In 2011, Airbnb, the vacation-rental website, learned it wasn’t just in the business of pairing up short-term renters with people who had a spare room or an empty apartment. It was also a risk manager — or would have to be if it wanted to continue to grow.
That lesson sprang from Airbnb’s hometown of San Francisco. A local woman — she identified herself in a blog post on her experience only as EJ — rented out her apartment via the site and came home to find it ransacked and her jewelry and electronics missing. Her first call, after the cops, was to Airbnb. She said she waited 14 hours to hear back. One of the early responses from the company, according to EJ, wasn’t pretty: An Airbnb executive asked her to take down her blog post because the bad publicity might hurt his company.