Airbnb has gone public, and the result has been unbeatable: After years of waiting for the premiere on Wall Street of one of the largest startups in the world, Airbnb began its stock market journey with a valuation of 82,000 million euros, well above the 25,000 million that he expected to reach.
A spectacular reception by investors, in a year that has not been exactly good for the , which had seen the pandemic, confinement and the impact of teleworking they had greatly reduced their trading volume. A perfect time to go over his story in detail.
Who are the creators of Airbnb
Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia They are two proper names that do not sound in the common imagination, but the company they have developed does has become a platform known by all. Both names correspond to creators of airbnb and they have become part of that select group of the richest entrepreneurs in the world.
The story of two roommates
Airbnb began its activity in 2008 adding the name of Nathan Blecharczyk to that of Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia as co-founders. But the story began a year earlier, when the designers Chesky and Gebbia still They shared a flat in San Francisco (California).
The city was hosting the conference of the Society of Industrial Designers of America at the time and all the hotel establishments were occupied, so both they considered renting the rooms of the house that they shared (their landlord had also just raised the price).
The idea worked and they began to propose it to their environment closest… until in 2008 they founded , a platform for renting private flats based on the principles of the collaborative economy, the same ones in which also based the creator of Uber . Today Airbnb is already present in more than 34,000 cities and has hosted 60 million guests.
Airbnb is thus a service that began from the purest need of its creators, a idea emerged by surprise and by utility momentary that they knew how to transform into a prolific business model. Guiding in your professional design profile, and focusing on future possibilities in a still original online environment.
Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia: two entrepreneurs from the School of Design
The history of the creators of Airbnb began years before living together in San Francisco. Both were born in 1981, and They met while studying at the Rhode Island School of Design. In fact, Brian Chesky He has been interested in art since he was little so he got a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Industrial Design. His presence in the media is usually linked to his profession, in 2015 he was among the. We hardly know anything about his personal life, except that he met his girlfriend, how could it be otherwise, through an application: Tinder.
With the same age and the same degree as Chesky, Joe Gebbia He has also become a celebrity in the entrepreneurial world. Only a year after launching Airbnb his name is already appeared in the Top 20 best young entrepreneurs of Tech Business Week. And then he has been part of the list of Inc. magazine 30 under 30 and Fortune 40 under 40.
A company affected by the coronavirus
Both continue to run the company: Chesky is the CEO of Airbnb and Gebbia is its Chief Product Officer (CPO), and as we said, they have had to face one of the most difficult times since its creation: the coronavirus crisis. On May 5, in a letter sent to his employees brian chesky explained that the decrease in their income and the need to reduce costs they were forced to make massive layoffs.
Through this letter, Airbnb announced the dismissal of 1,900 of its 7,500 employees, in addition to reduce operations that are not directed to housing rentalimpacting businesses such as its transport and audiovisual productions division (Airbnb Studios), in addition to its hotels and luxury experiences division.
Interestingly, the third quarter of the year turned out, against all odds, to be very positive for the startup, which it saw as the partial recovery of tourismIt came with new habits on the part of travelers: a greater preference for renting houses and flats instead of hotel rooms, which has benefited it. Now, with the prospects of a recovery in mobility thanks to the arrival of the vaccines, Investors welcome Airbnb’s debut on the stock market with open arms.
As you can see, they are two entrepreneurs who ended up becoming billionaires, revolutionizing a sector as classic as accommodation, and who have had good times… and not so much. Do you want to know more stories of digital entrepreneurs? You will surely be interested in:
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