In this response from Paul Graham we have an example of how this crisis could taint ALL Y Combinator companies. I say this as a fan of Mr Graham, Hacker News (which he created), and his essays. But this is 100 percent the wrong reaction by Paul to the sickening -- sickening! -- disclosure that Airbnb tried to get this guest to hush up the utter sacking of her apartment in order to close a funding round.
Paul, you should be condemning Airbnb's pathetically slow response (which you do not dispute), attempted cover up (which you do not dispute), long silence when they thought this was going to fizzle out and disappear (which you do not dispute), and mammoth hole in their security procedures (which you do not dispute).
Instead you are complaining about some detail of how TechCrunch covered this big story, and parroting a single, one-sided conversation you had with the people who have the most to lose from the situation.
If you want the lack of ethics on display at Airbnb to cast a PR taint over legit YC companies, this is exactly the way to do so.
He really doesn't, though I can see how you might get that impression. In the post you suggest I re-read, Paul is referring to financial assistance, which will reasonably take a period of days to offer. When Paul says "Airbnb has been offering to fix it, from the very beginning," that may well be true.
But that statement does not dispute or otherwise speak to the fact that it was hard and time consuming for the customer to get in contact with Airbnb in the first place, just to get basic information and to let them know what happened. EJ said in her original post that it took 14 hours to get a call back from the "urgent" phone line -- and even then only after she contacted a friend who freelances for them.
Just so you know, the phrase "shocked -- shocked! --" (which you seem to be referencing here with your invocation of "sickening -- sickening! --") is a reference to the movie Casablanca, where it is uttered cynically by a corrupt police chief who is not shocked at all as he's been participating in the illegal activity himself from the very beginning. So, if you are genuinely sickened, it's inappropriate.
I was not referencing that movie line; the movie line is itself a reference to a common style of emphasis that predates the movie by... well, by quite some time.
Paul, you should be condemning Airbnb's pathetically slow response (which you do not dispute), attempted cover up (which you do not dispute), long silence when they thought this was going to fizzle out and disappear (which you do not dispute), and mammoth hole in their security procedures (which you do not dispute).
Instead you are complaining about some detail of how TechCrunch covered this big story, and parroting a single, one-sided conversation you had with the people who have the most to lose from the situation.
If you want the lack of ethics on display at Airbnb to cast a PR taint over legit YC companies, this is exactly the way to do so.