our management, personnel, operations, systems, technical performance, financial resources, and internal financial control and reporting functions. We may not be able to manage growth effectively, which could damage our reputation, limit our growth, increase our costs, and negatively affect our results of operations. In addition, as our operations have expanded, our headcount has increased significantly over time, and we have increased reliance on third-party providers, which introduces additional complexities, including increasingly complex and expanding reporting structures. Our business is becoming increasingly complex, and this complexity and our rapid growth have demanded, and will continue to demand, substantial resources and attention from our management.
We expect to continue to increase headcount and to hire more specialized personnel in the future as we grow our business. We will need to continue to hire, train, integrate, and manage additional qualified website developers, software engineers, account services personnel, government relations, legal and compliance personnel, and sales and marketing staff, and improve and maintain our technology to properly manage our growth. The San Francisco Bay Area continues to be a challenging recruiting market; overall, certain key roles and skillsets have been difficult to fill due to a competitive market and limited candidate pool, including but not limited to engineers, product managers, and design professionals. If our new hires do not perform as expected or take longer than expected to ramp up, if we are unsuccessful in hiring, training, integrating, and managing these new employees, or if we are not successful in retaining our existing employees, our business may be harmed.
Further, to accommodate our expected growth, we must improve and maintain our platform, technology, systems, and network infrastructure. Failure to effectively upgrade our technology or network infrastructure to support the expected increased traffic on our platform could result in unanticipated system disruptions, slow response times, or poor experiences for hosts and guests. To manage the expected growth of our operations and personnel and to support financial reporting requirements, we will need to improve our transaction processing and reporting, operational and financial systems, procedures, and controls. These improvements will be particularly challenging if we acquire new operations with different systems. Our current and planned personnel, systems, procedures, and controls may not be adequate to support our future operations. If we are unable to expand our operations and hire additional qualified personnel in an efficient manner, it could adversely affect customer satisfaction and cause our expenses to grow disproportionately relative to our revenue, and our financial performance and future prospects will be adversely affected.
Host, guest, or third-party actions that are criminal, violent, inappropriate, dangerous, or fraudulent may undermine the trust and safety or perception of trust and safety of our marketplace and our ability to attract and retain hosts and guests, which could materially and adversely affect our reputation, business, results of operations, and financial condition.
We have no control over or ability to predict the actions of our hosts, guests, and other third parties, such as additional passengers in, or drivers of, vehicles booked on our platform, and therefore we cannot guarantee the safety of our hosts, guests, and such third parties. From time to time, we are subject to legal proceedings, including personal injury suits, claims, arbitrations, administrative proceedings, and government investigations or enforcement actions in the ordinary course of business. The actions of hosts, guests, and other third parties may result in fatalities, injuries, other bodily harm, assault, fraud, invasion of privacy, property damage, theft, including cases in which we are unable to recover the vehicle, discrimination, harassment, and libel, among other negative impacts, which could create potential legal or other substantial liabilities for us, hosts, or guests. For example, hosts may incur and have incurred liability due to the unlawful actions of their guests or other third parties guests present in the vehicle, such as traffic violations or other legal violations and guests may incur and have incurred liability due to the unlawful actions of their hosts, such as vehicle or registration violations. In addition, there have been rare instances where guests were pulled over or detained by police because the vehicles they were driving had been reported as stolen by the vehicle owner, sometimes in error, or where law enforcement did not properly remove stolen vehicle notifications. Depending on the circumstances, hosts or guests may also attempt to assert that we should be liable for unlawful actions stemming from the use of vehicles available on our platform. Such liabilities could materially and adversely affect our reputation, business, results of operations, and financial condition.
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