therin lie the seeds of a problem that could literally destroy the company, or at least incinerate the stake of the current founders and major shareholders. Hence the question.

s_q_b• 10 years ago

The first advantage is that it dries up funding for any potential competitors.

The second is that businesses face a sudden jump in their need for capital as they shift focus to their global operations.

gmisra• 10 years ago

If the goal of Airbnb's investors/BoD was to grow a viable business, this would be a reasonable question - but their job is to increase the value of their (and their LPs') existing investment as much as possible, usually within a fixed time window.

For employees in the tech sector, this misalignment of incentives is one of the ugliest lessons to learn.

jhanschoo• 10 years ago

If this is the case, raising funding based on ever increasing valuations sounds like a Ponzi scheme to me, albeit a very inefficient one.

lettergram4• 10 years ago

Every person I know, young to old use airbnb now. I can't say the same for uber. Plus, as mentioned in a comment, although it would be have a higher market cap than Hilton, Hyatt, etc. They also have no inventory, employees, property tax, and so on.

I see this valuation being low in a few years. Instead, of thinking of them as a hotel chain (or something similar), we should think of then as an insurance and travel company

mylons2• 10 years ago

I have the opposite anecdotal experience. Most people I talk with in the midwest do not use airbnb, they use vrbo.

lettergram4• 10 years ago

Weird everyone in the Midwest (where I'm from) has only ever mentioned uber.

codingdave• 10 years ago

For personal travel, I tend to hear the same. But for professional travel, the people I know still seem to be fairly traditional. It is not a good risk/reward balance to allow the possibility of a business trip being disrupted because of a bad host, or a surprise cancellation.

pyrophane• 10 years ago

I wonder if these terms account for the potential impact on Airbnb's growth that all of the new regulations being proposed in places like NY and Europe could have. A lot of effort is being put forth to curtail full-time entire apartment listings in several of the company's largest markets, and there is good reason to believe that those listings contribute significantly to their revenue.

For example, a study put forth by housing advocacy groups recently identified over 8,000 "impact listings" in NYC alone, which are essentially entire apartments being operated on a close to full-time basis. [1]. Certainly these groups are biased, but their methodology for finding full-time listings looks sound. I'll do a little quick math to consider the revenue and fees Airbnb may be collecting from those:

200 days a year rented (total guess on my part) * $120 (somewhat less than the average shown for a one night stay) * 8000 (full-time listings) = $192M total revenue

Or maybe around $19M in total fees collected from both hosts and guests. Granted, I could be way off here, but I think it shows how much money is potentially at stake in these listings that, if the current legislation on Cuomo's desk passes, could go away nearly overnight.

My point is that these new regulations appear to represent a substantial risk to Airbnb's continued growth. It makes me wonder how much this new raise might be earmarked for fighting cities on regulations and conducting an aggressive PR campaign to sway public opinion in their favor.

1. http://www.sharebetter.org/story/housing-report-short-changi...

mylons2• 10 years ago

and also to fund their legal proceedings against the city of San Francisco. I really do not like that they're suing the city because a consequence of them winning seems to be more stifling of housing in the city available for those who live in the bay.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/technology/airbnb-sues-san...

bogomipz2• 10 years ago

It seems like a lot of the gunicorns are topping up their funding lately - Uber, Airbnb, Spotify.

mattmanser• 10 years ago

Every person I know, young to old use airbnb now

Not really much of a surprise as you're a young, white male working and living in the SF bubble.

dang• 10 years ago

That's unduly personal and not ok.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11997359 and marked it off-topic.

Airbnb Is Said to Be Seeking Funding Valuing It at $30B

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