AirBnB

How did they meet up with Nathan? How did they convince him to join them?

• GrowthHackers - Airbnb

Ways you could have arrived at the idea for Airbnb

• Looking for industries that are ripe for disruption.
  • Look for any industry that was born and largely developed before the Internet. Even if the industry is currently using modern tech in some way, modern tech may have undermined some foundational assumptions that the existing industry is based on, such that a better solution is possible. For example, the hotel / motel industry is based on the foundational assumption that people seeking accomodation
  • Look for industries that require equipment that people outside of that industry also have and aren't always using.
    • The hotel / motel industry requires rooms.
    • The taxi industry requires cars.
• Looking for existing tech companies whose market may have grown beyond their ability to control all of it.
• Look for any equipment / product that sits unused for significant periods of time.
  • The thing is, your car and your housing are the two major expenses for most people. When I was going through my mom's expenditures I saw that those two things dwarfed all of her other expenses.
• Look at what people are spending money on, group it by category. Each expenditure represents buying a solution to a problem. See if any of those problems could be solved more cheaply.

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

2011.03.16 - AVC - Airbnb

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.

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 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: airbnb

They 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: airbnb

So 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: airbnb

There'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 pros

I 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 pros

That'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

• 2011.05 - Dave Gooden - How Airbnb became a billion-dollar company
  • Very, very interesting.

  • A year and a half or so ago I was looking into the amazing growth of AirBnB. As disclosed above, I work in the vacation rental sector and when a competing company comes on my radar, I always do my due diligence. In my AirBnB research, I didn’t find great SEO results or a gazillion followers on Twitter or any massive advertising spends on Google or Facebook. I looked everywhere but I couldn’t find any rational or traditional reasons for this type of growth. All of these AirBnB users can’t be coming from tech blogs, can they? Word of mouth? I didn’t think so. After thinking on it for a day or two, only one possible answer popped into my head: “These guys are black hats!”
    
    (...)
    
    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.

• Images of the emails:
  •   

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.

Quora - How did AirBnB, Dropbox and Stripe do at their respective YC Demo Days?

First Round Review - How Design Thinking Transformed Airbnb from a Failing Startup to a Billion Dollar Business

Questions for the Airbnb founders

• Joe said you guys quit your jobs as soon as Brian moved up from LA; what was the plan?