Inside Airbnb, employees eager for big payouts pushed it to go public

Tension has grown among a 6,000-person work force as it waits to sell company shares, people with knowledge of the situation said

Last summer, several Airbnb employees wrote a letter to the online room-rental start-up’s founders.

On behalf of more than a dozen employees, they pleaded to be able to sell their Airbnb stock options. Because Airbnb is privately held, its shares cannot be easily traded or cashed in. So the employees also asked that the company go public, a move that would let them freely sell their shares, said five people who saw or were briefed on the document and were not authorized to speak publicly.

The letter was a sign of the tension that has built up among Airbnb's workers.

According to interviews