When Brian Chesky arrived in San Francisco in October 2007, his friend Joe Gebbia told him the rent was $1,150. It was more than he had expected. The idea they would soon have for paying it began with three designers named Michael, Kat and Amol, a sold-out design conference, and an air mattress on the living-room floor.
Chesky, born in Niskayuna, New York, to two social workers, had graduated in industrial design from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004 and taken a job at a Los Angeles design firm, 3DID. Gebbia, from Georgia, studied graphic and industrial design, worked at Chronicle Books and started a green-design site, Ecolect. They brought in Nathan Blecharczyk, a Harvard computer science graduate who had run a web-hosting business as a teenager, as CTO in February 2008. The company was incorporated that June as AirBed & Breakfast, and the site went live in August.
When he told her about it, she offered to send money, and called it crazy to have strangers staying in your home.
Chesky expected it to take off. It did not. As he later put it, they got two customers, and he was one of them.
What almost nobody remembers is what his own mother said. When he told her about it, she offered to send money, and called it crazy to have strangers staying in your home. He has recalled her reaction in interviews. She was not alone. He sought $150,000 for 10 percent of the company and was turned down by many investors, and he has said the founders probably did not look very impressive. Their credit-card debt, by various accounts, ran to $20,000 to $25,000 each.
In 2008 he and Gebbia nearly stopped. He has described going to bed with his heart pounding, and called it probably rock bottom.
So they did something odd. During the 2008 presidential race they redrew cereal boxes as Obama O's and Cap'n McCain's and sold them at the Democratic convention. Estimates of the take run from $20,000 to $30,000. It was enough to get Paul Graham's attention, and in January 2009 Y Combinator took the three in for $20,000 and 6 percent. By March the site had 10,000 users and 2,500 listings, and the name was shortened to Airbnb. In April, Sequoia put in $600,000.
The company grew to a $10 billion valuation by 2014. In April 2020 travel collapsed and Silver Lake and Sixth Street put in a combined $2 billion. Airbnb listed on Nasdaq on 10 December 2020 at $68 a share and set aside $238 million of shares for its hosts. In 2025 it reported $12.2 billion in revenue and $2.51 billion in net income, and on 6 November 2026 it was worth about $102 billion.
The people closest to him said it was crazy, and for a while the numbers agreed. He kept the rent paid and the site live until a stranger said yes.