9 Lessons I Learned from Brian Chesky about Creativity, Community, and Hyper-Scaling Startups #929929

In 2008, two young designers found themselves in a situation that was both desperate and oddly ordinary. They couldn’t pay their San Francisco rent.
That predicament—shared by thousands of people in expensive cities—could have ended with a credit card, a call to their parents, or a Craigslist sublet.
Instead, Brian Chesky and his roommate put three air mattresses on the floor of their apartment and decided to rent them out to strangers. They called it Airbed and Breakfast.
What makes this moment worth remembering is not that it became Airbnb, a company now valued in the tens of billions. It is that Chesky, who had no training in business and no particular interest in becoming a CEO, stumble
d into an idea that fused together creativity, community, and technology in a way that redefined the meaning of hospitality.
The story of Brian Chesky is a study in contrasts. On one hand, he is an artist—he studied industrial design and once dreamed of designing sneakers.
On the other hand, he became the head of one of the most disruptive technology companies in the world. That collision of art and commerce, of imagination and execution, is not common.