Divisions like design, finance and marketing were condensed into one department, encouraging collaboration across teams, he added. To combat a company-wide collapse, Airbnb's executive team conducted layoffs, took personal pay cuts and slashed the marketing budget from '$1 billion to. Within weeks, journalists were predicting, 'Is this the end of Airbnb?'' that is like being an 18-wheeler going 80 mph then you slam on the breaks,' he said. Months before Airbnb's scheduled initial public offering, business dropped 80% in eight weeks during Covid-19 lockdowns, Chesky told Stanford students. The company was reportedly valued at $31 billion in 2017, before they went back to the drawing board in March 2020.

In February 2011, Airbnb announced that guests had booked one million nights in its rentals. Their timing wasn't ideal: The co-founders spent much of the Great Recession visiting NYC hosts to photograph rentals for their website and better understand the guest experience, Chesky told LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman's ' Masters of Scale' podcast in 2017.īusiness started taking off in April 2009, after the company landed a $585,000 investment from Sequoia Capital. Joined by a third co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk, the trio officially launched their website in 2008.

Brian chesky