Airbnb Commits To SF By Signing A 10-Year, 169,000 Square Foot Lease | Hacker News Reader

Airbnb Commits To SF By Signing A 10-Year, 169,000 Square Foot Lease

sf.curbed.com

Airbnb signed a 10-year lease for the historic 888 Brannan building. The lease is for over 169,000 square feet, and Airbnb plans to move in by February of next year to accommodate the company's anticipated growth to more than 1,000 employees.

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888 Brannan does not look anything like the pristine building pictured in the article. Why would they need to post a clearly 'shopped picture of a building that already exists unless they were hiding something?

The actual building's windows are all painted over and that tree in the foreground does not exist. The freeway overpass pictured just across the street is a homeless encampment strewn with shopping carts, human feces, and needles. The city comes by about once a month to hose the sidewalk down with a noxious bleach solution.

btw, 888 Brannan is just around the corner from Zynga and Adobe.

Presumably they'll be renovating and this is planning artwork from their architect. This is the equivalent of my sending my family concept sketches of my kitchen renovation. I can't imagine what they'd be "hiding".

Edit: this seems to be pretty close to the angle in the picture: http://g.co/maps/xj758

Speaking from having met someone on the renovation project, That is indeed artwork from the architect, The building itself quite nice, but it's gone a bit to shit recently, the renovation is supposed to be rather impressive.

Exactly - there is a LOT of TI money to renovate for projects such as these.

"and this is planning artwork from their architect"

Good point but this appears to be the architect and the drawings on the website look nothing like the rendering that made the curbed story:

http://www.menaarchitects.com/portfolio/002_mixed_office_com...

"Airbnb has partnered up with the world-famous Gensler Architects (same folks who renovated Terminal 2) to design the space. The building is also going to seek LEED Silver certification"

Obviously, the picture is what the building will look like after renovations are done.

"the picture is what the building will look like after renovations are done."

Gensler is doing the interior for Airbnb. This is who is doing the building exterior:

http://www.menaarchitects.com/portfolio/002_mixed_office_com...

This must be your first experience with architectural renderings.

For any other europeans, 169,000 sq ft = 15 700 m^2 (or slightly bigger than two football pitches joined up).

I don't know enough about retail space to say if this is ambitious or not? On the one hand, a ten year lease is a big commitment, on the other hand I guess AirBnB is thinking 'go big or go home', and in that case it might well get cramped sooner than that.

Thank you. I was wondering why they were renting such a massive amount of space for a moment there.

So every time a startup signs a lease for office space we have to read about it on front-page HN? Who cares? This isn't even interesting. As for the "commitment," a lease is simply an asset and can be sold like anything else.

1,000 employees? For what?

I imagine that AirBnb needs a very large customer service team, for one.

Our customer support team is primarily home-shored, and works around the world in over 15 countries - less than 5% is in SF. The majority of people will be product, design, engineering... plus marketing, bd, operations, G&A, etc.

Completely sincere question that I'd love to hear your thoughts on: why in the world do you need 1000 people doing that stuff? I get how sales/marketing/customer service require high headcounts -- but product people?

Is there really something useful for 500 developers to do that the top 50 of them couldn't have done?

I've always assumed (since I don't understand it) that it's just a momentum thing. Did you ever consider keeping Airbnb under 100 employees? Would your investors have freaked at that idea? Would it have hurt your growth?

To get big, you have to grow your headcount. Staying lean forever will not support the kind of growth that AirBnB is currently enjoying or would like to achieve. The "lean" mentality is fine when you're searching for a business model or want to run a lifestyle business. It's suicide if you want to build a large company to service a large customer base. And there's nothing wrong with wanting to grow big. In fact, it's admirable.

I don't think that's a global rule- look at Instagram (nothing to do with the sale, just the number of users served by a company with two employees). Obviously, AirBnb is a very different business, but it is possible to grow by orders of magnitude without also growing headcount.

It's about revenue, not user count. Money changes everything: when customers pay, they expect a different level of service.

A company's revenue per employee is a common benchmark, and is usually around $600K-$1MM or so for successful companies at or near scale, up to $2.2MM for outliers like Apple(1). A company cannot grow to $100MM revenue and higher without having a large number of employees just to manage those revenue streams, partnerships, contracts, and support issues.

I should add that Instagram had ~13 employees, not two. That is a very low number, but mobile apps are easier to scale, support-wise, than web apps – users are just less likely to bug you, especially with a free app.

(1) Comparing Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon's Revenue per Employee: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=revenue+per+employee+ap...

A different level of service means customer support, it doesn't mean 10x-100x the number of developers working on the product.

So honestly, I'm curious---what is AirBnB going to do with ~1000 developers. Facebook expanded their headcount and created a whole suite of products glomped onto their original vision. I'd like to know if AirBnB intends the same and if so what are their plans.

Ofcourse, they have no obligation to blab about them early.

1,000 developers? Downvote.

Instagram has a few moving parts (and no revenue). AirBnB has millions (and millions in revenue).

I'm guessing the 10 year plan is they're going to start competing with orbitz, travelocity, priceline, tripadvisor, flightcaster, hipmunk, everyone in the travel space basically.

Let's not forget about cars, trucks, bikes, why not start competing with zipcar, Hertz, Budget, Enterprise? Sometimes you need a car when you travel, right?

Commercial REITs are getting into the rental space as well, they might have some sort of deal lined up with large players. Let's also not forget about coworking spaces for when you want to get work done on the road...

Airbnb for play, airbnb for work, airbnb for commercial real estate, airbnb for wheels, airbnb for...

Interesting. I used to work for an accommodation company in a similar space to AirBnb (in fact, I was tasked with cloning you guys before I quit...) that had customer service operations centralised in two continental hubs. Sounds like your approach will work a lot better than that.

What could they possibly need this much space for, and who is paying for it?

Bubblelicious.

Airbnb is frequenty cited as a counterpoint to all the bubble talk because they have a real business model and are making money. Same goes for all the other highly valued YC companies(Dropbox,OMGPOP,Heroku,etc).

There seem to be non-trivial possible legal landmines though which are likely to multiply internationally.

That's not unusual--PayPal was in the same boat and they made billions.

Their tens of millions of dollars in revenue?

Shouldn't they deposit that money in a bank?

And have their employees work out of Starbucks?

We originally wanted to work in our apartment forever. We figured we could fit 100 people in 5 apartment units in our building. Assuming we would need to scale beyond that, Joe and I talked about renting every home on the street. Imagine product in one house, marketing in another... Wasn't really feasible though.

Why, oh why, did this beautiful dream die?

I know. Train has left. Inspiration for a new startup perhaps?

That would have been epic.

Zoning code issues or hard finding a block of housing to buy with owners willing to sell?

"Wasn't really feasible though"

Zoning as only one issue. You most definitely can't run a business in a residential apartment, condo, coop or neighborhood. In some neighborhoods you might slide by depending on the makeup and the neighbors.

That sounds amazing an scary at the same time. Wonder if you could try it out for a new product team, that's fairly isolated from rest of the company. A startup within AirBnb?

"airbnb skunkworks? Yeah, they're three houses down"

Maybe they plan to divide it into smaller chunks and loan them out to people via some kind of internet website for that sort of thing?

I'm actually wondering if they will ever get into the coworking space.

I think 42Floors is going to get there first:

http://42floors.com/

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