So, they brought in their friend Nathan Blecharczyk, then in his early 20s and a recent Harvard computer science graduate. “There’s no real connection, and you leave the city not really having any impression of what it’s like to live there.”īy 2008, Chesky and Gebbia, then 27, had a strong vision for their new company’s cultural touchstones and aesthetic, but they needed someone to transform those elements into a functional product. “There’s this whole way of traveling-I call it mass tourism-where you just stay in a hotel district and do things that the people who live there would never do,” Chesky says now, reflecting back on that first experiment with hosting. “It’s amazing how one trip can have such an impact on your life,” Surve later wrote on his blog.įor Chesky and Gebbia, the experience was equally transformative. On Surve’s last day, Chesky drove him to Stanford so Surve could catch a lecture at the university’s design school. Later that weekend, they took Surve to the Ferry Building for his first farmers’ market and to a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in the Mission for Mexican food. They asked Surve to jump in on the brainstorm that night, he joined them at an event where they pitched the concept.
When he arrived at Chesky and Gebbia’s place, he found the two young entrepreneurs working on a pitch for their new hospitality venture.
Unable to afford a hotel room, Surve found a post about Air Bed and Breakfast on a design blog. One of their first guests was Amol Surve, who had come to the city for an industrial design conference. They called the service Air Bed and Breakfast. The two friends decided to inflate three air mattresses in their San Francisco apartment, located on Rausch Street in the city’s SoMa neighborhood, and rent them out for $80 a night. “Co-founding Airbnb was my discovery of travel-it was the moment I realized there was a bigger world.”Ĭhesky’s early mental exercises of redesigning urban spaces sat dormant until 2007, when he and his roommate Joe Gebbia found themselves struggling to pay rent. He barely understood that gallivanting was a thing. Airbnb, however, was not born from its founders’ experiences with gallivanting around the globe. Startup founders often build their companies around a lifelong passion, be it for food, personal computers or for shape-fitting athleisure wear. That family trip, along with future ones to other cities, is one of his “greatest memories of growing up.” No space was spared the cocktail of creativity and structure that was Brian’s mind. Already beginning to show interest in art and design-“I’d ask Santa Claus for poorly designed toys so I could redesign them”-Chesky explored the city with his family, reimagining the layout of its buildings, its streets, its sprawl. When Chesky was seven, Deborah’s conference was in St. “The hotel and flight were paid for,” Chesky remembers, “so we basically turned the conference into a family vacation.” Once a year, however, Deborah and Robert were able to take Brian and his younger sister Allison on an airplane, to an annual conference that Deborah was required to attend. Chesky’s childhood was not lavish adventures were mostly limited to away ice hockey games and afternoons at Albany’s Crossgates Mall, which he remembers as “a little sequestered world that you could be in, run around in,” and was “never-ending entertainment.” His parents, Deborah and Robert, were both social workers, and much of their time was consumed with finding shelter and care for the community’s neediest people. Chesky, 40, has been asked to fit the pieces of his current life-the one in which he sits atop Airbnb, a $100 billion company that is arguably the greatest disrupter in contemporary global tourism-with those of his humble, and apparently untouristy, beginnings.Ĭhesky grew up in Niskayuna, a leafy upstate New York suburb wedged between Schenectady and the Mohawk River. In the background of his Zoom frame, his golden retriever lazily ambles around the minimalist, art-and-book-adorned room that calls to mind some of the chicest Super Host spaces on the site Chesky co-founded and still runs. It is morning in late 2021, and Brian Chesky is sitting at home in San Francisco, wearing a loose blue T-shirt and black browline glasses.
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