The AirBnb Story

In October 2007, two design school graduates in San Francisco could not pay their rent. So they bought three air mattresses, hand-built a website over a weekend, and rented floor space to people in town for a design conference. They served untoasted Pop-Tarts for breakfast and called the operation Air Bed and Breakfast. Nine years later, Brian Chesky was sitting in a hotel bar at the Fairmont San Francisco, the same hotel where that 2007 conference had been held, telling Fortune writer Leigh Gallagher that his company was now worth thirty billion dollars and had hosted one hundred and forty million guest arrivals. The night before the interview, Airbnb had beaten back a San Francisco ballot initiative designed to shut it down.

This is the story of how three people with no industry experience built the largest accommodation provider on Earth, larger than any hotel chain, and how they did it by violating almost every rule of the business they were entering. Leigh Gallagher's book is the first full-length account of that rise, written with the cooperation of the founders, and it doubles as a study in what happens when a clever consumer idea collides with cities, regulators, hotel unions, and the awkward fact that some strangers really do destroy your apartment.

The Air Mattress That Saved the Rent

Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia met at the Rhode Island School of Design and bonded over a Conair internship in 2004, where they proposed a shirt made of soap that would wash off while you showered. The marketing manager told Chesky he had drunk too much coffee, and Chesky later said he had not had any coffee at all. What he had was a partner. As Chesky put it, when he and Gebbia got into a room together, ideas tended to get bigger rather than smaller. One night over pizza that summer, Gebbia told him there was something he needed to say. They were going to start a company one day, and someone was going to write a book about it.