Whether or not a company is a "tech" company is kind of a muddled question, but taking even a brief glance at https://airbnb.io/ (their engineering blog) makes it clear that AirBnB does some pretty serious engineering.
For example, their post about their work in search ranking is quite interesting [1].
I'm not suggesting they don't have engineering challenges, but if you stack ranked the engineering challenges by difficulty across Airbnb, Uber/Lyft, Google, FB, Netflix, Amazon, Dropbox, Pinterest, etc. I don't see how Airbnb would not very easily rank last by a long shot.
Airbnb is basically just a prettier craigslist with a payment transfer mechanism and messaging. It isn't to say it isn't a great business, just that the "tech" part of it is not really much more than a web app.
Not sure where the threshold between tech and non-tech would be though... Dropbox is just unison on the cloud, Pinterest is just a photos website etc.
Also engineering challenges aren’t always obvious from the consumer facing product. It is true that AirBnB founders have design backgrounds rather than engineering ones, but from what I’ve seen of their engineering and data science work, they would qualify as a tech company in my estimation. They did come up with Apache Airflow which is a well regarded data pipeline management system.
Well like every tech company the entire purpose of an externally facing engineering blog is to maximize their "tech/employer brand." That's the whole point. I would also guess that some of the projects highlighted are could probably fit into "complexity for complexity sake" e.g. teams of bored or overzealous engineers who are trying to justify their jobs by working on complex things that are probably overkill for the actual problem their trying to solve. That's pretty common.
I'm just pointing out that the nature of Airbnb's business means that there's no real-time, no streaming, no billions of concurrent users, etc. The tech boils down to a 1) web app 2) payments mechanism and 3) messaging. Nothing particularly revolutionary on the tech side.
I'm not saying a "tech" company has to be defined by how "hard" the tech is, or that a "tech" company isn't a "tech" company because it isn't working on LIDAR or AI.
I'm just pointing out that Airbnb's application of "tech" isn't necessarily "hard" tech, relative to other companies that it's usually associated with or compared to in the SF startup scene.
Fair enough. I guess your original statement was more that AirBnB shouldn’t be consider a tech company in the same breath as FB and Netflix, and not that it isn’t a tech company.
Not to take a stance either way, but pretty much any org will find a way to justify the salaries of the people it employs. It’s neither informative nor surprising that a company that employs lots of engineers will have lots of engineering problems.
The question is: if you sacked everyone but the core team who keeps the trains running, what would happen to the business?
Do you mean private with respect to the host or private with respect to other guests (e.g., booking a single room in someone else's place)?
I'm trying to understand the underlying problem you're getting at. I haven't had trouble with getting places with my own bathroom though I do not stay in Airbnbs with multiple concurrent guests much.
Airbnb traditionall had three, now four "Home types": Entire place, Private room (Have your own room and share some common spaces), Hotel room, Shared room. The entire place will (almost always) come with your own bathroom and kitchen and living room etc. It's an entire place, after all.
A private room typically means you get your own bedroom but there are others living in the same home, maybe the owner, maybe other guests. Living room, kitchen are shared. The question is whether you also get a bathroom for your own use or not. This is displayed even in the listing (4 guests · 1 bedroom · 1 bed · 1 shared bath vs 2 guests · 1 bedroom · 1 bed · 1 private bath) but you are unable to filter on it. They understand this detail is important enough to put it in the listing but you still can't filter on it.
And the reason this matters, well, that should be pretty evident: multiple strangers can be in a kitchen or a living at the same time but not in a bathroom. A shared bathroom is a botttleneck in the morning and an overall pain in the neck to be honest. And in some places the private room-private bath combo is by far the best value.
I like Airbnb but I am surprised by their reputation as having expertise in front-end web development. The web UI is very slow to load and during on-page interactions, it is confusing to navigate between listing and related pages, and there are other badly designed aspects, such as the way that in order to select a menu item, one has to move the trackpad horizontally and then vertically to avoid dismissing the open menu while en route to the desired menu item.
For example, their post about their work in search ranking is quite interesting [1].
[1]: https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/machine-learning-power...