Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight
Airbnb & YC, just fix this please:<p>1. Get a new place for EJ. Furnish it fully. Pay for everything.<p>2. Help her restore her virtual identity. Use any resources at your considerable disposal.<p>3. Help her find her irreplaceable stuff. A few private detectives and a small team of scouters can make more progress in 2 weeks that the SFPD can make in a lifetime. Publish pictures of her grandmother's jewelry to enlist a giant army of spotters.<p>4. Hire her and pay her well (perhaps even with equity). She is obviously an excellent writer and an empathetic persona. But more importantly, she is an expert in addressing what is clearly the weakest link in your business model's chain.<p>5. Fuck the business models, projections, and funding rounds and just "do the right thing".<p>This appears to be a royal fuck-up. But nothing compared to the lost goodwill for Airbnb, YC, the startup community, and the "new order" in general. Many of us had thought that you all had deprecated the era of Ford Pinto thinking. Current data appears to be to the contrary.<p>Turn this lemon into lemonade before the window closes. Tick. Tick. Tick.<p>[EDIT: This has nothing to do with assigning blame; this incident was clearly an outlier and nobody's fault (except the obvious bad guys). And it has nothing to do with solving this class of problem. All I'm saying is that fixing this instance will lead to solving this class. It presents an excellent opportunity to fix things in a way that never could have been imagined before.  Airbnb has a compelling business proposition with an obvious Achilles heel. This unfortunate situation presents an excellent opportunity to address that weakness head on.  But only with a 179 degree change in thinking.  I don't know what the ultimate solution to this problem is, but <i>now</i> is clearly the time for Airbnb to get moving on it...]