On Thursday afternoon, amid news of Intel’s record-breaking earnings from Q4, suggestions that the once-public now-private may , and in the cryptocurrency trading space, a report from��ReCode seemed to fly under the radar.
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Kara Swisher that Airbnb, the home rental and travel behemoth, will “show $100 million in cash-flow profitability for the full year in 2017.” The company is also adding , the former CEO of American Express, to its board.
These new developments are interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it places Airbnb in a small and rarified club of private, billion-dollar-plus companies that also manage to consistently turn a profit.
Most importantly, the ability to consistently turn a profit���plus the addition of a respected public-company executive to its board���signals growing readiness for Airbnb to go public.
Since its first round of funding ��� ��� through the present day, Airbnb has raised a total of about $4.4 billion. That’s split between $3.4 billion in venture funding from , plus����led by .

With Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi , Airbnb��� in its last ���stands head and shoulders (or, rather, at least $10-20 billion in private market valuation) above the likes of now-profitable Palantir, WeWork, Pinterest, Lyft, Dropbox, and other US-based companies on .
In some ways, this isn’t new news. According to from CNBC from March 2017, co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky told members of the Economic Club of New York that “[Airbnb is] probably about halfway through [the] project” of readying itself for an IPO, a process he said would take two years.
So, working backward, 2018 would be the year when all the IPO prep would come to a head. And if Airbnb��does go public this year, it could be the largest private U.S.-based tech company to do so in 2018.
All this being said, the company is still experiencing some growing pains and internal turf battles. According to published by��The Information this past Tuesday, Airbnb’s CFO Laurence Tosi finds himself at loggerheads with CEO Brian Chesky. Chesky has reportedly advocated for expanding the scope of Airbnb’s offerings to become a more diversified travel firm. This reportedly included exploring the possibility of launching an airline (which, given the airline business, doesn’t seem like a great move these days). Tosi, for his part, has encouraged financial discipline and strategic restraint, according to the report.
Airbnb has indeed diversified beyond just the home-rental business, but that’s still the mainstay for company revenue. There are still a number of unanswered questions concerning regulation, long-term growth prospects, and whether or not the company will continue diversifying its service offerings.
But one thing is for sure: Airbnb has come a long way from a couple of dudes with some airbeds and breakfast for travelers.

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