The Customer Who Almost Killed Slack, Stripe, and Airbnb(siliconopera.com) |
The Customer Who Almost Killed Slack, Stripe, and Airbnb(siliconopera.com) |
And a zillion alternate universes in which they never got big. Survivor bias is real, and everyone has just-so stories. The ones they choose to tell are partially an artifact of organizational culture, and partially of self-aggrandizement.
I'm genuinely confused at what is it better at than Booking, which also has hosts.
Booking is also significantly cheaper at all offerings ranges and has a much wider catalogue including hotels.
Airbnb was cool and interesting when it was genuinely cheaper and offering authentic experiences.
Every vacation or place I go I check Airbnb and bar for one apartment in Sangenjaya, Tokyo, I have never, ever booked there in years, and the only reason I did was that Booking had nothing in those days in that very place I wanted. But it's rare.
As it would apply to a lot of things throughout history.
e.g. “Remember that there is an alternate universe in which ancient Anatolian farmers defeated the Yamnaya steppe raiders in Europe, and they are telling the story of how they nearly didn't make it.”
Which would mean even the concept of “European” as known in this universe… is just a bundle of survivor bias, just-so stories, and so on.
As to your second point: "European" is an arbitrary social concept. Cartographers could have decided that Eurasia is obviously a single landmass, or that nothing is more important than river systems, or that the most important directionality is the path of the sun. Thousands of years later, the decisions made have consequences, but there is nothing divinely ordained about what those decisions were.
I suppose if a hundred years from now the common, generic word for "hotel" is "airbean", that might be a significant effect. But it's a little more likely to be "marriott" or "hilton", I think.
I'm pretty sure Slack has those things by now. So the question is, what did the team actually end up building? What features were prioritized over the enterprise compliance features? Would Slack have less revenue had they gone with the enterprise stuff first?
I'd be particularly interested in a separate source for the 2010 story about AirBnB. I worked in the short term rental space at that time and I remember AirBnB exploding into the zeitgeist at that time and being seen as a potentially potent new disrupter - not this "at grave risk unless they took on a big new customer" story that this article is projecting. Plus, AirBnB raised their Series A in Nov 2010, so it didn't seem like they were having issues with investors.
While the core arguments stand, there's little actual nutrients in the article.
I spend hours per day with codex and claude. Almost every LLM is using each other's training data. There's a ton of AI slop out there already now feeding into training data. They all sound the same.
You are right! My honest take, The customer who did X wasnt Y, it was Z.
In early 2025, this was novelty, now it's annoying.
Will definitely now AI check for slop better before even posting. But was curious how automated and cheap I could make it. Isn't turning out that well yet. Also I put up a PR to remove silconopera from Kagi Small Web. Because it breaks multiple of their guidelines: multi-author, all fake authors, and all LLM content at non-human scale.
Gaaaah please stop
Hundreds of billions of dollars and they can't teach the superintelligent being that will replace us all (if freed from its shackles by the US government) to use the word "honest" correctly. Sad!
The abuse of language via token predictors is legitimately infuriating. Perhaps more infuriating is that blatant spambot posts are upvoted to the front page routinely.
It’s not just slop—it’s turbo slop.
(Embrace the suck I guess, won’t last too much longer)
I'll take "Things I've heard every single day for the past 3.5 years" for $200, Alex.
Some of the most valuable customer conversations we've had completely reshaped our roadmap. But we've also found that it's important to distinguish between a design partner helping define a broader market need and a customer asking for highly specific workflows that don't generalize.
That distinction is much easier to see in hindsight than in real time.
Both prioritize putting at the top places that are likelier to sell and hotels in more touristic areas draw more people.
What are those off putting experiences on booking?
Both apps and websites do essentially the same, it's not a sketchy dark pattern filled Ryanair check in.