The core idea was - what if you could book someone’s home just like you could book a hotel room, anywhere in the world. One of the guests who stayed with us invited me to his wedding, one of the other ones changed his whole career trajectory because of that trip.Īfter this experience, Joe brought in Nathan Blecharczyk - one of his old roommates - and we decided to do this as a company. You normally don’t get to know people this quickly in the real world - in contrast the time it took to develop longstanding relationships is longer. While these three people were living with us, we had realized that the normal arc of a friendship that takes years to build - now took a few days when people were living with you in your home. We ended up hosting 3 people in our home during the conference and at the time we thought this was a cool and funny way to make some money. This is where we came up with the name “Air bed and breakfast” and our first site was. The problem with this idea was we didn’t have any beds - however we did have 3 inflatable air beds. We had this idea that the designers coming to attend the conference needed a place to stay - we had no money - so what if we created a bed and breakfast for the design conference. At the same time, there was this international design conference coming to SF and on the event page it showed all of the nearby hotels were completely sold out. Upon arriving to San Francisco I had learned my portion of rent for the place we had was $1,200 so I literally didn’t have enough to pay rent. ![]() When I told my roommates I was leaving they thought I was crazy and needed an intervention.Īt the time, I had $1,000 in my bank account and I drove to SF, this was in 2007. We had no idea what we wanted to do but we knew we wanted to do something. However at RISD they told you because you were a designer, you could change things - that I could go out and do and change anything I wanted to do.Īfter school I got a job and one of my college friends Joe Gebbia kept trying to convince me to leave my job and move to San Francisco to do a startup. All my life I had been taught to look straight ahead and do the normal path - anything different would lead me to the principal's office. Going to RISD had a profound impact on me. That was the extent of my perceived ambitions. My parents always told me if I got a job I should make sure I got one with health insurance. ![]() My parents were both social workers and when I told them I was going to art school they were sure I was going to move back home. ![]() The closest thing to an entrepreneur I knew of was Bob of Bob’s Pizza in the town I grew up in. Growing up, I never thought about being an entrepreneur, in fact I had never heard about anyone being an entrepreneur before. Reid Hoffman: Can you tell the story of Airbnb in the early days? How did you get the idea? What was the founding story?īrian Chesky: A number of people have told me that Airbnb is the worst idea that has ever worked (lol).īefore Airbnb I was different than most tech founders because I went to art school at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and studied industrial design.
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