Company
ActiveAirbnb
San Francisco · Since 2008
Still independent. A small software staff coordinates a much larger, scattered group of hosts who are not employees.
Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk founded Airbnb in 2008. The company does not own the rooms. It lists them, takes a fee from the guest and often from the host, and employs a staff that is small next to the number of people who clean, message, and check guests in.
The hosts are not employees. That sentence is the business model and the labor argument. A company coordinates a workforce it does not put on the payroll, and the work still happens.
Who actually works
Airbnb's own staff builds the site, handles trust and safety, and deals with cities that decided a short-term rental was a hotel in disguise. The larger effort is elsewhere: cleaners, co-hosts, and the hosts themselves, paid by the booking or not paid at all if they are the owner with a sponge. Cities have required registration, limits, and hotel taxes. Each rule creates a small clerical job, inside the company and inside the host's kitchen, that did not exist when a spare room was only a spare room.
A company, not a movement
Airbnb is public and still independent. It is a useful correction to the idea that a software firm is weightless. The weight was moved onto people the firm does not employ. The catalogue lists the company because it is a real employer of its own staff, and because the work it organizes is larger than that staff.
The work it organized
- Trust and safety agent
- Host
- Cleaner
- Policy staff
On the timeline
Related
- UberActive