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How did they meet up with Nathan? How did they convince him to join them?
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2008.08.11 - WSJ - The Business of Politics
San Francisco entrepreneurs Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky are ardent supporters of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. They've attended his rallies and have an Obama '08 poster hanging in the hallway of their apartment, and Mr. Chesky has donated to the campaign.
But when running their start-up, AirBed & Breakfast Inc. -- a Web site that helps travelers find locals willing to rent them a spare bed -- they keep mum about their politics. In fact, they've approached both presidential campaigns in hopes they will promote their site to supporters trekking to the national party conventions.
2010 - "1000 days of AirBnB", AirBnB Founder - Brian Chesky - Startup School 2010
We couldn't wrap our heads around air mattresses on the living room floors as the next hotel room and did not chase the deal. Others saw the amazing team that we saw, funded them, and the rest is history. Airbnb is well on its way to building the "eBay of spaces." I'm pretty sure it will be a billion dollar business in time.
We made the classic mistake that all investors make. We focused too much on what they were doing at the time and not enough on what they could do, would do, and did do. I am proud that our portfolio is full of companies where we saw the vision before other investors did and backed a great team. But we don't always get it right. We missed Airbnb even though we loved the team. Big mistake. The cereal box will remain in our conference room as a warning not to make that mistake again.
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2011.03.17 - Paul Graham - Subject: Airbnb
Ideas can morph. Practically every really big startup could say, five years later, "believe it or not, we started out doing ___." It It just seemed a very good sign to me that these guys were actually on the ground in NYC hunting down (and understanding) their users. On top of several previous good signs.
(...)The Airbeds just won the first poll among all the YC startups in their batch by a landslide. In the past this has not been a 100%
indicator of success (if only anything were) but much better than random.
(...)Did they explain the long-term goal of being the market in accommodation the way eBay is in stuff? [NW: So they did see the potential for that.] That seems like it would be huge. Hotels now are like airlines in the 1970s before they figured out how to increase their load factors.
from: Fred Wilson
to: Paul Graham
date: Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 2:05 PM
subject: Re: airbnbThey did but I am not sure I buy that
ABNB reminds me of Etsy in that it facilitates real commerce in a marketplace model directly between two people
So I think it can scale all the way to the bed and breakfast market
But I am not sure they can take on the hotel market
I could be wrong
But even so, if you include short term room rental, second home rental, bed and breakfast, and other similar classes of accommodations, you get to a pretty big opportunity
fred
from: Paul Graham
to: Fred Wilson
date: Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 12:21 AM
subject: Re: airbnbSo invest in them! They're very capital efficient. They would make an investor's money go a long way.
It's also counter-cyclical. They just arrived back from NYC, and when I asked them what was the most significant thing they'd observed, it was how many of their users actually needed to do these rentals to pay their rents.
--pg
from: Fred Wilson
to: Paul Graham
date: Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 2:21 AM
subject: Re: airbnbThere's a lot to like
I've done a few things, like intro it to my friends at Foundry who were investors in Service Metrics and understand this model
I am also talking to my friend Mark Pincus who had an idea like this a few years ago.
So we are working on it
Thanks for the lead
Fred
from: Paul Graham
to: Fred Wilson
date: Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 10:00 PM
subject: airbnb already spreading to prosI know you're skeptical they'll ever get hotels, but there's a continuum between private sofas and hotel rooms, and they just moved
one step further along it.[link to an airbnb user]
This is after only a few months. I bet you they will get hotels eventually. It will start with small ones. Just wait till all the
10-room pensiones in Rome discover this site. And once it spreads to hotels, where is the point (in size of chain) at which it stops?
Once something becomes a big marketplace, you ignore it at your peril.--pg
from: Fred Wilson
to: Paul Graham
date: Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 4:26 AM
subject: Re: airbnb already spreading to prosThat's true. It's also true that there are quite a few marketplaces out there that serve this same market
If you look at many of the people who list at ABNB, they list elsewhere too
I am not negative on this one, I am interested, but we are still in the gathering data phase.
fred
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- 2011.05 - Dave Gooden - How Airbnb became a billion-dollar company
- Very, very interesting.
To prove my theory I needed to setup a “mouse trap” on craigslist, so I posted a few vacation rentals using craigslist’s hidden (anonymous) email address option and I made sure to setup the ads to clearly state that I do NOT want emails from commercial interests. A couple of hours later – BOOM! As expected, I received an email inquiry from one of my cl listings…but it wasn’t from AirBnB. The email I received was from a “young lady” telling me about the upside of AirBnB.com (growing site, growing traffic, etc..) and how she really liked my property and wanted me to check out the site. She was nice enough to included a direct link with no tracking code to AirBnB.com’s homepage. I was 99% sure that the email proved my theory and uncovered AirBnB’s black hat supply-side growth strategy…but I needed to be 100% sure.
Again, the email I received was from “girlsname04@gmail.com,” not AirBnB. Maybe she was just a girl that was totally excited about AirBnB and I didn’t uncover anything. There was only one way to find out so I decided to push my “investigation” to the next level. It was time to dig into the closet and pull out my old, faded, dusty black hat. It still fit.
I spent the next weekend building a new website, rounded up some black hat software (craigslist email harvester, mass mailer) and emulated the marketing initiative that I believed AirBnB was using (elementary stuff).
After harvesting email addresses (I only grabbed real email addresses, not anonymous craigslist addresses) I did one email blast to people that were advertising vacation rentals on craigslist. I skipped over the other categories that are directly related to AirBnB’s business model because they didn’t fit with the test site I built. My results: 1,000+ vacation rental owners signed up and listed their properties on my test site.
Now that I had 1,000 new members, I took it upon myself to do them a favor and advertise their vacation rentals on craigslist.
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2015.07.12 - Medium - 7 Rejections (Airbnb)
On June 26, 2008, our friend Michael Seibel introduced us to 7 prominent investors in Silicon Valley. We were attempting to raise $150,000 at a $1.5M valuation. That means for $150,000 you could have bought 10% of Airbnb. Below you will see 5 rejections. The other 2 did not reply.
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Quora - How did AirBnB, Dropbox and Stripe do at their respective YC Demo Days?
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At the time, Airbnb was part of Y Combinator. One afternoon, the team was poring over their search results for New York City listings with Paul Graham, trying to figure out what wasn’t working, why they weren’t growing. After spending time on the site using the product, Gebbia had a realization. “We noticed a pattern. There's some similarity between all these 40 listings. The similarity is that the photos sucked. The photos were not great photos. People were using their camera phones or using their images from classified sites. It actually wasn't a surprise that people weren't booking rooms because you couldn't even really see what it is that you were paying for.”
Graham tossed out a completely non-scalable and non-technical solution to the problem: travel to New York, rent a camera, spend some time with customers listing properties, and replace the amateur photography with beautiful high-resolution pictures. The three-man team grabbed the next flight to New York and upgraded all the amateur photos to beautiful images. There wasn’t any data to back this decision originally. They just went and did it. A week later, the results were in: improving the pictures doubled the weekly revenue to $400 per week. This was the first financial improvement that the company had seen in over eight months. They knew they were onto something.
This was the turning point for the company. Gebbia shared that the team initially believed that everything they did had to be ‘scalable.’ It was only when they gave themselves permission to experiment with non-scalable changes to the business that they climbed out of what they called the ‘trough of sorrow.’
“We had this Silicon Valley mentality that you had to solve problems in a scalable way because that's the beauty of code. Right? You can write one line of code that can solve a problem for one customer, 10,000 or 10 million. For the first year of the business, we sat behind our computer screens trying to code our way through problems. We believed this was the dogma of how you're supposed to solve problems in Silicon Valley. It wasn't until our first session with Paul Graham at Y Combinator where we basically… the first time someone gave us permission to do things that don't scale, and it was in that moment, and I'll never forget it because it changed the trajectory of the business”
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