What was that like? What did that teach you?

Yeah, so there's a few parts of this story to understand how it played out, but it's all very interesting.

So we set out to launch What You See Today in August of 2008 was when we were going to launch it.

And we kind of settled on this idea in June, which was facilitating the payments and the reviews and what you know Airbnb to be today.

We kind of scoped that in June and set out on a three-month journey to launch it in August.

And the whole idea was to... leverage the Democratic National Convention, something that we knew everyone was going to be talking about and where we knew that there was going to be a need for our product.

This is when Barack Obama received the nomination of his party to become the presidential candidate.

crazy because, yeah, it's like, can you imagine during this period with YC, when did you start seeing a turnaround in revenue and the numbers that you were actually excited about, you know, and to what did you attribute that?

So tell me more about what Paul might have gotten wrong, um, and I'd be interested to know i- i- if you, if you feel as I do that you guys actually were correct from the very beginning that this was something that the market always needed, uh, and that you provided.

Well, well, clearly we were ultimately correct.

Um, I think the biggest kind of, you know, entrepreneurial ideas tend to be ones that are non-consensus, where it's not obvious, right? Um, and so this was obviously not an obvious idea, and that doesn't mean that all non-obvious ideas are good ideas (laughs).

But why was this one a good one and, and how did we know? Well, I think it's because we, we experienced it firsthand, right? We, Joe and Brian were the first hosts, and they viscerally felt the power of the experience, right? It wasn't just an economic transaction.

Like, they met people and it was really transformative, and, like, friendships arose out of that.

The guy from India who stayed with them, you know, two years later invited them to his wedding.

Like, it's hard to capture the power of that when you relay it, um, as part of a pitch or whatnot.

How many, how many of those moments, uh, d- can you identify, um, and is that something that every, every founder has to deal with if you're scaling from, from zero to what you are today?

(laughs)

And so they're both designers by background, and they notice that an international design conference is coming to San Francisco, and they notice that all the hotels were sold out.

And so they had this idea, why not take the extra bedroom, the bedroom that I had vacated, and rent it to designers who might need a place to stay that one weekend as a way to make some extra money? Now, this room is completely empty.

It doesn't even have a bed, but Joe sets up an airbed, and instead of calling it a bed and breakfast, he calls it an airbed and breakfast.

So Airbnb is short for airbed and breakfast.

They create a simple blog advertising, uh, the room and the airbed, and they're expecting guys like themselves, so 25-year-old, you know, male probably, and instead they get a, uh, father of four from Utah, a man from India, and a 35-year-old woman from, from Boston.

So, like, eclectic group.

Right.