The irony is the company is trying to make robots to help clean airbnbs for renter turnovers. Instead they are messing up airbnbs and making them harder to clean before turnovers.
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It's fine to make mistakes, that's how you learn. The problem here was that they didn't announce to the host that they are doing a test of their in-development equipment.
So the host wasn't able to add the additional risk and hassle to the price, which in this instance would have been a quite legitimate ask as the robot damaged their revenue generating property.
It's very ironic that Airbnb itself has done similar practices in the past where it ignored hospitality regulations to establish their business model, i.e. not asking for permission but for forgiveness.
The Airbnb style response would be to gig-ify this model where you ask an independent contractor to buy the test robot, rent the Airbnb, and test it out instead of you doing it yourself. Then the contractor bears the risk of damages to the property.
> The problem here was that they didn't announce to the host that they are doing a test of their in-development equipment.
I might be okay forgiving skirting the disclosure rules BUT only if they tried to be model tenants and, if there was any damage, took steps to proactively make things right. If you're breaking the rules, even if there was no damage, you should definitely be cleaning up and putting things back in place.
This was my thought. I can understand not wanting to go to the hassle of trying to explain that you're testing an experimental prototype robot to a confused Airbnb owner.
What I find inexcusable is not owning up to the damage and paying to fix it when your prototype goes on a rampage of destruction.
Moving fast and breaking things is fine, as long as you fix the stuff you break...
> We are backed by Greenoaks, NFDG, Spark, Eclipse, Kleiner Perkins, Y Combinator, and many others who
are too broke to pay for scratched furniture?
> Moving fast and breaking things is fine, as long as you fix the stuff you break...
What? No its not. Breaking things can cause harm that is not always "fixable", particularly if its not your thing to break.
Well, that statement kinda implied what was broken has to be fixable, at least I thought it did.
And what is going to be impossible to fix or replace in a budget !hotel room?
Even if it is fixable, there are costs involved for the fixing. A broken hotel lamp will sit in a landfill for all eternity.
"Moving fast and breaking things" could be acceptable in cases where there is an ulterior objective whose potential value could be >> these costs, but in general it should be evaluated more carefully.
Fixing scratched hardwood furniture is an absolute pain.
In a rental unit you should not have things that can’t be replaced. People who rent it will break things, either by accident or purpose (there are always idiots around).
You don't need to rent someone else's house to test your robot. These people all live in houses.
But that like costs money and/or time.
Should have signed up for Old Glory Robot Insurance.
The problem here was that they didn't announce to the host that they are doing a test of their in-development equipment.
I personally think the problem here is that they were delusional enough to think this was the way to 'test' their prototype clean-o-bots. But as you point out (and...sigh...you're spot on on all points), we live in a world where doing things like beta-testing robo-cars in real live traffic is perfectly cromulent as long as you capture market share and outlast the lawsuits and 'disrupt' something.