The Airbnb Story summary

The trio had experienced what looked like success as a result of their work around the DNC. But following the event, their website was getting no traffic. They were starting to get desperate.

Since they were technically offering a bed and breakfast service, they came up with the funny idea to serve Obama O’s and Cap’n McCain cereals. They simply reboxed cheap cereal and earned nearly $30,000 selling their new products as collectors’ items.

So, a couple of guys renting three blow-up mattresses in their San Francisco apartment had turned into thousands of people renting out their living spaces all over the United States. Airbnb had blossomed as an adventurous, offbeat, affordable alternative to traditional accommodation, and was especially attractive for millennials.

To maintain this success, Chesky, who stepped into the role of CEO, made it Airbnb’s mission to put a unique human exchange at the heart of everything the company did. For instance, the company required that each apartment have a kind and personal touch to it, whether it be a homemade welcome packet or a host being on site to greet their guest.

Airbnb employs around 2,500 people, most of them in San Francisco. But what’s more impressive are the company’s millions of users worldwide.

At this point, there are 3 million active Airbnb offers in 191 countries, with only 20 percent of them in North America. Beyond that, since the company’s launch, 140 million guests have checked in. And finally, even after eight years of steady growth, the company is still expanding its user base, with 1.4 million new users joining per week at the end of 2016.

The majority of people operate with positive intentions, but there will always be those who don’t. So, while Airbnb takes safety very seriously, accidents do happen.

For instance, in June of 2011, the San Francisco apartment of an Airbnb host named EJ was trashed by renters. On her blog, she wrote that her spirit itself had been stolen, but she loved Airbnb and, even after the accident, still believed that 97 percent of users were honest.

In 2011, Michael Luca, an assistant professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School, began studying shared market platforms like Airbnb, Amazon and eBay.

All of these sites use personal profiles and user photographs to build trust, a fact that Luca thought might result in discrimination. As it turns out, he was right – and in the case of Airbnb, that discrimination is racially motivated.

In many places, it’s illegal to rent out apartments on a short-term basis and, as Airbnb scaled, it came up against a number of legal issues.

For instance, certain Airbnb listings violated local rental laws or building regulations. Luckily, the company was able to sign agreements with some municipalities to bring these rentals up to snuff. Such new frameworks for short-term rentals, including the right to tax them, were proposed in cities from Chicago to Paris.

When Airbnb started out, it had a hard time overcoming the general suspicion people had about sleeping in a stranger’s home. But now, those days are long gone; the number of Airbnb users is rising every year and the company is set to become one of the biggest players in the hospitality industry.

Even so, the market research firm Cowen found in a survey that, while Airbnb is pretty big, only half of those polled knew about the company. More significantly, just 10 percent of those surveyed had used Airbnb.