Brian Chesky built Airbnb by moving a co-founder to San Francisco and working 8 p.m. to midnight every day for months. Now worth $9.2 billion, Chesky's path shows entrepreneurship requires sustained effort and risk, not magic.
Here's Brian Chesky, the co-founder of Airbnb, talking about how hard he and his co-founder worked.
We basically decided for 3 months, Nate would move from Boston to San Francisco and we'd wake up at 8 o'clock. We'd go to bed at midnight, 7 days a week. We work from 8 to midnight every single day and 7 days a week. You know, we get full night's sleep, but that was it. And then we would— in that dedication for 3 to 4 months created this real serious rhythm where we weren't doing other things. We were totally focused.
Airbnb is currently valued at over $100 billion. Billion, and Brian Chesky's net worth is $9.2 billion. Brian and his team would not have been able to build such an impressive business without putting in so much work. The thing that most people don't realize is that entrepreneurship is not magic. It doesn't bend reality or give you superpowers. It just represents the extreme on the wealth curve from those who have put in the time and effort and were willing to take risks.
