524: In Retrospect - From Air Mattress to $31 Billion | The UNLIKELY Rise of Airbnb

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan

Nathan Chan

Marketing, Business, Entrepreneurship

4.8 • 662 Ratings

🗓️ 9 August 2024

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today, we're diving back into the Foundr Podcast archive to bring back a true highlight of an interview with Airbnb co-founder, Joe Gebbia. How do you raise capital for your startup? Well, if you ask the co-founder of Airbnb Joe Gebbia, he’ll tell you what worked for him: Cereal. That’s right, the company that started with a single air mattress and grew to a $100 billion empire was kept afloat by selling custom cereal boxes. It was bizarre but it worked. Gebbia muses in this episode of the Foundr podcast: “We made $20,000 in breakfast cereal, and we're able to basically pay off our credit card debt...The cereal, funnily enough, was how we were able to help keep the options open for us until eventually, the invitation came for Y Combinator.” In undoubtedly one of our most riveting episodes, Gebbia recounts his incredible journey from struggling to pay rent, to Airbnb’s first angel investor, to one of the biggest brands in the world and Gebbia’s incredible charity work. Gebbia is candid about how he overcame countless rejections and problems. Listen in as he shares specific advice for entrepreneurs looking to create the next industry disrupter: “You can see what’s hot. You can go after an emerging industry... Or you can solve a problem. Your own problem. Airbnb was our own problem. We had a rent check that we couldn’t pay. And it forced us to come up with a new way of making ends meet.” Click here to start your business for $1. You’ll get all-access foundr+, where you’ll find more in-depth, proven strategies from founders like our guest today and support and advice from our global community of 30,000 founders. If you loved this conversation and learned something new, rate and review this episode. Stay in touch with us, follow foundr on your favorite platform: Foundr.com Instagram YouTube Facebook X LinkedIn Magazine

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey Founder Fam. Today I'm jumping back into the archives with an all-time favorite to bring you our episode with Joe Jebia. He's the co-founder of Airbnb. This is a crazy story where he talks about from struggling to pay rent to building a $100 billion empire. This is one of my all-time favorite interviews. All right, let's jump in.
0:22.5	Hear the stories. Learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through
0:28.2	entrepreneurship. Welcome to the founder podcast with Nathan Chan.
0:35.8	The first question we ask everyone that comes on is how did you get your job,
0:41.4	aka how did you find yourself doing the work you're doing today?
0:45.3	That's such a funny question to ask.
0:47.6	I think any entrepreneur will probably give me the same answer.
0:50.9	Many of your guests have probably said the same thing.
0:53.2	We made our own jobs.
0:55.4	There was no job description. There was no application process. There was nobody to work for
0:59.1	because the company didn't exist. And that is absolutely the case with Airbnb.
1:05.0	You know, since I was in high school during the first.com, I would come home every day and I'd read these stories
1:12.4	about these companies launching this mythical place called Silicon Valley.
1:18.0	And I grew up in Georgia in the southern part of the United States.
1:22.5	And every day, there was a new story about a company and this place of San Francisco, Silicon Valley, left this imprint on me.
1:31.1	And I remember saying to myself, I know I want to start a company one day.
1:35.3	It sure seems like Silicon Valley is the place to do it.
1:39.1	And so I knew in high school at some point I was going to make my way to the West Coast.
1:44.8	And when I finally did get out there in 2006, the timing could have been better.
1:51.3	It was sort of the second coming of the internet.
1:54.6	You know, the first dot-com crash happened.
1:56.5	There was a bit of a lull.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Nathan Chan, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Nathan Chan and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.