Question

What did you get out of the book,The Airbnb Story by Leigh Gallagher.

Answer 1

One of the first things the author does is recount the now-legendary origins of Airbnb. In 2007, two unemployed art school grads — Brian Chesky, the enigmatic CEO and his roommate and co-founder Joe Gebbia — came up with an unconventional way to pay their rent by renting out air mattresses in their flat during a busy design conference in San Francisco. Literally, an “air bed and breakfast” was born. Soon after, Harvard grad Nate Blecharczyk joined as Chief Technology Officer and they were off to the races. Slowly, that is, with several false starts before the company started really hitting the cultural zeitgeist in 2008, when Gallagher first heard about the company.

“I don’t cover Silicon Valley day in and day out but the Airbnb story stood out for so many reasons,” Gallagher told Digital Trends. “First, its growth was incredible. You can’t have that kind of explosive growth without striking a chord with consumers. The other thing that struck me about Airbnb was that the founders really are outsiders. They come from a completely different perspective because Airbnb isn’t a product that anyone in the travel industry would have imagined.”

For the book, Gallagher also does a deep-dive analysis into why the Airbnb product — which at its core is simply a real estate brokering agency — resonated so strongly with its community. Even as hoteliers scoffed and communities struggled with the legality of homestays.

There were competitors but the product was a little different,” Gallagher explained. “They really popularized sharing the space with somebody who was there. That made it more of a community; because you had a lot of interaction with the person you were hosting or staying with, it made it a more personal experience. They also took a cut of the transactions, which was one way they were able to really boost the business model.”

Another factor, said Gallagher, was timing and taste, especially among newly adult millennials.

The great recession made it so people were looking for a cheap way to travel or a cheap way to make money from their homes. They also had this brand-new audience, a very large one, in the millennial generation — these were people still unclaimed by the hotel industry. They had different tastes: anti-corporate, counter-cultural, and they liked adventures and anything artisanal so Airbnb really spoke to them at a critical moment.