Gebbia and his friend Brian Chesky had first
met at Rhode Island School of Design in 2002
- but five years later, they weren’t exactly
finding it easy to pay their rent in San Francisco.
Fortunately, a design conference was visiting
the city that year, with local hotels already fully
booked. Gebbia and Chesky duly identified an
opportunity to rent out three airbeds on their
living-room floor while making breakfast for
their guests.
The business was founded by Gebbia, Chesky
and a past flat mate of the former, Nathan
Blecharczyk, a computer science graduate who
helped his fellow co-founders to develop the
company website. It was ultimately launched
two weeks before Denver’s Democratic National
Convention (DNC) in 2008, in anticipation of
8,000 people attending the event but finding
hotel rooms in short supply. Within a week,
the site had attracted 800 listings from people
advertising their homes for rental.
As a company, Airbnb has continued to grow
since then – in terms of both financial takings
and geographical coverage. Uber had similarly
unassuming beginnings. In mid-2008, Canadian
entrepreneur Garrett Camp was watching Daniel
Craig’s first James Bond film Casino Royale on
DVD, and was inspired by one particular scene
in which Bond keeps track of where he is driving
his silver Ford Mondeo by looking at a graphical
marker of its location on a digitized map on the
screen of his Sony Ericsson phone.
At the time, Camp lived in San Francisco,
where the taxi industry seemed to protect the
interests of taxi drivers more than those of
their customers. Taxi licenses in the city were