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The Woz to Chesky and Gebbia’s Jobs, Blecharczyk was author not only of Airbnb’s website and sophisticated payment system but also the suspected architect of the cold-blooded feats of coding that greased the wheels of its early hyper-growth. But it’s marred by the CNBC treatment it gives its subject.įor all the discussion of Airbnb’s exquisite “design sensibilities,” as Stone puts it, the company’s rise was fueled also by programming, and the virtuosic contributions of co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk. Gallagher is an editor at Fortune, and “The Airbnb Story” does yeoman’s work explaining the Airbnb phenomenon to the uninitiated. No figure is too obscure in the annals of Uber and Airbnb for Stone to track down, including the poignant stories of sundry entrepreneurs who converged on similar ideas but, amid various missteps, failed to find traction. “The Upstarts” is a penetrating study marked by the same thorough reporting that distinguished this earlier work. Stone, an editor at Bloomberg, is best known as the author of the terrific “The Everything Store” (2013), about Amazon. The hustle and industry of Chesky was pivotal in bootstrapping Airbnb Kalanick quickly intuited the basis of Uber’s appeal, helping the company avoid the ditches into which many of its competitors plowed: “The luxury of Uber is about time and convenience. It’s hard to imagine the success of either company without their CEOs - the personable Chesky, high on Steve Jobs’ injunction to “put a dent in the universe,” a master of the gauzy Instagram-hued soft sell Uber’s prickly Travis Kalanick, as hard-bitten as the most die-hard, obstreperous cabbie. Also crucial: forays from Silicon Valley to New York City, where many early adopters lived, yielding insights into how people actually used the site.įrom their inception, though, there was one constant, a sine qua non of overachieving startups: “viral” appeal, observes Stone - friends watched friends insouciantly arrive at a club in an Uber and signed up themselves travelers used Airbnb to score cheap digs in a hip neighborhood rather than some sterile, overpriced downtown hotel, then listed their own spare room on the site when they got home. Along the way, it recast itself as a company “rooted in complex math” and data, able through the “lever” of price to modulate supply and demand in urban transportation as never before, Stone writes.Īirbnb quickly branched beyond the conference trade, and an early backer clued in co-founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia to tourists as a steady source of demand, Gallagher recounts. To fend off rivals, Uber went mass market, eventually embracing the ride-hailing service for which it’s best known today. Much of the thrill in reading about their short but vertiginous histories lies in the glimpse this offers into how, in a crucible of competition and regulatory skirmishes, they assumed their current contours as harbingers of “a new trust economy,” as Stone puts it. Uber was conceived as a chauffeur service for well-heeled techies frustrated by San Francisco’s taxi deficit Airbnb’s impetus was more parochial still - a means for two recent Rhode Island School of Design grads to make the rent by putting up conference delegates on, you’ve guessed it, air beds.
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Unlike, as Stone notes, Google, with its crisp founding mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” these are companies whose original form bears only a tenuous relationship to what they’ve become.