The Genesis Of AirBnB
February 3, 2013 5 Comments
Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky were friends from Rhode Island School of Design.In 2006,Joe asked Brian to move to San Francisco to start something.Unfortunately by October 2007,even as the duo had nearly run through their meagre savings,their landlord hiked the rent by 25%.Their situation was bad.They had no money to pay the next month’s rent.They did not even have an idea for a business.
The Industrial Design Society of America holds a specialized conference around the world once in 20 years.They picked San Francisco in 2007.The week Joe read the landlords missive with a sense of impending doom,San Francisco was abuzz with an acute shortage of hotel rooms for the IDSA conference.They rented out space in their living room that weekend.Joe coded and put up a small website advertising their living room.For $80,a person got a room,airport pickup and breakfast.As Brian and Joe pulled out three airbeds from storage to accommodate their guests, they named their service AirBnB. Read more of this post
While in San Francisco in 1970, Anita Roddick visited a tiny hippie shop on Union Square owned by Peggy Short and Jane Saunders, two sisters by marriage.It was a fun place, offering “biodegradable” shampoos and lotions made with avocado, cocoa butter, and cucumber, packaged in small, round plastic bottles with hand-written labels that were refillable at a discount.The store carried freshly made glycerin soaps scented with strawberry and lemon and perfume oil redolent of gardenia, woody sandalwood, and honeysuckle. It was housed in CJ’s, a car repair garage so the two founders cleverly named it The Body Shop.
“You’ve got to do it! There’s no ‘How will you? How can you?’ You just do it!”-Anita Roddick
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