<story><title>How The Hell Is This My Fault?</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/30/how-the-hell-is-this-my-fault/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jellicle</author><text>Sounds to me like Paul Graham has made a fairly fundamental and common mistake, which is to say believing the AirBnb people when they reassure him that everything is under control and there&apos;s no fire here.&lt;p&gt;Paul, if you actually read the statements made by the CEO on news.ycombinator.com, it&apos;s &lt;i&gt;very clear&lt;/i&gt; that AirBnb are the primary, if not only, ones at fault here.&lt;p&gt;I don&apos;t want to call Paul a liar, since it seems likely to me that he has just made a mistake of believing someone else.  But he&apos;s putting his own reputation behind AirBnb, and AirBnb is lying.  That&apos;s unwise.&lt;p&gt;Let me compare a different response that I&apos;m familiar with.  A friend of mine had her apartment destroyed in the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks.  Insurance companies came and set up booths in Manhattan and were cutting checks left and right, without even SEEING the damage.  My friend had a check in her hand on 9/13 if I recall correctly.  She didn&apos;t get in to SEE her own apartment until a month later, and the insurance company didn&apos;t see it until much later than that.&lt;p&gt;As of today and yesterday, there are articles in newspapers across the land.  There are phrases like &quot;As of Friday afternoon, Airbnb had not returned calls from The [Washington] Post requesting comment.&quot; - that&apos;s a quote from a WashPost story, of course.  One thing I know: when the Washington Post calls and a company has something good to say about themselves, they take the call (calls, actually).&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s apparent from the latest newspaper stories that AirBnb is now reacting in a cover-it-up fashion - they&apos;re trying to offer the woman a sum of money with the condition that she shut up.  That&apos;s fine, I guess - very corporate of them.&lt;p&gt;But frankly I expected better.  I guess I sort of expected that even if AirBnb was being dumb, that when the first article hit news.yc, that someone would call them and straighten them out.  Instead it seems that PG, also, is blinded by &quot;going to be as big as Ebay&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>breck</author><text>&amp;#62; it&apos;s very clear that AirBnb are the primary, if not only, ones at fault here.&lt;p&gt;No. Some terrible human being who should be in jail is at fault here.&lt;p&gt;Airbnb and YC are all run by great people. Responding to a crisis like this is never easy. Responding to your &lt;i&gt;first&lt;/i&gt; crisis like this is hardest of all.&lt;p&gt;I wouldn&apos;t blame Michael Arrington at all, either. I think he&apos;s done a great job at reporting this. But it&apos;s not his first rodeo, for some of the other people involved it is, and so I&apos;m not surprised they&apos;ve made some mistakes.&lt;p&gt;Also, in regard to the so called &quot;coverup&quot;, it&apos;s totally natural when someone says bad things about you on the internet to ask them to take them down. That&apos;s not a &quot;cover up&quot;. That&apos;s &quot;being human&quot;. Imagine if someone posted a diatribe against one of your children. As a parent, wouldn&apos;t you want to get that taken down? Airbnb is these guys&apos; baby.&lt;p&gt;I grew up in a political family and all the time my father and my family would get slammed in the paper and online. I used to have a knee jerk reaction and email people asking them to take things down. It hurts when people say shit about you, especially if you haven&apos;t developed &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; think skin. EJ is a great writer, so it makes the post that much more stinging. It shouldn&apos;t be taken down, but we shouldn&apos;t imagine Airbnb&apos;s asking for it to be taken down some nefarious &quot;coverup&quot;. It&apos;s only human.</text></comment>
<story><title>How The Hell Is This My Fault?</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/30/how-the-hell-is-this-my-fault/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jellicle</author><text>Sounds to me like Paul Graham has made a fairly fundamental and common mistake, which is to say believing the AirBnb people when they reassure him that everything is under control and there&apos;s no fire here.&lt;p&gt;Paul, if you actually read the statements made by the CEO on news.ycombinator.com, it&apos;s &lt;i&gt;very clear&lt;/i&gt; that AirBnb are the primary, if not only, ones at fault here.&lt;p&gt;I don&apos;t want to call Paul a liar, since it seems likely to me that he has just made a mistake of believing someone else.  But he&apos;s putting his own reputation behind AirBnb, and AirBnb is lying.  That&apos;s unwise.&lt;p&gt;Let me compare a different response that I&apos;m familiar with.  A friend of mine had her apartment destroyed in the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks.  Insurance companies came and set up booths in Manhattan and were cutting checks left and right, without even SEEING the damage.  My friend had a check in her hand on 9/13 if I recall correctly.  She didn&apos;t get in to SEE her own apartment until a month later, and the insurance company didn&apos;t see it until much later than that.&lt;p&gt;As of today and yesterday, there are articles in newspapers across the land.  There are phrases like &quot;As of Friday afternoon, Airbnb had not returned calls from The [Washington] Post requesting comment.&quot; - that&apos;s a quote from a WashPost story, of course.  One thing I know: when the Washington Post calls and a company has something good to say about themselves, they take the call (calls, actually).&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s apparent from the latest newspaper stories that AirBnb is now reacting in a cover-it-up fashion - they&apos;re trying to offer the woman a sum of money with the condition that she shut up.  That&apos;s fine, I guess - very corporate of them.&lt;p&gt;But frankly I expected better.  I guess I sort of expected that even if AirBnb was being dumb, that when the first article hit news.yc, that someone would call them and straighten them out.  Instead it seems that PG, also, is blinded by &quot;going to be as big as Ebay&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>true_religion</author><text>Air BNB is specifically &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; an insurrance company.&lt;p&gt;They technically have no obligation to pay in the case of &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; damage.&lt;p&gt;For them, the best possible course of action was to bury this case. However, now that it&apos;s come into the public light they&apos;re torn between (a) trying to re-iterate to everyone that they &lt;i&gt;do not have liability&lt;/i&gt; and (b) trying to look good by doing the &quot;Right Thing&quot;.&lt;p&gt;As a business owner, I feel for them. As a human being, I feel for her. I too am torn, and think that there is going to be no satisfactory resolution to this situation. Someone is not going to come away &apos;whole&apos;, and most likely it will be AirBNB.</text></comment>