[mrchess]

This might be a stupid question but what do you do after you secure such a large series of funding? Go on mass expansion? Would anyone mind telling me how startups typically use this kind of money (closing Series with 100+mil)?

[tptacek]

Big ticket items:

* Mainstream promotional marketing

* Direct sales efforts (identifying target markets, staffing sales teams to pursue them)

* Business model changes to ramp up customer acquisition at the expense of profitability

* Rollups of related companies and acquisition of complementary companies.

* International expansion

* Lobbying

And there's just always something to be said for having a war chest; in today's climate, if you can lock in a very long runway at favorable terms because it's obvious you have a great shot at financial success, why not? The saying goes, "when you're hitting your numbers, you're in charge; when you're not, your investors are in charge". Even with more outside investors, Airbnb probably isn't giving up control over their destiny.

[nostrademons]

Hiring as well. I remember that Twitter was about 25 people when I was looking for jobs in 2008, just as they'd closed their mammoth $50M+ round. They're now at 400+.

[forensic]

Everything he said involves hiring.

[mbesto]

Reminds me a lot of when Groupon was looking to raise $1bil and everyone squawked. Aggressively hiring sales teams alone is an absolutely massive undertaking. Google doesn't (didn't?) understand that because they are under the notion that good technology can alleviate massive sales team. Thus why I feel they haven't been able to compete with Groupon's offering and rapid expansion. Even though Airbnb is not a 1-1 comparison to Groupon I think it still holds some relevance.

The overall point is that business is still conducted by people. Even in today's e-commerce era, people still want to be treated like a human beings by human beings - and us Americans are bloody expensive human beings.

[helwr]

I'd add lawyer fees to the list

[aresant]

An interesting quote from AlleyInsider on this:

"They're probably going to need the money for customer acquisition. AirBnB is in the highly competitive travel space, where it's very expensive to acquire customers. From Paris, AirBnB has the top Google ad for "vacation rental", which has to be a pretty expensive click. "

via http://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-billion-funding-dst-an...