For example, their post about their work in search ranking is quite interesting [1].
[1]: https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/machine-learning-power...
Airbnb is basically just a prettier craigslist with a payment transfer mechanism and messaging. It isn't to say it isn't a great business, just that the "tech" part of it is not really much more than a web app.
Also engineering challenges aren’t always obvious from the consumer facing product. It is true that AirBnB founders have design backgrounds rather than engineering ones, but from what I’ve seen of their engineering and data science work, they would qualify as a tech company in my estimation. They did come up with Apache Airflow which is a well regarded data pipeline management system.
I'm just pointing out that the nature of Airbnb's business means that there's no real-time, no streaming, no billions of concurrent users, etc. The tech boils down to a 1) web app 2) payments mechanism and 3) messaging. Nothing particularly revolutionary on the tech side.
Internet schminternet.
The question is: if you sacked everyone but the core team who keeps the trains running, what would happen to the business?
They might but after all these years you still can't search for a room with a private bath despite the platform has the data and detail pages show it.
I'm trying to understand the underlying problem you're getting at. I haven't had trouble with getting places with my own bathroom though I do not stay in Airbnbs with multiple concurrent guests much.
A private room typically means you get your own bedroom but there are others living in the same home, maybe the owner, maybe other guests. Living room, kitchen are shared. The question is whether you also get a bathroom for your own use or not. This is displayed even in the listing (4 guests · 1 bedroom · 1 bed · 1 shared bath vs 2 guests · 1 bedroom · 1 bed · 1 private bath) but you are unable to filter on it. They understand this detail is important enough to put it in the listing but you still can't filter on it.
And the reason this matters, well, that should be pretty evident: multiple strangers can be in a kitchen or a living at the same time but not in a bathroom. A shared bathroom is a botttleneck in the morning and an overall pain in the neck to be honest. And in some places the private room-private bath combo is by far the best value.
