Up In the Air--Is there a balance between Entrepreneurship and Life activities?

I have always been an Entrepreneur. Can't help building the better mousetrap. Can't help seeing when there is a problem that could be solved if only seemingly minor tweaks could be made.  But at my age, I do not want to live in an apartment and work out of it too with my two college friends so that I can make rent payments while looking for VC money (ala airbnb.com).

I applaud the chutzpah of the three founders of airbnb who, in 3-4 short years, started their venture and have recently raised $112M from VCs (famed Marc Andreesen is one of them). In fact, the recent Series C round of investment had a valuation of $1B. This means that the $112M they received gave those investors just 12% ownership in the company. Wow. And that is after seed funding of $600k a few years ago and $7.2M last year. Things are getting spendy. Granted, airbnb has a customer base now and a great story. They also have a great PR machine that tells of treehouses and castles for rent and Obama-O's they sold to survive. But with about 50,000 customers/places for rent (as of Feb. 22, 2011 interview), and them taking 10% of rental deals off the top to broker the transaction, we can estimate their cash flow to be as follows:

• Average rental: $100/night
• Average rental period: 4 nights
• Total rental: $400
• % of listings that rent: 50%
• # of rentals each listing gets per year: 6

$400 x 6 = $2,400 --> Total income received by renter per listing

50,000 x 50% = 25,000 --> Total # of listings that receive rentals

25,000 x $2,400 = $60,000,000 --> Total Income of all rentals

$60M x 10% = $6Million --> (my) estimated Revenue for airbnb for this year

That means that aibnb received a 167x Revenue multiple for their valuation. Nice! Not sure who else has gotten those kinds of multiples from investors but whoever their I-Banker is, my hat is off to them!

To do some sensitivity analysis, since after all I am using educated guesses here, let's say they have twice as many customers, or 100,000. That still gives them an 83x Revenue multiple. Whoa. Still a fantastic deal for them.

But the point of my story is/was, where is the work/life balance? In many stories that I read about airbnb, the work-around-the-clock tirelessness of the founders is repeated over and over. I know that investors invest in teams and not ideas, but I would hope that there is some balance between what airbnb guys do and the rest of their lives. I know they're young but they won't be forever. It's really a good idea to establish balance earlier than later. Being rewarded with $112M is not very good incentive to change one's behavior, but eventually burn-out will prevail if they don't get the balance right.

In the meanwhile, I wish them the best.  It's said they are moving into a big, new Potrero Hill (San Francisco) office. Hope they spend the $150M slowly and wisely. Those bucks were hard-earned (read: blood, sweat and tears). The next round may come or may not be needed at all. Just hope the balance occurs along the way.