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.

Chesky grew up in Niskayuna, New York, and studied industrial design at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he met Joe Gebbia. In 2007, with a design conference filling San Francisco's hotels, the two rented out air mattresses in their flat to attendees. Nathan Blecharczyk, a former flatmate of Gebbia's, joined as the third co-founder.

Money was the early problem. To keep going in 2008 the founders sold novelty breakfast cereals themed on the US presidential candidates, Obama O's and Cap'n McCain's, and Y Combinator admitted them in early 2009. Sequoia Capital led their seed round that spring.

Airbnb went public in December 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, and its shares more than doubled on the first day of trading. Chesky has since run the company with a smaller, more centralised structure; a talk he gave on that approach inspired Paul Graham's 2024 essay 'Founder Mode', which became a debate across Silicon Valley. In 2025 he expanded the app into services and experiences beyond places to stay.