Instead of nagging eBay management for a PayPal spin-off, Carl Icahn should be asking it why it didn’t develop its own Airbnb. Yesterday, Airbnb raised its third round of venture capital, at a reported valuation of $10bn. The company functions as an eBay – for spare bedrooms in houses or flats, rather than household flotsam and jetsam. The brilliance of the business is that Airbnb doesn’t buy land and build hotels. It simply runs a website linking vacationers and residents. It doesn’t take much to build a website; it does take marketing acumen to build a sizeable user base before anyone else thinks of the idea.
卡爾?伊卡恩(Carl Icahn)不應糾纏于要求eBay管理層將PayPal分拆出去，而是應當質問該公司為什么沒能開發出自己的Airbnb式服務。昨日Airbnb募集到了第三輪風險投資，據報道該公司的估值已經達到100億美元。Airbnb的功能與eBay類似——不過交易標的是獨立屋中或公寓中的空閑房間，而非家中的零碎物品。這項業務的聰明過人之處在于，Airbnb并不購買土地修建賓館，而只是通過經營一家網站，幫助度假觀光客與當地居民建立聯系。建立一個網站并不需要太多投入，不過搶先想到這個主意并打造出上規模的用戶基礎，確實需要一點營銷智慧。