Pros
Some of the best and most talented people I have ever worked with. The connections I made there will help me for the rest of my career, and I believe I made friends for life. The opportunity and experience I was offered to make a genuine contribution was far greater than I imagined when I accepted the position, and I really felt I made a difference to the company's direction. Fast-moving - although if you had been there for as long as myself (around 2 years), you could see the slow-down.
Cons
Hugely political. If you're friendly with the right people, regardless of how useless you are, or how well-known that fact is, you will be protected and rewarded disproportionately. I honestly felt like the harder you worked, the further you dropped in the pecking order. The startup vibe is completely dead. Airbnb is now a corporation. There is no such thing as a flat hierarchy anymore, whatever that was supposed to mean in the first place. None of the advertised perks are available to anyone outside of San Francisco Despite being a "people" company, many decisions have recently been made for completely the wrong reasons - and they're just plain stupid to the average bystander. It was very difficult to ever have full faith in the senior management team - in typical startup style, this was made up of mainly of 20-somethings with only a year or two of work-experience. In the past year, I noticed the average quality of new hires dropping significantly - to the point where several "IT specialists" were unable to understand BASIC IT principles. The "Culture" of Airbnb is regulary trampled all over by the senior management.
