It started with air mattresses on his own floor because he could not make rent. Brian Chesky co-founded Airbnb in 2008 on a proposition investors kept telling him was unworkable: that strangers would sleep in each other's homes.
He is a designer by training, and it shows in what the company obsessed over — the experience, and more importantly the trust, without which nobody hands a stranger their keys. Airbnb grew from that into a platform that rearranged how the world travels.
The company began with a question nobody took seriously: would strangers really sleep in each other's homes?
Then the pandemic stopped travel entirely. The cuts that followed were brutal, and Chesky used the emergency to strip the company back to what it was actually for. The recovery was strong enough to carry it into a high-profile public listing.
Since then the emphasis has been on reinvention as a habit and design as the way to get there. From unfundable founder to running a hospitality giant is the Silicon Valley persistence story people tell — with the detail usually left out that most such stories end at the first part.