First of all I don’t think AirBnB currently has too many employees & when they were 85 employees they were adding 2-3 employees per day[1] Likewise their team has also grown due to a couple of acquisitions/acquihires – Crashpadder, Accoleo and DailyBooth.
The reason why AirBnB needs a team of 800+ employees is because, they’re trying to expand as quickly as possible into as many countries as they can – leveraging the growth they already have there. For example they have 20,000 properties listed in Asia[2] & are focusing heavily on increasing this number & have just opened offices over there.
The [2] post also highlights some of the reason for the number of employees as each location requires, “a team of dedicated local customer support agents and a hotline for queries” due to AirBnB offering 24/7 support to its users.
As well as having, local customer support agents who help the company provide 24/7, AirBnB also requires: Management, Finance, Accounting, Legal (Recently they hired David Hantman from Yahoo[3] to help tackle some of their regulatory issues), Human Resources, Business Development, Customer Support, Other Operational Staff etc alongside their developers to build out the company & leverage the market opportunity.
Comments
First of all I don’t think AirBnB currently has too many employees & when they were 85 employees they were adding 2-3 employees per day[1] Likewise their team has also grown due to a couple of acquisitions/acquihires – Crashpadder, Accoleo and DailyBooth.
The reason why AirBnB needs a team of 800+ employees is because, they’re trying to expand as quickly as possible into as many countries as they can – leveraging the growth they already have there. For example they have 20,000 properties listed in Asia[2] & are focusing heavily on increasing this number & have just opened offices over there.
The [2] post also highlights some of the reason for the number of employees as each location requires, “a team of dedicated local customer support agents and a hotline for queries” due to AirBnB offering 24/7 support to its users. As well as having, local customer support agents who help the company provide 24/7, AirBnB also requires: Management, Finance, Accounting, Legal (Recently they hired David Hantman from Yahoo[3] to help tackle some of their regulatory issues), Human Resources, Business Development, Customer Support, Other Operational Staff etc alongside their developers to build out the company & leverage the market opportunity.
[1] http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/05/25/airbnb-is-growing-fast...
[2] http://thenextweb.com/asia/2012/11/21/airbnb-targets-2-milli...
[3] http://allthingsd.com/20121015/yahoo-loses-government-relati...