Extra Crunch Tuesday: 5 questions from Airbnb's IPO filing

Welcome to Extra Crunch Tuesday

Tech companies that go public capture our attention and imagination because they are literal happy endings.

An IPO is the promised land for pilgrims who wander in the desert for years seeking product-market fit. After all, the “I” in “ISO” stands for “incentive.”

The S-1 document Airbnb released yesterday provided insight into at the home-rental platform’s core financials, but it also raised several questions about the company’s health and long-term viability, writes Alex Wilhelm:

• How far did Airbnb’s bookings fall during Q1 and Q2?
• How far have Airbnb’s bookings come back since?
• Did local, long-term stays save Airbnb?
• Has Airbnb ever really made money?
• Is the company wealthy despite the pandemic?

On Monday, Alex dove into the IPO filing for enterprise artificial intelligence company C3.ai.

After poring over its ownership structure, service offerings and its last two years of revenue, he asks and answers the question: “is the business itself any damn good?”

IPO announcements typically force me to rearrange our editorial calendar, but I don’t mind; our 360-degree coverage lets some of the air out of various hype balloons and always uncovers several unique angles.

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch.

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

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The VC and founder winners in Airbnb’s IPO

Airbnb founders Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk and Joe Gebbia hold a combined 41.95% of their company, giving them each a stake “worth somewhere in the ballpark of $2.5 billion to upwards of $5 billion,” reports Managing Editor Danny Crichton.

But, “when it comes to the venture investors, there are just two massive winners, and then a longer list of folks who have some returns coming, but aren’t going to rock the checkbook quite as significantly,” he found.

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The VC and founder winners of DoorDash's IPO

As Danny acknowledges, “the most fun question with these big startup IPO offerings” is always, “who made the money?”

Between a seed round and Series A-H, DoorDash has raised $2.485 billion.

Even though each of its four co-founders will see “a nice haul” in the hundreds of millions, their equity was significantly diluted.

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How COVID-19 accelerated DoorDash's business

Living in San Francisco, it’s easy to see how the COVID-19 pandemic strengthened DoorDash’s bottom line in 2020.

DoorDash workers are a constant presence on my street; I have seen neighbors accept physically-distanced deliveries of everything from boba tea to diapers in the last several months.

To better understand its growth trajectory, Alex Wilhelm studied the numbers from 2019 and 2020 to see how DoorDash gave itself “a shot at adjusted profitability for the full year, a nearly unheard of result in the on-demand market.”

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Will edtech empower or erase the need for higher education?

Without an on-campus experience, many students (and their parents) are wondering how much value there is in attending classes via a laptop in a dormitory.

Even worse: declining enrollment is leading many institutions to eliminate majors and find other ways to cut costs, like furloughing staff and cutting athletic programs.

Edtech solutions could fill the gap, but there’s no real consensus in higher education over which tools work best. Many colleges and universities are using a number of “third-party solutions to keep operations afloat,” reports Natasha Mascarenhas.

“It’s a stress test that could lead to a reckoning among edtech startups.”

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3 growth tactics that helped us surpass Noom and Weight Watchers

I look for guest-written Extra Crunch stories that will help other entrepreneurs be more successful, which is why I routinely turn down submissions that seem overly promotional.

However, Henrik Torstensson (CEO and co-founder of Lifesum) submitted a post about the techniques he’s used to scale his nutrition app over the last three years. “It’s a strategy any startup can use, regardless of size or budget,” he writes.

According to Sensor Tower, Lifesum is growing almost twice as fast as Noon and Weight Watchers, so putting his company at the center of the story made sense.

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Send in reviews of your favorite books for TechCrunch!

Every year, we ask TechCrunch reporters, VCs and our Extra Crunch readers to recommend their favorite books.

Have you read a book this year that you want to recommend? Send an email with the title and a brief explanation of why you enjoyed it to bookclub@techcrunch.com.

We’ll compile the suggestions and publish the list as we get closer to the holidays. These books don’t have to be published this calendar year — any book you read this year qualifies.

Please share your submissions by November 30.