"I'm sure they deal with this with people wanting to stay beyond their trip date or trying to book directly, but Airbnb can easily track this stuff with the scheduling feature and seeing discrepancies when users try to go offline."
Just curious, what recourse does Airbnb have when discovering these discrepancies?
If you bypass AirBnB, you will not benefit from their insurance coverage. I have heard of cases where recurring guests would try to arrange the next deal directly, and that factor was always the decisive reason for the host to decline.
I'd imagine it's hard to tell the difference between offline bookings from other sources, and repeat guests. We list our room on Airbnb and occasionally on work email lists, CL etc, for longer-term sublets. We have never taken an Airbnb guest offline, but from the surface it would look pretty similar, with the balance of insurance vs someone you have had enough contact with to trust (and the fees/tax aspect), I can certainly see why people'd do it. Especially given a recent experience with unexpected underpayment from them :/
They could disallow that host from listing their space. Small revenue loss to AirBnB. Big revenue loss to the host. Not really worth the few bucks to not be able to use airbnb.
Irrelevant. How valuable is the work you do? You could go around 'pitching' your window washing services and land 5 out of 100 potential clients but you still aren't getting more than a few bucks per wash.
Irrelevant, since people are in window washing services despite the low pay.
Reasons for huge commissions:
1. Restricted field: you need a license, and in general these kinds of licenses are difficult enough to get to create artificial scarcity.
-> seek employment in such a field, if you think you can get in.
2. High stakes: A lot of money is moved around so it doesn't hurt so bad to give an important service provider a large chunk.
-> seek work where the money is.
-> when dealing with Realtors etc., try and negotiate over the price anyway, just out of principle.
3. There is probably more to this profession than is visible from the outside. I don't know what, but usually people underestimate the complexities of professions they don't know much about.
-> ...? Maybe talk to Realtors and find out what it is like.
I'm just showing why realtors aren't as greedy as you think. The reason they get away with charging that much is because of the likelihood of being royally screwed when one buys a house.
Fair enough, but it's also advantageous to make it non-obviously fake. Consider the recent stories about services faking traffic/users in order to gain real traffic/users (ebay, reddit, dating sites, etc).
You have a very fair point, but it's tangential to the one patio11 is making; creating testing data for development purposes (that's never going to be seen by users, short of an accident) and creating faked data for marketing/growth/etc purposes (which is solely for the purpose of presenting to users) are unrelated.
I guess I'm not following how they are unrelated. To really stress a system and find bugs, shouldn't you be putting it under realistic usage and load? In my mind using test data that closely matches real data is desirable for development purposes. I suppose I'm now actually disagreeing with the OP's statement -- that example was a specific circumstance where perhaps more care should've been taken, but for the general case I think it's actually desirable to use realistic data.
Plus I just think it'd be cool if you could use the same service/API for both use cases.
"Given the scale of the cash injection, the company might not have to raise another series round before going public, though a bridge round isn’t inconceivable."
Why does a company need to raise so-much-money before going public? Isn't the whole point of "going public" to raise money?
I'd say that the point of "going public" is to provide liquidity to existing shareholders (e.g. founders, employees, outside investors). There are other ways to raise money, if that's all you want.
Sorry, I don't know anything about finance/business. What you say makes some sense to me, that going public lets initial investors cash out, if they so wish.
But I'm still confused, why not sell public shares from the get-go. Is it that it's easier to make your case (for investment) to a VC than it is to Joe public?
Its the bane of quarterly capitalism - once public, management focus is diverted to managing earnings and increased amount of transparency needs to be provided for the company's internal operations.
Companies would prefer to stay private (and away from the limelight) while they're still figuring out product/market fit etc
The biggest reason for not going public is because you'll get a low valuation. The public markets aren't much for venture investing.
If you don't want to dilute the hell out of existing shareholders, you'll want a high IPO price. You get that by moving the company as far forward on venture cash as you can.
If you take a look at the biotech industry, IPOing too early can result in not raising enough for your cash needs, so you offer more shares, diluting your existing stockholders.
> The public markets aren't much for venture investing.
The public markets definitely are for venture investing that was their origin and still is a main function today.
However it is not rare for founders and early investors to cash out during or shortly after an IPO, typically after a hold-back period called a lock-in.
In my opinion this is a red flag, it shows that founders and early investors would rather sell at the current price than stay in, and they typically have a bit more information (insider trading laws notwithstanding) than the general public.
The stock market is an excellent place for fools and their money to be parted, think of it as a giant casino where the house controls the games and the information available, the SEC controls some of the rules and the public is (usually) clueless.
I wouldn't say founders selling is a red flag. Often the overwhelming majority of their net worth (plus a decent chunk of their future professional earnings) is tied up in their company. At some point they need diversification far more than they need to maximize returns on company stock.
Early investors are another matter, of course. They usually have other ways of diversifying so that's not a plausible motive for sales in most cases.
If I had 10 million dollars worth of stock in my company and was otherwise pretty much poor, you'd see me selling a good 50% regardless of how confident I am in the company.
When people float companies they built and worked at for a long time with little tangible reward it is not unreasonable for them to want to take their money and actually enjoy it.
The public markets definitely are for venture investing that was their origin and still is a main function today.
I guess it all depends on what you call venture investing. I don't think that Sergey and Brin could have IPOed 6 months after founding Google - the public would have found the idea of investing absurd. So instead they went to VCs who can actually realize value in a "idea" and are willing to invest at a reasonable valuation.
Raise enough VC money and you can advance the company forward enough so that the general public see value in your company (usually revenue). At that point you can IPO and actually get a decent valuation.
Sarbanes-Oxley made it much more complicated to sell to public investors than to private ones. You pretty much have to hire staff whose only job is to ensure being compliant.
Public companies always had pretty strict reporting requirements leading to substantial overhead. If you take the public's money they have a right to be informed and to a minimum standard of corporate structure and governance.
Sarbanes-Oxley was instituted in the wake of the Enron and Worldcom (and others beside) scandals (which led to the demise of accounting giant Arthur-Andersen, which - surprisingly - survived in some form because the verdict against them from the Enron debacle was eventually overturned by the supreme court) which severely undermined the public confidence in Wall Street.
As a result the already substantial reporting requirements for public companies were ratcheted up several notches further increasing the overhead. So yes, Sarbanes-Oxley made it more expensive to be listed on the stock market and therefore to be trade publicly but the difference was always there, also before SOX.
One reason is overhead. Being a publicly traded company involves lots of legal filings and paperwork ($$$). Typically, you want to stay private for as long as you can. For example, Facebook only went public when they were legally obligated to because they had reached the limit on private shareholders. (I'm not saying that was the only reason, but it was a factor in the timing)
Going public requires a vast investment in accounting and lawyering, before you can think of how to make your shares seem like a deal. There's a whole new set of laws that suddenly apply when a company is about to go public.
Going public involves giving up a lot more control, since private investments of qualified investors are basically a freely negotiable contract, while offering shares to the public is legally standardized. For example, once public there is very little you can do against some troublemaker acquiring a significant position in your company via the open market and then causing endless trouble via legally required minority shareholder rights...
> I'd say that the point of 'going public' is to provide liquidity to existing shareholders (e.g. founders, employees, outside investors). There are other ways to raise money, if that's all you want.
Actually, the point of an IPO is to raise money, from the public markets. It's an Initial Public Offering, and the company can raise more at a later date by issuing more shares. The liquidity wouldn't exist if people didn't want those shares.
The IPO just happens to be a convenient time for current shareholders to sell their stake (as part of the offering) but even then, there are rules about how they can do that (lock-in periods, etc)
> Isn't the whole point of "going public" to raise money?
It used to be. Regulations introduced in the past decade have made it very expensive to be a public company - there's a lot of accounting and legal overhead. These days it's easier to raise large sums of money privately and only IPO when those investors want to cash out.
Wouldn't the logic instead be that when they wanted to raise money again that it would be at an IPO-level. Not that this round is necessarily driving them towards an IPO, except in the sense that it's leading them to be big enough for one.
Why does a company need to raise so-much-money before going public?
To spend it on a drastically raising revenue before the IPO: "...Our revenue grew by 785% last year so buy shares of our $xx billion company..."
*Isn't the whole point of "going public" to raise money?"
Nope, many times (if not most) it's to get the money back and then some for the early investors.
Except that go is a garbage collected language and as such will never be a replacement for C++. I could however see C++ dying, leaving C and go behind.
If rust could do that (someone hacked and remove GC), I'm sure go authors will figure something out. Well, guess it all depends on interest on that topic.
What about the author's complaints about exponentially increasing code complexity when introducing new features or new exception types? I feel like the author made an attempt to write c++ the "correct" way and found it unsuitable for the software's goals (zero undefined behavior).
There's been several extended discussions on this, some involving the author, and in virtually every case he's been berating the language for doing things a particular way but often because it's just one way of many and he's ignorant of the other ways of doing it.
There was some bitching about allocators, for example, as if he didn't know about the C++ allocator override feature which isn't even hard to implement. Then there was more confusion about template objects for things like `vector` where he was using them as you might a C linked list library, then complaining that you had to allocate twice as many objects.
I think the author is dimly aware of what C++ really is, and just refuses to play along because they'd rather be writing C code anyway.
John Carmack could probably tear apart every single one of those complaints in ten minutes and have time left over to talk about his new CTO position. That's because Carmack spends the time to learn his tools inside and out and doesn't simply bitch about things being not to his liking.
The entire first half of the article is dedicated to why "C++ with exceptions" is not acceptable for software that strives to have zero undefined behavior. Your proposed "better title" doesn't make sense given the article content.
He doesn't really make a case for not using exceptions though. He misuses the term "undefined behaviour", doesn't discuss RAII and doesn't give any concrete examples.
For a while I thought C + templates would be a great idea as well. In theory templates are a much more powerful and expressive way of generating code than macros/xmacros.
However after playing around with the idea in a few C++ modules I was writing I came to the conclusion that it's just not worth it. Part of what makes C so enjoyable to write is its relatively "weak" typing and the flexibility that comes with that, primarily freely casting between pointer types including void*'s where necessary. Templates fight against that at every opportunity and I found myself spending more time trying to figure out how to wrangle my code into the template type system than actually making progress on the problem at hand. Newer additions like C++11 constexprs take that type-system frustration to an entirely new level.
Many of these "I'd never have imagined you could get rich doing... (groceries|steel|lumber|shoes|silverware|bandaids|etc) examples take generations to build the business large enough to actually "get rich." They're definitely not "get-rich-quick" schemes but slow, methodical progress made on capturing a portion of industries with billions worth of turnover per year. Obviously counter-examples exist (Cotsco, etc.) but by and large these stories involve generational contributions to the business.
Just curious, what recourse does Airbnb have when discovering these discrepancies?