Yes, someone always has to be the person to point this out as if the commenter or other readers had never considered it before :)
Do you have examples to share of companies who were as devoted to talking to their customers and making something people want as Airbnb, but who failed to build a successful company?
That YC W09 batch had about 16 companies. They were all far less successful than Airbnb (though some of them did well and got solid exits, and others live on and are going OK, like mine). But none of the companies who did less well than Airbnb were remotely as engaged with their users as Airbnb was. It was blindingly clear, even in the first month of the batch.
Airbnb probably made a bunch of people very rich, which could probably count as success, however we could also point out that they're a great example of the toxicity of VC funded startups:
1. They business model seem to be disrupting housing markets and regular neighborhoods, more than it's actually disrupting incumbents (Accor & co.).
2. 13 years after their launch, this is their bottom line:
> Net income -$4.584 billion (2020)
Which, yeah, is during the pandemic, but they've never been profitable.
Though I guess these days success is measured by how much money you can get from investors, than building an actually profitable business.
You're the second person in the thread who has sought to diminish the point by tangentially invoking the controversial aspects of what they do. It's a non-sequitur. I'm not engaging with that part further, as I responded to it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28425675
As for financial losses, yes of course the pandemic year was hard, but it's completely false to say that Airbnb has never been profitable or that it is not a financially strong company. Indeed they have financial strength built into the foundations of the company; they were revenue-focused and profitable in their first few months, and the very thing that made them attractive to investors was that their unit economics (dollar margin per transaction) was so strong. And they have had several profitable periods in the years leading up to their IPO. Yes they may have ended up posting losses, because they've spent heavily on marketing/growth and expansion into new product categories, but that doesn't make them a weak company, quite the opposite. If you're trying to equate them to money-sinks like Theranos, WeWork, Uber, etc, you're mistaken; they are the very antithesis of those kinds of companies.
Do you have examples to share of companies who were as devoted to talking to their customers and making something people want as Airbnb, but who failed to build a successful company?
That YC W09 batch had about 16 companies. They were all far less successful than Airbnb (though some of them did well and got solid exits, and others live on and are going OK, like mine). But none of the companies who did less well than Airbnb were remotely as engaged with their users as Airbnb was. It was blindingly clear, even in the first month of the batch.