In this presentation, Nate Blecharczyk, co‑founder and former CTO of Airbnb, walks the audience through the company’s meteoric rise and the personal journey that enabled it. He opens with striking graphs that illustrate Airbnb’s exponential growth—from 4 million guests in its first four years to 8 million guests in just the first five months of 2015, and a portfolio of 1.2 million listings across 191 countries. He frames this success as the result of relentless perseverance, likening the startup path to training for the Olympics. Blecharczyk then recounts his early fascination with programming at age 12, his first paid freelance project at 14, and the confidence it gave him. After a brief, unfulfilling corporate stint post‑Harvard, he left to pursue faster‑paced work in the Bay Area, learning both what to do and what to avoid. He describes how a chance roommate match on Craigslist led him to Joe Gebbia, whose design background complemented Nate’s engineering skills, and how Joe introduced Brian Chesky, completing the founding trio. The narrative culminates in the origin story of Airbnb: a rent hike forced the roommates to rent out an extra bedroom, using an air mattress and coining the name “AirBed & Breakfast.” Throughout, Nate emphasizes that each experience—successes, failures, and side projects—added tools to his toolbox, ultimately enabling the creation of a global hospitality platform.
Chapters
I thought I'd kick off today first by showing a few graphs and a few numbers just to illustrate how crazy hypergrowth can be, and then tell you the backstory that really led up to that growth. So with that in mind, let me show you. In 2009 is when Airbnb really first started to grow. And this is a graph showing the number of guests who have traveled on Airbnb. So here's 2009, up and to the right, the way it should look. And then 2010 comes along, it looks pretty similar. 2011, almost the same thing again. 2012, 2013, 2014. Notice the numbers are getting bigger here on the left. What does it look like when you add all these graphs up? 6 years of continuous growth. Yeah. That's what we call exponential growth. Pretty mind-blowing. It took 4 years to get our first 4 million guests, and now in the first 5 months of 2015 alone, we've done twice that, 8 million guests in the first 5 months. It's kind of mind-blowing how something can start so small and yet come— become so big in such a short amount of time. And yet when you look at this graph, you might think that, like, clearly a good idea, it's really taken off. It seems almost obvious in retrospect, and yet what I'm going to tell you in terms of the journey it took to produce this is so long. It was actually against all odds that any of this ever happened. So despite the crazy success that you know today, there's a lot of hard effort that goes into creating that, and I'm sure that's what many of you are experiencing right now. So with that in mind, I'll share my personal story with you. And the one thing I want you to be thinking about or take away from this presentation is The importance of perseverance. And I like to think of starting a startup as going to the Olympics. Not that I've done that, but I imagine there are some similarities in the sense that you're not going to show up to the Olympics and expect to win a gold medal on your first show or overnight. Instead, you're probably going to dedicate years of your life to training. You might compete a few times and fail. And then you might ultimately succeed. And it's the same way with starting your company. So with that in mind, a few more stats, which is that we're now in 1.2 million— 1.2 million properties around the world, 191 countries, 34,000 different cities. So again, really big scale. That all started when I was about 12 years old. When I was 12, I was homesick from school one day, and I took a book off my dad's bookshelf. And it was a book on programming computers. My dad is an electrical engineer. He's a computer enthusiast, and so he had some of these books. And I took one off the shelf and started looking at it. And I got engaged, and I got excited. And this spawned a hobby of programming, which I did for a number of years, posting my work on the internet. And at the age of 14, somebody from the internet called me and said, I saw what you've done on the internet. I want to pay you $1,000 to write me a program. And so I tell my dad, somebody from the internet wants to pay me $1,000. And he says, son, nobody from the internet is going to pay you $1,000. I said, I don't care. I'm going to do it anyways just for fun. Well, sure enough, 30 days later, I got paid $1,000. And this was the beginning of a business that I ran throughout high school. I made enough money to pay for college, but more important than the money, from this experience I got confidence. Confidence in myself and my ability to teach myself the necessary skills to create a business, to build things that people would value. And I think that's so important. And so I started at a young age with this entrepreneurial spirit in my blood. I went to Harvard. I studied computer science. Upon graduating, I got a, perhaps surprisingly, normal corporate job, programming, of course. After 7 months, I had to quit. You see, the pace of development was just not very fast. I didn't find myself learning. When I went to talk to my boss and tell him I was leaving, he said, oh, you can't quit. You're our most productive engineer. And I said, well, that's funny, because actually, The way my schedule worked, I had an office to myself and I would come in the first half of the day and I would do my work, but then the second half of the day I would just trade stocks. And here my boss is telling me I'm the most productive engineer at the company. I was like, well, that's really problematic. I'm clearly not being challenged. I'm clearly not learning. I must leave immediately. And so I quit and soon thereafter I moved out here to the Bay Area. And I joined another startup company, not my own. But another company where I learned a lot. I learned everything not to do. Actually really valuable because when things are going well, it's really easy to gloss over the things that aren't going well and to miss some of those lessons. But at this company, everything went wrong. And it was a very valuable lesson for me. And when I think back on how I've spent my time over the years, there's actually a lot of things that I've worked on. Either for fun or as more serious projects that have ultimately been discarded and might have at the time seemed like a waste of time. And yet I look back on those experiences and I realize that I was basically— by learning, I was putting tools into my toolbox. And I realized that a lot of my success at Airbnb was empowered by those lessons that I learned along the way. And so it's not always about the destination, it's about the journey and realizing that all these experiences are additive. and over time they'll make you smarter and smarter, more and more capable, and set you up for that ultimate win someday. And so I'm now in the Bay Area and I need a place to live. And so I go on Craigslist to find a roommate and I come across Joe, my now co-founder, and I become his roommate and we live together here on Rauch Street in San Francisco. And I notice a couple of things about Joe. After work and on the weekends, we're up late at night working on our own projects. And I really realized that in Joe I saw someone with amazing work ethic, much like myself. While other people were at the park having fun, we were working on our passions, our projects. And the other thing I noticed about Joe was he's a designer, and I saw the things that he was designing both online and in the real world. And he saw the software I was developing, and we actually helped each other out on projects and realized that our skills were incredibly complementary. And so we filed that away in our heads and realized we would make a really good team someday. Meanwhile, Joe introduced me to Brian. This is Brian, our CEO, our 3rd co-founder. Joe and Brian met each other at the Rhode Island School of Design in university. And so the 3 of us connected and decided we should start a company together. The only question was, What should the idea be? And it actually took us a couple months to work through a series of ideas until Joe and Brian told me a story. And this is now January 2008, but they told me a story that took place in October 2007, a few months before. And what happened then was we were— had been roommates. The rent on our apartment was raised 25%. And I said, that's too expensive. I'm moving out. But the other 2 guys wanted to stay. They had just quit their jobs to become entrepreneurs. Also known as unemployed. And so they didn't have the money either. But they're both designers, and they saw that an international design conference was coming to San Francisco. And they noticed that all the hotels were sold out on the conference website. And they got this idea, why not rent the extra bedroom in the apartment to designers who might need a place to stay? Now this room, it had no furniture because I had moved out. It had no bed. But Joe had in his closet an air bed. He said, we'll just put the air bed up, and instead of calling it a bed and breakfast, we will call it an air bed and breakfast. And so that's where Airbnb, the name, comes from.
