When was airbnb founded

Investors weren't convinced. Introductions to 15 angel investors left them with eight rejections, and seven people ignoring them entirely. As they had learned from their first time hosting, a hotel room shortage meant people would be looking for other options.

Each one came with a limited-edition number and information about the company. The one VC who did take notice was Paul Graham. Graham invited the guys to join Y Combinator, a prestigious startup accelerator that doles out cash and training in exchange for a small slice of the company. The company spent the first three months of at the accelerator, working on perfecting their product.

Even during Y Combinator, they still got rejected famously by investors. Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures admitted in that he had failed to look past the Air Bed and Breakfast name and see the business. The company continued its scrappy business-building techniques. Channeling their design backgrounds, the founders launched an ambitious project to get its hosts to love the company. They visited all of their hosts in New York to personally stay with them, write reviews, and professionally photograph their places.

Chesky describes it as going from only eating leftover cereal to "ramen-profitable. That's when the company hit the accelerator on growth and learned a bunch about their business. Chesky famously lived exclusively in Airbnbs for a few months in when their employees crowded out the bedroom space left in their apartment.

By , four years after the first air mattress guests, Airbnb was already in 89 countries and had hit 1 million nights booked on the platform. It also finally won the break-out mobile app award at SXSW — a definitive success after its lukewarm launch at the festival in That makes Airbnb a "unicorn" in Silicon Valley. Soon after, the fast-growing startup hit a snag. One host had their place completely trashed.

Other hosts started complaining about guests throwing ragers or leaving their place in disgusting shape the following morning. The company also had a growing problem of people getting fined or evicted from renting their place out on Airbnb. Cities soon had a growing problem with Airbnb rentals, and the company's regulation headaches began.

With legal battles and unruly guests plaguing the home-sharing platform, Airbnb decided to do a redesign in Despite its focus on belonging, cities started to reject Airbnb rentals. New York threatened to ban Airbnb and short-term rentals in and fine every host. Many city laws made it illegal to rent out your unit without being present for less than 30 days. Which is exactly how it all worked out for the three guests they had space for.

They got to feel like they belonged there in the sense that they didn't feel like outsiders," Joe said. Everything their guests did outside of the conference was arranged for or guided by Joe and Brian. If this had been a cruise, they were the shipbuilders, the captains, the social directors, the navigators and engineers, the cooks, and the housekeeping staff, all rolled into two guys. To do that, they would need a much more robust website that required a level of technical expertise that neither Joe nor Brian possessed.

With no money to hire programmers, they would need to leverage their network to find one. Fortunately, Joe knew a guy. An engineer with a computer science degree from Harvard named Nate Blecharczyk, who just happened to be the roommate that Brian replaced when he moved in with Joe.

After the holidays, Joe gave Nate a call and they met for a drink. Eventually, the three of them decided that the perfect time to re-launch Airbedandbreakfast. By the time they came to this strategic decision, the conference was less than a month away. The turnaround was tight, but the opportunity was ideal. Twitter had launched there, Foursquare, and others. We were just going to follow the rocket ship that all of them did," Joe explained.

Plus, "every year the same thing happens. The hotels sell out months in advance, [and] people scramble for housing. What better scenario for an online hospitality platform born from a total lack of hotel room capacity?

For the next three weeks, they worked out of Joe and Brian's apartment, day in and day out, re-building the website — Joe doing the design, Nate doing the coding, and Brian doing everything else required to turn an idea into a business.

With no money. On "half a shoestring," as Joe said. They launched the site with six listings, just in time for the conference. Unfortunately, only two people booked.

And one of them was Brian. But they realised a couple of key things in the process. One was that exchanging money in person, especially in a home, is really weird, so they should probably have the financial transaction piece online.

The second was that there may be people who like to travel for reasons other than conferences, who are also interested in the idea of staying in someone's home — with or without the air mattress, ostensibly — so maybe this idea shouldn't just be tied to conference sites.

In , there was a tsunami of attention spreading across the country. What is it with these tech companies that think they can gloss something up and re-issue it onto the marketplace? This incredibly social, business and cultural disruption story — it just touches so many things. Knowledge Wharton: What these guys did — Chesky, along with Joe Gebbia and Nate Blecharczyk starting a company basically by renting out space in their own apartment — was obviously a unique way to launch something.

Gallagher: It is, yes. The whole story around their origin takes a lot more twists and turns than most people who have read about the company know. Everyone thought that they were completely crazy; no one thought this was a good idea. I am not touching this with a foot pole. They almost had to close up shop because people thought it was that crazy. Gallagher: There were two moments, I would say.

One was when they first rented out their apartment when a design conference was coming to town. They needed to make their rent. Two of the three co-founders — Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, they were Rhode Island School of Design graduates — needed to make money, and they rented out their apartment. Now, Airbnb absorbs all that extra demand.

They thought they were going to get hippie backpackers, and instead, they got lots of people just like them who wanted those air mattresses. They went to New York, and they really sat with their users and helped them dress up their properties with better language, better pricing and just gussied up the listings — and that was enough to turn the numbers to where they then started to catch fire.

So the fact that this idea took so long to really explode in big cities is a tad surprising. Gallagher: It is surprising. These other sites, they were for beach houses or mountain towns, or they were for second-home rentals, which is a huge business. You mean like the houses at the beach my parents used to rent?

He did not see Airbnb as a vacation rental company. It was that it was urban; it was also that it was home sharing — renting out space while the owner or the resident was there — that was the original idea.

They still do that, now, but the majority of the business is renting out a full space. But that was a really new thing, and that was definitely out there. They did a review system, which was intended to be a checks-and-balances system, to keep everybody honest. Also, I think they came along at the right time, because it was the Great Recession. People were looking for a cheap way to travel, and they just struck a chord with millennials, who were a massive market that at the time was not really being spoken to by the traditional hotel industry.