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Comment by fletchowns | Hacker News Reader

He then addressed his concerns about my blog post, and the potentially negative impact it could have on his company’s growth and current round of funding. During this call and in messages thereafter, he requested that I shut down the blog altogether or limit its access, and a few weeks later, suggested that I update the blog with a “twist" of good news so as to “complete[s] the story”.

If this is true it is downright appalling. Does he really think this woman that just had her life turned upside down gives a shit about his next round of funding?

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It gets worse.

"Note: a second co-founder did email me for the first time around 2am yesterday, suggesting we meet for coffee as he 'would enjoy meeting' me. He made no inquiry into my current emotional state, my safety or my well being."

Speechless. The lack of compassion for another human being here is staggering. Utterly oblivious — or indifferent. How does this happen to people?

Writing well is extremely hard. It could be that the "second co-founder" is bad at writing rather than oblivious or indifferent. He did want to meet her in person, perhaps to lend assistance, after all. If he was oblivious, this is probably not the action he would have taken.

> Writing well is extremely hard.

Please.

Writing like Michael Chabon or Aaron Sorkin is hard. Having some basic compassion in how you interact with people is not. This email didn't need to win any awards — it just needed to have some minimum level of sensitivity. As I said in a cousin:

"he 'would enjoy meeting' me"

I don't think she really gives a damn in her current state what this guy would "enjoy" doing, is really the point here.

I have to agree with you.

If someone falls over in the street, you probably ask if they're okay. If someone worse happens to them because your website failed to make someone safe, then you don't tell them you'd "enjoy meeting" them.

I completely agree with your last sentence.

However, I at least, find writing about emotional matters to be extremely difficult. When I sit down with a goal of saying something nice, to show some compassion, to show what I'm actually feeling - what I usually end up doing is twisting the knife.

So in general I write less, and see the people face to face ASAP. Any other way is just harder for us both.

I could have easily made this mistake.

Well, isn't that what he would probably talk about over coffee? We don't know how the conversation went. He may have said something like:

  We're very sorry about what's happened to you and seek to
  resolve it. Let's have coffee as soon as possible to see 
  what we have to do to resolve the situation for you.

Would that justify the criticism that he should have asked about how she was at that moment, when it would seem from the conversation that there was every intention to do so only moments later?

"he 'would enjoy meeting' me"

I don't think she really gives a damn in her current state what this guy would "enjoy" doing, is really the point here.

Apart from jrockway's explanation: it may also be the way she currently construes and represents the email and is not a literal quote. Given 'her current state', you can't really trust her to be an honest judge of peoples' intentions. Nor should you fault her for that, but that doesn't mean her statements can be taken at face value.

EJ has demonstrated a keen grasp of English language, punctuation and rhetoric. I think regardless of her state communication is clearly her strong suit.

What I'm saying is that I'd bet good money she knows what quotation marks mean.

True, but the rest of the point remains: you don't know the rest of the message and how well she's presenting it. That particular quoted phrase may have annoyed her so much, that it doesn't really matter anymore what the rest of the email said. Even though an objective outsider would say the email was otherwise decent and acceptable.

What I'm saying, and why I'm responding, is that I'm seeing classic lynch mob behavior: people are out with their pitchforks, making all kinds of sweepings statements about what is happening, based on very little actual information. You are making rather bold assertions about someone based on only that quote. Doesn't that strike you as perhaps a bit rash?

You're right.

But what you're missing is, it's not rash to be extremely upset in this situation. A woman's house was destroyed. Airbnb's response was to worry primarily about how she might impact their funding.

Personally, I don't want to live in that kind of world.

Now this part I think is overdramatic. I agree with jrockway. Criticizing a person for stating he would "enjoy meeting" a person is more than a bit pedantic imo. I'm sorry if she "doesn't care" about what anyone else may "enjoy", but seriously, I don't think it indicates any lack of sympathy. It's not like EJ is bleeding all over her keyboard while people nonchalantly schedule appointments later in the week or something, the crime is over now and it's a reasonable way to request a meeting. What do you want him to say?

Really a silly thing to make a fuss over, and fussing over trivial matters just weakens an otherwise strong case.

Not disagreeing with you, but just wanted to point out: this is why there are such things as trained spokespeople and customer service reps. I know these jobs aren't looked upon with much respect by those of us in the engineering and development community who would rather say things directly to the customer...but here, an innocent attempt to cut through the redtape and get to the bottom of things may have been misinterpreted by the customer to look much worse than it was...

I can totally see how the co-founder had the best of intentions and in his mind, was thinking "She'll be grateful to see me cutting through the layers of BS and giving her a straightforward invitation to meetup". Unfortunately, she saw the terse message and interpreted it in the worst light possible...and then reposted it to the world, with her interpretation.

When my car got wrecked by someone else's poor driving, I dreaded making the call to my insurance company to deal with it, even though all I had to do was report it to get my reimbursement.

The very first thing the customer rep said to me after I said why I was calling was, "Are you OK? How are you doing?" I was totally fine, and though this is most likely a script that they teach to anyone qualified to answer the phones...even if I were angry, it'd be difficult for me to rip on the customer rep (at that particular point).

In the airbnb case, if the co-founder had taken the five seconds to go through the motions of expressing the empathy that he felt, at the very least, this disgruntled customer couldn't claim on her blog that he had expressed no empathy for her situation and just wanted to get to deal making...which was probably quite the opposite of how he felt.

But yeah...it is a trivial bit in the big picture. It's a shame it could taint the discussion between her and airbnb regardless.

What's the problem? Co-founder wants to meet with person who was harmed by using his company's service? Or the fact that he didn't phrase his request for a meeting appropriately?

You must have a lot of trouble walking down the street if you find such trivial things staggering.

I had doubts about whether this was just a misunderstanding or that EJ was blowing it out of proportion, but after reading that in her post, that's all that needs to be said. Dreadful.

Once the mainstream press is going to pick this up (probably a WHEN, not IF the way it's going), they might not have another round of funding to give a shit about in the first place.

It's depressing, because AirBnB is a solid idea, if they can work some of the minor (ha!) kinks, like this, out of the system.

But after falling flat on their face like this, I wouldn't be surprised to see the idea of "social housing" go the same way as the Zeppelin did after the Hindenberg. It's going to be forever tied to every homeowner's worst nightmare.

It's certainly going to be interesting to see how AirBnB handles this going forward. So far, it's pretty much been a textbook version of how not to handle it, and given the HN audience, there are a lot of lessons to be drawn from this.

The problem is that this is AirBnB's 2nd to worst case scenario and it doesn't look like it is going to turn out well for them or that they gamed the possible problem scenarios out before hand and created a set of responses. No one died, so there is no "AirBnB Killer" in the headlines, but it might make the host side a little more scarce.

Hysteria and PR can both overcome facts. Heck, look at the people in the articles comments quoting the McDonald's coffee incident and believing the "common wisdom" it was a lawsuit happy lady. McDonald's PR did a heck of a job on that one given how absolutely, positively wrong they were and how bad their behavior and actions were.

I just cannot believe they didn't think this might be a consequence of the scaling of their service. It happens to every community based service as soon as it gets out of the initial, early adopter group. Startups need to take the time to figure out how to deal with "bad actors" in their business model, particularly when the potential damage is high and of a new type.

The founders should have taken advice from one of their older advisors before proceeding further.

So bad, she's traumatized and he's trying to steamroll her just like he has everything else probably in the last couple years...Ooops! It was time to be a human. Should have let the CS rep keep talking to the woman.

Edit: bring on the downvotes! That's right, downvote a difference of opinion, and forget about logical or reasoned counterargument. Next time the internet lynch mob will come for your startup; hope that someone takes your side when they do.

----

Don't you think the CEO has to worry about the people he's paying? Who knows what their burn rate is; that funding could have been a life or death event, and in the event of death then a bunch more unemployed people would be hitting the streets.

And that wouldn't help anyone, least of all this woman.

AirBnB reported this to the police. They said they had someone in custody. What more do you want them to do? Go after them like Dirty Harry?

Dollars to donuts this woman is planning a lawsuit and looking for a payday. Not against the drug addicts who trashed her apartment, but against AirBnB. She rents out a room to people she's never met in person and then acts surprised when sometimes it goes wrong.

It's depressing to see the mob mentality here on Hacker News, and the extent to which Arrington delights in playing the organ grinder.

A pedestrian is hit by a DUI driver, does he sue or blame Honda? No? So why all the hate on AirBnB when it was a bunch of drug addicts who committed the crime? Sell them into old school bondage and send the income to her, by all means, but let's be real: it was the criminals' fault first, her fault second, and AirBnB in a distant third.

I think you're missing the point--the CEO asked the victim to take down her blog because it was bad press. If you were considering funding the company, wouldn't you want to know about potential issues?

Putting aside the questions of blame, and the eventual intent of the individual. Putting aside the question of culpability, and whether anyone acted inappropriately.

Thinking about this entirely from the perspective of AirBnB. Doing what a company is supposed to do, by law, and considering only the shareholders.

Given what they've done, do you think it's the best thing to have done to give the company the best chance of long-term survival?

I don't.

Leaving out the morals and the ethics, assuming we only care about the company's survival, this issue has to be dealt with in an open, transparent, and above all seen by all to be fair manner.

Providing for the short term care of this customer is vital. Whether it's right or wrong, ethical or moral, if they don't do it, people will say "That might have been me."

Above all else, that will kill AirBnB, and they are seeming to do nothing about it.

Leaving aside the moral and ethical considerations, working only according to the game theoretic standard of doing right by the company, what they are doing is clearly not in the best interests of the company.

========

ADDED IN EDIT: From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html :

    Please don't bait other users by
    inviting them to downmod you.

FWIW - I didn't down-vote you. I think you're wrong, and I don't think you've thought it through enough, but I didn't down-vote you. I took the time to reply because I think your view is common enough, and you had the courage to say it out loud.

But as I say, the current actions (as we understand them to be) are not in the best interests of the company or its employees - really, they're not.

Well, ok. While being entirely rational, let's also think about a related angle. The woman is out quite some money. She wants it back. The most coldbloodedly rational act on her part would have been to wait till they closed the round and then sue. Which, if you read her post carefully, is almost certainly what will happen in terms of timeline.

A billion dollar co is a real juicy target, much more so than the actual bad guys.

Sure. And:

a. She's in a fit state to be cold-bloodedly rational

b. She knew AirBnB was about to close a round

c. That closing was within a few weeks, and hence worth waiting

d. In the meantime she has no home, and has to deal with

d.1. the police,

d.2. all the credit card issues,

d.3. all the banks,

d.4. AirBnB themselves

Seems unlikely to me that she planned that. <shrug> You call them as you see them. I'm saying that I think AirBnB did the wrong thing to start with, and continues to make it worse, even discounting the ethics and morals. Add those in and it's even worse still.

  | Rock | AirBnB | Hard place |

The real issue, again ignoring ethics and morals and just concentrating on optimal course of actions for the company - where is their risk assessment and contingency plan? If they don't have one, that's tantamount to negligence. And you can't claim 20:20 hindsight, because people have been expressing concerns over this issue ever since they started.

As a director of two companies, one of which is involved in safety and security issues, I watch the unfolding - and perhaps unravelling - drama with interest (in both senses of the term).

> I think your view is common enough, and you had the courage to say it out loud.

Thanks, I guess.

Philosophical: seems to me that the tone of HN has shifted. Not in the standard way, it's not less intelligent per se. Rather, there is a greater proportion of big-co employees, academics, and college students. People without profit/loss responsibility, who don't deal directly with customers, who've never been through a media firestorm like what AirBnB is experiencing now.

While it's usually hard to pinpoint any particular change, it's safe to say the tenor of this thread would be very different if this was still Startup News.

YC alums need not say AirBnB has handled this well (i concur that the mere existence of this thread shows that they made objective errors, though in my opinion not normative ones). But they would not be so quick to trash the startup.

Considering the interests of the shareholders means that, if the shareholders want Airbnb to buy her a new house, they should buy her a new house. "Interests" doesn't always mean "more money."

What more do you want them to do?

Well, for starters: company officers shouldn't be using weasel words to try and take credit for things they haven't actually done.

Don't you think the CEO has to worry about the people he's paying? Who knows what their burn rate is; that funding could have been a life or death event, and in the event of death then a bunch more unemployed people would be hitting the streets.

Well, how bad is bad PR? Their service has this major flaw that your home can get royally trashed & there is no backup. If they let this stand AS-IS, all it's going to take is a couple news networks to pickup on the dangers of social housing & down the toilet a lot of their potential customers go.

And that wouldn't help anyone, least of all this woman.

AirBnB existing & doing nothing isn't any better than AirBnB not existing and being unable to do anything. Why should she really care about their livelihood if they don't seem to really care about her livelihood?

AirBnB reported this to the police. They said they had someone in custody. What more do you want them to do? Go after them like Dirty Harry?

Recoup her losses or at least make an effort to. Then instigate a plan to cover their asses the next time this happens, because if they continue as a service this probably will happen more often. If they are going to leave the homeowners wholly responsible for any damages without offering some sort of insurance or protection, then they're going to remain niche & their word is as good as dog poo. "Yeah, we provide a safe way to do this, we just won't guarantee it, because that's not really exactly true."

So AirBnB has a flawed business model. They can't vet people properly, their word is not guaranteed. Why should I ever trust AirBnB again? Let's play roulette with my housing.

A pedestrian is hit by a DUI driver, does he sue or blame Honda? No?

Terrible analogy. If Honda advertised that their cars were safe, but in some cases under normal operation their cars had catastrophic failure despite the owner not doing anything out of the ordinary, then yes, Honda would have a major issue on their hands.

You seem to be pointing at how EJ was a fool for lending her house out to strangers, which just so happens to be the business model for AirBnB. So if she is stupid, what does that make AirBnB? "Social Housing For Stupid People", could win a lot of customer's with that slogan.

I am not down entirely on AirBnB, but when I first heard of them I thought "ehh, sounds risky, what happens if someone trashes your place?" Well now I know what happens & it ain't pretty.

If Honda advertised that their cars were safe, but in some cases under normal operation their cars had catastrophic failure despite the owner not doing anything out of the ordinary, then yes, Honda would have a major issue on their hands.

If you look at the advertising for cars, it's always along the lines of safer instead of safe. A LOT of lawyer-hours went into protecting them from exactly this scenario.

But recall the Toyota "brakes not working" debacle from a year ago. Even if there are no assurances of safety in the marketing, people expect their cars to be safe under normal conditions. Breaking that implicit contract is still very expensive in both PR and money.

Yup, this does indeed deserve the downvote.

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