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Comment by xfour | Hacker News Reader

Not sure how well this is going to work judging from the last time they tried to buy a vote http://sfist.com/2015/10/23/airbnb_frantically_doing_damage_... though admittedly that did work out in their favor in SF in the end.

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This ad campaign still _blows my fucking mind_. How did this leave the 4x4 space of open office of whoever thought it was a good idea? I don't know how big of a company AirBnB is but presumably more than 1 person had to give this the thumbs up, right?!

I absolutely love AirBnB as a user and I hope they can come to agreeable legal terms with the communities they are in. As a programmer and potential employee these ads say to me: "don't ever try to work at AirBnB, we only drink the finest Kool-aid and there is a lot of cyanide in it."

My reaction was similar: before seeing that, I was sympathetic to the idea that short term rentals were a bold new territory requiring a new regulatory framework, like the 'employee' classification in online microtasking. Then I saw that campaign, which gives the impression that AirBnB either 1) has no idea what community is 2) doesn't care. Neither is acceptable, given their long-run goals.

I know absolutely nothing about the people that run AirBnB, but based on those ads my brain instantly imagined a small group of twentysomethings from rich families who'd never worked a day in their life prior to getting out of college, who have yet to mature intellectually or otherwise past the point of thinking that being really snotty and sarcastic and dismissive of their opponents is an effective form of argumentation, whose entire worldview is circumscribed by whatever bubble of funemployed trust fund hipster kids they socialize with and have always socialized with, but who somehow fell backwards into a good idea and accidentally ended up with some VC money and just enough competent friends/employees/business partners to get the thing off the ground, but still have no idea what they're doing and are just coasting from the momentum of a great idea and good-enough execution so far.

Again, I have no idea what these people are actually like, but that's the mental image of the company that those ads (and other company statements and actions over the years) conjure up for me. If that's the intent of their marketing, then mission accomplished I guess, but I've got to think there are better messages they could be putting out there to help their cause.

I've met a few. All upper twenty-somethings who have drank so much of the Kool-Aid that absolutely everything else they taste tastes like Kool-Aid. I'd feel sorry for them if they weren't making a ton of money off it. Which is ironic because that's exactly what the Kool-Aid tells them: if it's profitable it's moral.

> don't ever try to work at AirBnB, we only drink the finest Kool-aid and there is a lot of cyanide in it

I know a few folks who have interviewed at their SF office, and it sounds hella cultish. More personality screenings than technical screenings, recommended courses of study so you'll fit in culturally, etc...

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