Taken Mind Stories – Airbnb history!

Airbnb [Air Bed and Breakfast]:

Airbnb, an international company was started up by Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky in 2007. Airbnb works on the monetization of personal property and concept of shared economy.
www.airbnb.com serves as a one-stop destination for people to find rent and lodging. As of 2015, 1.5 million properties had been listed at Airbnb. Airbnb had turned to be the world biggest Estate Rental service ever known.

Airbnb History :

The emergence of Business Model:

It all started in 2007.

27-year-old Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky who had met 5 years earlier at ‘Rhode Island School of Design’ were struggling hard to pay their house rent at San Francisco. By that time, there was a design conference going to be held at San Francisco. All rooms in the hotels of San-Francisco got booked. The duo struggling to pay their house rent found a temporary solution to make up for rental money.
Joe and Brian came up with the idea of renting up their home. They had a minimal hope that someone would turn up. The next day they created a website, www.airbedandbreakfast.com. Within 6 days, the duo got their first order. 3 people – a 30-year-old Indian man, 35-year-old Boston woman and 45-year-old from Utah showed up for $80 each.
The duo rented out 3 airbeds on their living-room floor and also cooked breakfast for the guest. Soon after the nights, as the guest left, Chesky predicted that there’s gonna be a bigger scale idea. Sitting at the edge of the sofa, the “dream plan” of Airbnb was framed.

Chesky and Joe planned to get their hands wet on the idea and started a deep discussion. Chesky always had the idea of Entrepreneurship. They came up with the idea of creating a website that helps in renting stuff that already existed. The idea was perfect. They primarily targeted conference and festivals across America. Local People were given an option to list their rooms and the travellers had the option to book them. Very few bookings showed up, upsetting Airbnb.

Entry of Nathan Blecharczyk and the arrival of Co-founder: Airbnb history

Nathan Blecharczyk, then 29, was the former flat mate of Joe and a Computer Science graduate. A new version of Airbnb website came into existence with the entry of Nathan. Nathan was given the co-founder profile for his active web development. In summer 2008, a perfect kick-start for the company development was expected by the trio. It was the Democratic National Convection and a whooping 1 million people were expected to be present. The trio completed their webpage 2 weeks in advance to the conference. Within a week around 1000 listings were made on the website by the users, yet the website couldn’t make money as Airbnb didn’t charge its users. This created a huge upset for the team.

The seed funding initiative: Airbnb history

Taking Advantage of the election fever, the team brought in a ton of cereal and Branded them as ‘Obama’s O’ and ‘Cap’nMcCain’. They sold 800 boxes at $40 each. Thus, the trio made their seed funding themselves at a profit of $30 per box sold.

Series of Investor cash flow:

In 2009, Airbnb crew raised a seed funding of $20,000 from an angel investor- Paul Graham. This was followed up by a Venture Capitalist funding of $600,000.
After the series of investment, the crew felt the need to charge the users for every booking. They thought a decrease in customer base can be easily compromised by the funds generated to brand Airbnb. They started charging up to 15% on every booking.
In 2010, Airbnb raised $7.2 million from VC followed by $120 million in July 2011.
The funding gave them the power to hire more people to work. Airbnb moved into their new office Apartment in Hongkong.

Finally, Airbnb was established In the full fledged form where more than one million bookings take place annually. In the past year, the site grew up by 400% by their clever marketing skills.
Despite a huge evolution of idea, Chesky and Joe still rent the same flat they started in. Airbnb had employed more than 200 employees.

Thus, Airbnb gave a boost to the concept of Shared economy!

A Digital disruption is said to have occured when new Technologies and new Business Model ideas take over the existing one. The Following 7 Signs Prove that Digital Disruption had occured in the past 6 years and is actively replacing the previous Business Models.

World’s Largest Taxi Aggregator owns no ‘Taxis’ – UBER Technologies Inc.

Uber Technologies launched in 2009 by Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp made a huge revolution in transportation sector – The Taxis. After the release of Uber App in 2012, Uber grew internationally just because of the unique app based business model.
By late-2015, Uber was estimated to be worth $62.5 Billion.

Largest Accommodation Provider Owns No Real Estate – Airbnb

‘Airbnb’ alias ‘Air Bed and Breakfast’ is a platform for people to list, find and rent accomodation and lodging. Founded in 2007, Airbnb created a huge impact on real estate industry with 1.5 million listings all over the world. Airbnb works on commission model.It is now the largest Accomodation Provider known.

Largest Telecommunication Companies owns no Telco Infra – Skype Telecommunications :

Skype was founded in 2003 and got acquired by Microsoft in 2011. Skype allowed users to exchange text and video messages, files and images, as well as create conference calls. The Carrier companies lost a potential market on International calls after the intervention of Skype. The Technology that made international Communication much cheaper promoted a digital disruption.

World’s Most Valuable Retailer Owns No Inventory – Alibaba Group Holding Limited:

Alibaba – The Chinese E-Commerce giant provides B2B,B2C and C2C sales service via web portals. It was founded in 1999 and had a rapid expansion in past few years. Owning a Business Capital of whooping $145 billion dollars, Alibaba group stands out with varied chain of services. It includes its own mapping services,own payment system – Alipay, own Cloud Computing platform – yet owning no inventories.

Most Popular Media owner owns no content – Facebook Inc.

Facebook founded by Zuckerburg in 2004 showed the world a rapid social sharing platform. Killing its then known competitor Orkut by introducing the ‘news feeds’ feature, Facebook topped the social media platform. Today facebook has become a part of life among millions of people.

Fastest growing banks owns no actual money – Society One.

Society One – The online peer-to-peer lending Business model made investing or borrowing Personal Loans much simpler. Launched in 2012, Society One had created a huge disruption with its unique financial solution for unsecured personal loans. The key characteristics of peer-to-peer lending Model was that loans were unsecured and are not protected by government insurance.

World’s Largest Movie Streaming service owns no cinemas – Netflix Inc.

Started in 1997 by Marc Randolph – By 2009, Netflix was offering a collection of 100,000 titles on DVD and had surpassed 10 million subscribers.In October 2015, Netflix reported 69.17 million subscribers across the globe,out of which 43 million users were from United States.