CHAPTER 7
MOVING BEYOND THE COMFORT ZONE
In 2007, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, two industrial designers who couldn’t pay the rent, decided to put together a simple website to rent out a couple of airbeds in their loft, with the promise of a home-cooked breakfast. They timed their offering for the start of a design conference and called their site “air bed & breakfast.” Their initial efforts met with limited success, booking three rentals for $80 per mattress per night. They continued to develop the concept, bringing on a cofounder to build a more sophisticated web destination.
Friends told them, more or less bluntly, that they should be working on other things as they struggled to keep the operation going. In 2008, to raise money to keep the ...
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