Airbnb's founders kept afloat by selling novelty election breakfast cereal
Two San Francisco roommates short on rent in October 2007 blew up an air mattress, offered it to visitors at a sold-out design conference, and threw in breakfast. The following year, still struggling, they raised 30,000 dollars by selling boxes of cereal themed on Barack Obama and John McCain. Airbnb grew from that scrappy start.
Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia hit on the idea when hotels were full during a conference of the Industrial Designers Society of America. Nathan Blecharczyk, Chesky's former roommate, joined as technical co-founder in February 2008, and Airbedandbreakfast.com went live on August 11 that year. The name was cut to Airbnb in March 2009 so people would stop assuming every stay involved an inflatable bed.
The cereal money, mostly raised at the 2008 Democratic convention, caught the eye of Paul Graham, who took them into Y Combinator in January 2009 for 20,000 dollars and a 6 percent stake. They spent it flying to New York to meet hosts face to face. Within a couple of months 10,000 people had signed up and hosts had posted 2,500 places to stay, and Sequoia soon put in 600,000 dollars of seed money at a penny a share.
Growth was rapid. A first international office opened in London in 2011, the company became one of the first American businesses to enter Cuba in 2015, and by October 2019 about two million people were sleeping in Airbnb homes each night. Guest photos are now hidden from hosts until a booking is accepted, a change introduced after reports that some hosts turned away guests with names suggesting they were black. Its legal terms once ran to 55081 words, which one linguist likened to a short novel, only harder to read.
The pandemic hit hard, with bookings in some cities falling as much as 96 percent and about a quarter of staff laid off. Yet the company floated on Nasdaq on December 10, 2020, raising 3.5 billion dollars. It later banned parties in listings permanently and branched into bookable services such as private chefs and massages.
Source: Airbnb
