The technical challenges of a successful marketplace

It's an interesting window into their operations and an outstanding recruiting tool. Someone will beat down their door to help solve one or more of these.

When I was a kid, I'd imagine one specific thing for the future. I'd see unused space and resources around the house or in the neighborhood. I'd think if only there were some meaningful way to inventory all of it and present in a central place, people could horse trade and we'd all be happier.

eBay satisfies 5% of this promise.

Airbnb is interesting because your spare space is much easier to catalog than any other resource. I'm excited to see them succeed – it brings us closer to my weird childhood imaginings.

I find the challenges with payment and fraud to be especially interesting. Your app can have some errors but nothing threatens the future of your business more than not dealing with fraud or not doing payments in the safest (perfect) way. It seems that no other feature has that.

Payments/Fraud are two issues that PayPal had to overcome before succeeding and put Square into a big problem earlier this year.

To followup on the blog post, we have about 20 technical and product openings at the moment, though this number keeps increasing, not decreasing. Some of them are posted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs

This post feels like a bit of a tease - I was hoping for details on how airbnb is currently solving these problems today. :)