Uber vs Airbnb

Airbnb more likely to 2x. Uber will get its lunch eaten by Waymo. Airbnb has no one except the government to eat its lunch. Congrats on the two offers! Both are decent comp from decent conpanies.

I’d go for airbnb

Uber will IPO for sure

Uber ‘s current 409A value is vastly undervalued.

If a bust happens both will be zero. So why bother

Uber needs to ipo compared to Airbnb so you may see liquidity in uber sooner however not sure how 409A valuation will shake up considering we took a hit in 17, sold China to Didi, Russia to yandex, SEA to grab, and who knows what’s next. Huge initiatives like freight and eats could be game changers though.

ignore the money, there is no way to know which one of us will multiply faster. we are both positioned pretty well but have competitors as any multi-billion dollar company would. what team would you be joining? how do you like the manager? what problems would you be solving in each place and does that appeal to you? which culture fits you better? which culture would you want to see yourself in 2 years from now? does company mission matter to you (where your money comes from and how much you care for your customers)? both companies are vastly different sizes, you may be able to have more impact at Airbnb and while we have difficult problems to solve there is no doubt that Uber has harder technical challenges around scaling real time data processing and their infra sounds pretty great.

Go uber. Easier to find technically interesting work.

I was in your position semi-recently and can provide my perspective if it’s helpful. From the work perspective: Uber has lots of interesting technical challenges, but you obviously are slotted more to a particular team. If you indicate that you’re going to take another offer they will give you some flexibility to swap over to another. It really depends on how you see that teams role, it’s importance to the company, and your role within the team. Uber probably has more problems to solve that are purely technical and difficult, like ATG, and problems in the maps and telematics space, that can be hard to find elsewhere. Another thing to consider is the distribution of Uber’s eng talent is probably not as uniform as Airbnb, FB, Goog because the hiring manager is more in charge of the process. I felt that there certainly was more variance at Uber from the people that I talked to and interviewed with. So something to consider with the initial offer and internal transfers. I’ve heard the Uber culture reset has gone well, but it’s difficult to eliminate all of the habits that may have formed. From Airbnb, there are a lot of interesting technical challenges as well, but it certainly depends on what you’re interested in. You may not find as many specialized problems here as at Uber, and the domains are quite different. The payments team has strong and interesting work, lots of interesting ML challenges, growth, marketplace, search, network trust, image and text problems around listings. Airbnb has a good culture around learning and education so it’s possible to pick up new skills if your manager is supportive. Airbnb at least for the team I’m on had good managers and WLB, which is important for me. I feel that the technical talent is pretty strong here and the eng culture is good. It has been collaborative and positive so far, but I can’t speak for all of the orgs. From comp: Airbnb doesn’t really need to go liquid soon since it’s shown it can turn a profit. Uber is going to be liquid sooner if I had to bet. Uber has more capital intensive bets. It’s hard to say which is better. I would wager that Uber perhaps has a higher ceiling but there’s more variance in terms of where it goes. Airbnb has a really strong network effect, and while there are competitors, I feel pretty confident in our business. I’m especially interested to see how some of the market segmentation plays out that we’ve announced recently, and the investment into trips, which seems like a pretty fractured product space that could be buoyed by our network effects. So they’re both good options. I would finally say that whatever you are most passionate about will accelerate your long term earnings more than what you think will earn you most over the next 4. They probably won’t be too different in terms of the comp, so I would err on the side of culture and problems you find interesting, rather than an extra 100 or 200k over 4.

Ask your recruiter to set up calls with potential teams, I talked to 2, and that helped me get a good sense. I ended up choosing a different team than either of those two when I joined. So I didn’t really know but I thought there were enough interesting problems that I would find something satisfying. The other thing I’ll say which I’m sure you already know being at MSFT is that priorities do change and shift at large companies. For example, Safety and Insurance is in the spotlight at Uber recently, whereas it had less of a C level focus before Dara came in. So having internal flexibility can be an important thing as well. The final thing I’ll say is that you can generally accept a previous offer within a year or two at most large companies, at the same level of comp if it doesn’t work out, so I wouldn’t worry too much about something not being a great fit.