#216 How Clever Entrepreneurs Turned 3 Air Mattresses Into Airbnb, The Site That Makes Any Home A Bed And Breakfast – with Brian and Joe

The founders of Airbnb are guys who couldn’t make rent a few years ago, but they kept turning desperation into creative solutions. In October 2007, eager to make extra money, they noticed that local hotels were booked up because of a conference. So they pumped up some inflatable mattresses and listed their place online as an “air bed and breakfast.” It was quirky and it worked. That little act of creativity became Airbnb, the (profitable) site that allows anyone to list their extra space for rent.
This interview is full of examples of that kind of hustle, like how they created and sold cereal called “Obama O’s.” That idea brought in a much-needed $30,000, but more importantly, it impressed investor Paul Graham of Y Combinator, who backed them. They jumped on that opportunity too, seizing every chance they could find to get Graham’s advice. His mentorship helped their company become profitable.
Along the way, they got impressive media hits by crafting interesting stories, improved their design by sleeping in their users’ homes and kept changing their product based on feedback. In this interview, they teach you how they did it.
Brian Chesky & Joe Gebbia are two of the co-founders of Airbnb. (The third co-founder is Nathan Blecharczyk.) Airbnb is a marketplace for renting space. Their open platform accommodates a ‘couch to a castle’, including vacation rentals, bed and breakfast, private rooms, and entire apartments. Travelers typically save money and get a local experience, while hosts have an easy way to earn extra cash and meet new people.

More interviews - https://mixergy.com/moreint
Rate this interview - https://mixergy.com/rateint

Interviewer introduction: Before we get started, I’ve got to tell you that the interview you are about to watch was a bear to edit. You are going to have a little bit of hiccups throughout the interview. But, I tell you something; the content here was so good I did not want to let these guys off the phone. We went longer off the phone off Skype. We went longer than we ordinarily do because the quality was so good (the quality of the information, not the quality of the connection). In fact, pay attention to the serial story that they tell somewhere about 40% into the interview. You guys are going to love that.Alright. I should say that the editing and so much of the work here is sponsored for, paid by and supported by these three great companies: The first is Grasshopper, the virtual phone system that entrepreneurs love. Because with Grasshopper, you get the extensions and everything you that you want with a robust phone system. You can manage it online and use a regular phone with this system. So check out Grasshopper.com.

Also, check out Shopify.com. Because as you have seen, so many entrepreneurs here on Mixergy have sold things online. And, uh, if you want to start sell things directly to your customers, not just advertising but products, check out Shopify.com. They will set you up with a store within minutes. Five minutes is all it took me. Shopify.com.

Thirdly, I want to tell you about Rich WB. If you go to Rich WB, you get a new theme for your website. I’ve said over and over again that just redeeming and rescinding my website helped me be a to get bigger and better interviews. Because it communicated authority and communicated that I was somebody with more than just a tiny, little blog. So, check out Rich WB.com. Get your own theme and customize it and make it your own. Go out there and do incredible things so that I can come back and interview you.

Alright. Those are the sponsors. Here’s the interview.

Andrew: Hey world, it’s Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. And, of the upstart whose system just keeps having issues. But, we got it working now.

Andrew: So, today I’ve got with me Brian Chesky and Joe Gibba. In fact, Brian can you raise your hand so people know who you are? And, the other guy with the glasses right there, that is Joe. They are the cofounders of Air B&B, a site that Time Magazine called the “Ebay of space”. It is an online marketplace that allows anyone from a private residence to commercial prosperities to rent out their extra space. How many listings do you guys have on the site?

Some silence and laughter from all three

One of the two interviews: So, uh, yeah, its, um..while we know that we do not know the exact number of listings we have, we have listings in 2,200 cities and a 110 countries. And we’ve got about 75,000 travelers on our site.

Andrew: Ok, 75,000 travelers. Meaning people who are looking for places to stay, right?

Interviewee: Right.

Andrew: Ok. We have got a few issues here. People who are watching this live are telling me that it’s choppy.

Andrew: We’ve got a couple of issues. Number one: It’s freezing in here, which is why I am wearing this…this excessive sweater here in the summer of Buenos Aires.

Laughter

Andrew: Number two: We have a couple of people here in the interview. Which I don’t really do much. But, I wanted to get to know the..uh, company as well as possible. There are three cofounders, right?

Interviewee: Right.

Andrew: And, today we are getting to know two. And, then, there is also some kind of lag. But, we will work with it, right? That’s what it means to be an upstart. If we were CNBC, this show, I don’t think, would have as much meaning. This is an upstart helping other up starters build their businesses by talking to guys like you who are building some interesting companies and getting traction.

Andrew: What amazed me about you guys is the way that you solve the chicken and egg problem. You know, you got a website that is supposed to have listings in order to get, uh..uh, travelers. It’s supposed to get travelers in order to get listings. So, I want to know how you guys did it and how you did it so well. That’s number one.

Andrew: Number two: Everybody knows my frickin’ fascination with Y Combinator and everything to do with the whole ecosystem there. I want to know how you guys won Y Combinator over. How you..what you got out of it beyond the money. And I want to know how it helped you build from there.

Andrew: I’m also fascinated by how a website like yours can get so much frickin’ press! I mean, I saw you in the New York Times. And then I saw Time Magazine on your website. And then I started, uh, doing some research and I came across the Washington Post. Then, I went to your press page which just had..imitates big explosion with gesturing hands So, there’s a lot for us to cover over here.

Andrew: Alright. Let’s go back to where this idea came from. In the conversation we had before the interview started, you said that you started off in your living room. At what point were you and your…

Interviewee interjects: Right. Which is only about 10 feet..(unintelligible). So, um…we’re going back to October of 2007. And, by the way, let me know if the video is going to be a problem. But, I’ll just keep talking otherwise.

Interviewee: So, October of 2007. And, actually the living room is about 10 feet away from where we are now. So, we’re in the original apartment where this all started. And, it happened because, umm, Joe here was living in this apartment in San Francisco with our other co-founder, Nathan Blecharczyk, and Nate eventually ended up moving out. And so, I was living in Los Angeles. Joe said ‘I got an extra room’. And so I said ‘Well, I’d love to come up to San Francisco. I, literally, was pretty impulsive, quit my job, move up here. Here we were in this amazing apartment that we have now and because it’s so nice, it was really, really expensive. So here you are, a couple of aspiring entrepreneurs, kind of unemployed. There is a fine line there.

Trying to figure out a way to make money and that was kind of a problem. We essentially have a problem and the problem was we need to make rent and we also want to meet people because we wanted to get our business going. So the opportunity came. It was actually literally that weekend. There was an international design conference coming to San Francisco.

And on the conference website, all the hotels they listed were sold out. See like they had hotel, hotel, hotel and it said sold out, sold out, sold out. Here we are thinking ‘Well, we need to make some extra money. We love to meet some people and we have all these people attending this conference that need a place to stay’. So that was kind of light bulb went off our head and we said we should create a little design bed and breakfast.

We pulled out a couple of air beds from out closet. Laid them out and we said ‘Oh, that is going to be. That is going to the air bed and breakfast’. It was not necessarily…It wasn’t like back into the reading hack news everybody. Hoping that one day. We, literally, were a couple of designers having a problem. We ended up hosting. Yeah, we put the sign thinking we had a couple of back packing kids use it. We figure a couple of guys our age or early twenties to fly up to the conference with us, really modest schools.

I remember us talking with our friends and family. People thinking ‘Well, I think maybe this is something young kids would do. I don’t really see older people doing it. I am not sure older people would use it.’ Well, we ended having three people stay with us. And the three people stay with us broke all assumptions. About the business, the market, everything. And ever since then, we have been thinking about differently.

[...]

Original source