Part IThe Story
The Unlocked Phone
In February 2016, on a stage in Vancouver, Joe Gebbia asked roughly 1,200 people to do something none of them would have done on their own. He told the TED audience to take out their phones, unlock them, and hand them to the person on their left. The stranger on their left, in most cases.
"How does it feel holding someone's unlocked phone?" he asked. He let the discomfort settle. "That tiny sense of panic you are feeling right now is what hosts feel the first time they open their home." Then he turned the exercise around. How did it feel to be the one holding the phone, the email and the photographs and the bank app of a person you had never met? "Most of us feel really responsible," he said. "That's how most guests feel when they stay in a home. It's because of this that our company can even exist."
It was a good trick, and Gebbia has always been good at tricks: tactile, a little theatrical, the kind of demonstration a design-school critic would admire because it makes an abstraction physical. The company in question was Airbnb, which by then counted 123 million hosted nights and was valued at about $30 billion. The abstraction was trust between strangers, which Gebbia had spent nearly a decade trying to turn into something that could be engineered, measured, and sold.
He told the audience a second story that day, and it was a stranger one. In 2005, while he was still a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, he let a man he did not know sleep on an air mattress in his Providence apartment. Sometime in the night Gebbia lay awake and began to wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake. What if the stranger kidnapped him? What if he ended up stuffed in the trunk of the man's car, which happened to be a red Mazda Miata, a vehicle whose trunk can barely hold a weekend bag? The fear was absurd, and he knew it was absurd, and he felt it anyway. Nothing happened. When Gebbia moved to San Francisco a couple of years later, he brought the air mattress with him.
Hold that image for a moment: a young man awake in the dark, doing the math on a stranger and a trunk. A great deal of the next twenty years can be read as an argument with that fear. First he would defeat it, then build a global business by teaching millions of other people to defeat it. Later, by a route nobody who knew him in 2016 predicted, he would come to stand for something that looked to many of his old customers very much like its return.
Nine years after Vancouver, on February 20, 2025, a woman named Krista O'Connell took her Arlington, Virginia, apartment off Airbnb. She had hosted for more than a decade. She had once testified before her county board against restrictions on short-term rentals. In 2021, when the company offered free housing to refugees from Afghanistan, she and her family took in an Afghan woman and her child for several weeks. Now Gebbia, who had chaired the nonprofit arm that coordinated that housing, had announced on X that he was joining Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. "How could a company that did that," O'Connell asked a reporter, "now work with the Trump administration that has no respect for refugees?"
Six months later, on August 21, 2025, his forty-fourth birthday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order creating a position that had never existed: Chief Design Officer of the United States. The first holder was Joe Gebbia. His directive, he wrote, was to make government services "as satisfying to use as the Apple Store."
The young man on the air mattress, the founder with the unlocked phone, the federal design chief in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building: these are the same person. He has, by his own account, changed his mind about a great many things, and he has never once stopped believing that design can make strangers behave better. To understand that, you have to begin a long way from Washington, with a boy selling drawings for a dollar apiece.
By the Numbers
From Living Room to Executive Order
$200Airbnb's weekly revenue during the 'trough of sorrow' before Y Combinator
~$30,000Raised by selling 'Obama O's' and 'Cap'n McCain's' cereal in 2008
0 of 20Investors who funded Airbnb in its first round of pitches
2.5B+All-time guest arrivals on Airbnb as of 2026
$3.5BRaised in Airbnb's December 10, 2020 IPO
5.6% / 17.6%Gebbia's economic and voting stake in Airbnb (2025)
~26,000Federal websites in scope for the National Design Studio
A Dollar a Drawing
The first thing Joe Gebbia remembers selling is a drawing. "In the second grade, I would make drawings and sell them to friends for $1 a piece," he told Grazia. "People loved them and I remember that was the first time that I saw and experienced people wanting to pay me for something that I created." The drawings were mostly Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a fact he still mentions with evident pleasure. Decades later, on Tim Ferriss's podcast, he cited the first collected volume of the original Eastman and Laird comics as a formative text, sharing a reading list with William McDonough's Cradle to Cradle and two books by Seth Godin.
He was born Joseph Gebbia Jr. on August 21, 1981, in Atlanta, of Italian and Irish descent. His parents, Eileen and Joe Sr., were independent health-food sales representatives, people who lived on commission, on the persuasiveness of a pitch and the patience to repeat it. His father would later serve two terms on the Brookhaven city council. The family raised Joe and his sister Kimberly in Gwinnett County, in Lawrenceville, the wide suburban belt northeast of the city where the subdivisions run into one another. He attended Brookwood High School in Snellville.
The school day was not enough. Gebbia took ceramics, photography, and jewelry metalsmithing at Brookwood, ran cross-country, and spent weekends taking figure drawing and painting at the Atlanta College of Art. He was a ball boy for the Atlanta Hawks, a job he has described as life-changing, presumably because it put a teenage boy inside a professional organization and let him watch how the machinery worked. The school called him "the art guy." He sold candy bars at his sister's swim meets, ran a lawn-mowing business, and redesigned his senior class T-shirts and then sold them. During the first dot-com boom he taught himself to build websites.
A summer in Georgia's Governor's Honors Program put him in college-level art courses. One professor told him to go to RISD. He spent the following summer taking classes on the Providence campus. He graduated from Brookwood in 2000.
The pattern was set early. There was the made thing, and the customer, and the gap between them, and the pleasure of closing it. He sold the drawing to the friend, the shirt to the class. He was a salesman's son with an art student's hands, and he never seemed to feel the two pulling against each other. "Design has always been a driving force in my life," he would tell the Globe and Mail in 2017. "It's the lens through which I experience the world." What he left out, because it was too obvious to him to mention, was that the world on the other side of the lens was full of buyers.
Twenty-two years after he left Brookwood, he came back to give the commencement address. "I definitely don't remember the advice that I was given at my graduation," he told the Class of 2022, "and I don't expect you to either." So he gave them something else: 22 shares of Airbnb stock for each of the roughly 890 graduates, about $2.1 million in total. "I would like to give you a piece of my dream to help inspire yours and let you know that it is possible." Days earlier the school had mounted a plaque for him on its Wall of Fame. The year before, he had given $700,000 to create the Joe Gebbia Visual Arts Endowment and support the cross-country and track teams. On his website he posted a wry line about the stock gift: he just hoped they wouldn't spend it all on crypto.
The art guy was still selling a piece of what he had made, this time to eight hundred and ninety strangers at once.
Sixteen Chairs
At RISD, early on, Gebbia took a 3D foundations course whose semester-long assignment was to produce 12-inch scale models of works by a famous artist or designer. He wanted to build them life-size, so that he could actually sit in them afterward. His professor dismissed the idea and told him to stick to what was achievable.
Gebbia produced sixteen full-sized chairs.
He tells this story the way other founders tell stories about getting fired or dropping out. It is his origin myth of overreach, the first time he discovered that the stated limits of a situation were negotiable. "Anything I come across that feels impossible," he told Ferriss, "I probably need to take a second look." The chairs mattered for another reason too. Around that time he came across the work of Charles and Ray Eames, and he switched his concentration from painting to industrial design. The Eameses would remain his household gods. Their ethos, as he summarized it for CNBC, was "to make the best design for the most people for the least price." He later supported the Eames Institute, and in 2022 Fast Company ran a piece on what he owed them.
Then, in his second year, the school took the industrial design students to the Rhode Island state landfill.
"It was like driving through a canyon of trash and it was demoralising," he told ICON magazine. "Here I was, so excited to learn the craft of product design but, oh my god, do I really want to be creating more stuff in the world that is just contributing to making landfills bigger?" He gave the feeling a name: designer's guilt. "It planted a pretty deep seed in me. I didn't know how to resolve it right away—I certainly toiled with it."
It is tempting to read the entire subsequent career as a resolution of that afternoon among the garbage. A company that would make no objects at all, only rearrange the use of ones that already existed: the empty room, the spare bed, the backyard. "What Airbnb represents," he said, "is a form of design that not only doesn't create stuff in the world, but helps people think differently about the stuff they already have." That is the official reading, and it is not wrong. It is incomplete, because the young man who felt the guilt was also, at the very same moment, making and selling a great deal of stuff.
The stuff was called CritBuns. RISD students spent hours sitting on hard studio floors during critiques ("crits") of one another's work, and Gebbia designed a foam cushion in the shape of a pair of buttocks to make the ordeal bearable. He walked around campus carrying them. "He always walked around campus toting these butt pads," his classmate Chris Saltzman told The New Yorker. They sold online for twenty dollars and eventually at the MoMA Design Store. Wired's reviewer reported: "It feels like I'm getting a perpetual, gentle ass massage." The school commissioned eight hundred as graduation gifts for his class. When CritBuns made it into the MoMA store, Gebbia mailed one to his friend Brian Chesky, who was then designing products at a firm in Los Angeles. It was, he later said, a "subtle nudge. It was a reminder. Don't forget, we could potentially be creating things too."
He was a joiner and a builder of joinable things. He gave tours for the admissions office ("I was, like, 'Whoa, this guy is so on point. He's going places,'" one tour-taker, the designer Loren Klein, remembered) and worked in the dining room of the University Club. He wore a signature pair of machine-shop safety glasses. He revived RISD's defunct basketball team, which competed under the name the Balls, in a sports program that also fielded the Nads (hockey), the Sacks (men's soccer), and the Jugs (women's soccer). The hockey team's unofficial mascot, a cartoon of male genitalia named Scrotie, had been designed by Chesky, who captained the Nads. One night, Klein recalled, he found himself with Gebbia and two other students "eating Krispy Kreme doughnuts and running into the ocean in our underwear."
He was also president of the student council, and here the record contains a small, almost comically prophetic detail. At one point the council formed a "committee to investigate the effectiveness of the faculty advisor program." "This is not some high school council that has no real impact or influence," the council announced, according to a student newspaper. Saltzman, asked about it two decades later, had no memory of the investigation. "The council was a nonentity," he said.
He also took classes at Brown and a product design and development course at MIT's Sloan School, "sneaking business classes," as his own website puts it, "like a kid raiding the cookie jar." He graduated in 2005 with BFAs in both graphic design and industrial design. He had attended on scholarship, a fact he would honor in 2014 with a $300,000 endowed fund for students who needed financial help, and again in 2017 when he gave the proceeds of his first furniture line to a RISD scholarship fund.
Chesky had graduated a year earlier. Before they parted, according to Speedwell Research's history of the company, Gebbia told him: "There's something I need to tell you. We're going to start a company one day and they're going to write a book about it."
He was right. The book is Leigh Gallagher's The Airbnb Story, and its subtitle (How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy) gets at least two of its three claims right.
Twenty-Five Percent
He moved to San Francisco and took a job as a designer at Chronicle Books, the publisher, where he watched how a design-led business worked "department by department." On the side he founded Ecolect, an online marketplace to help architects and designers source eco-friendly materials. It was his designer's guilt with a business model attached. He lived in a walk-up on Rausch Street in SoMa with a roommate named Nathan Blecharczyk, who had answered his Craigslist ad.
Each of the three founders deserves a few sentences, because the company is impossible to understand without the triangle they formed.
Brian Chesky grew up in Niskayuna, New York, the son of two social workers, descendants of Polish and Italian immigrants, whose chief anxiety about their art-school son was whether he would ever find a job with health insurance. He drew replicas of paintings as a teenager, cited Leonardo as an inspiration, became a competitive bodybuilder and captain of the hockey team, and after RISD went to Los Angeles to design toys, guitars, and medical equipment at a firm called 3DID. The job's low point was working on a toilet seat called the Pureflush for the television show American Inventor. He was, as Gebbia would later be, a designer who suspected the world did not need more of what designers were being paid to make.
Nathan Blecharczyk grew up upper-middle-class in Boston, attended Boston Latin Academy, and financed his Harvard computer science degree with software he wrote in high school, including a web-hosting business that served spammers and was at one point listed on Spamhaus's Registry of Known Spam Operators. He shut it down in 2002 to focus on his studies, took engineering jobs at OPNET and Batiq, and became, in the founding mythology, "the engineer," the one who could make the designers' drawings run. He was the only one of the three who could write the code, and his first business had been a lesson in how much money flows to whoever controls the plumbing between strangers.
Then the letter came.
Gebbia has told the story of the letter for nearly twenty years, and the number in it drifts. In 2018 he told CNBC that the landlord wrote "Dear Joe your rent has gone up 25 percent." In his 2022 farewell note to employees, he remembered the letter trembling in his hands and the rent rising "by $1,050!" Speedwell's account has Chesky arriving with about $1,000 in savings to face a share of rent of $1,150. What doesn't drift is the feeling. "This hit us like a ton of bricks," he said. "Suddenly, we're on the verge of getting evicted." Blecharczyk, he wrote, "nodded in similar disbelief—and soon moved out." Chesky moved in. They had less than four weeks. They had been out of work for two months. "How were we going to change the world," Gebbia wrote, "if we couldn't even afford an apartment?"
He was sitting in the living room with his laptop, looking at the website for the Industrial Designers Society of America conference, which was coming to San Francisco in October 2007. In big red letters, he recalled, the site said the hotels were sold out. "I glanced over the top into the vastness of our living room," he told CNBC, and thought: "What if I took my airbed out of the closet, blew it up on the floor and then we were to host a designer who wanted to stay for the design conference?"
He then emailed his roommate, who was presumably in the next room. The message has since been reproduced in Fast Company and quoted at TED:
Brian — thought of a way to make a few bucks — turning our place into a designers' bed and breakfast.
Chesky loved it. They acquired two more airbeds, which brought the total to three. They threw together a website and got coverage on design blogs. Then they did the thing that separated a sublet from a product: they started designing the experience around the bed. "What if we pick our guests up from the airport, what if we give them breakfast in the morning, what if we give them a map to San Francisco?" The breakfast was Pop-Tarts.
Three guests came. Accounts of the money differ: Gebbia has said elsewhere that they charged $20 a night, and also that they made $1,000 and covered the rent. Whatever the sum, the weekend produced a sensation the two designers could not stop talking about. "We got to provide hospitality for them," Gebbia told the Observer. "Second, they got to feel like insiders in San Francisco ... Third, we became economically empowered." The version he told Grazia is the one that sounds most like two twenty-six-year-olds standing in an emptied living room: "I remember after they left the apartment, Brian and I looked at each other and thought, 'Did we just get paid to make friends?'"
The air mattress from Providence, the one that had held a stranger and kept Gebbia awake picturing the trunk of a Miata, had been inflated again. The stranger had become a guest, and the guest had paid.
The Visa Round
Then nothing happened, for a long time.
"We waited for the rocket ship to blast off," Gebbia told the TED audience. "It did not." They relaunched for South by Southwest in March 2008 and got two bookings, one of which was Chesky himself. They brought Blecharczyk back as the third co-founder and chief technology officer, and he rebuilt the site in Ruby on Rails. Airbedandbreakfast.com relaunched on August 11, 2008, timed to the Democratic National Convention in Denver, where Barack Obama would accept the nomination before a crowd that dwarfed the city's hotel stock. TechCrunch covered it and the traffic crashed the site. Coverage trickled up from microblogs to the Denver Post to the New York Times. They got 800 listings and 80 bookings.
Then Obama left Denver, and the guests left with him.
The founders went to investors. "We met with the best in Silicon Valley—the guys who picked Youtube, Paypal and Google," Gebbia said. His numbers, given to the Observer, have the precision of an old wound: "We probably reached out to 20 investors. 10 replied to the e-mail, five met for coffee, and zero invested." "It sounded weird and crazy that we allow people to post photos of the most private spaces of their home, and then invite people to sleep in their home. It was kind of an absurd pitch in 2008."
There was a second objection, rarely spoken aloud, that Gebbia identified only later. "Investors didn't trust a founding team with two designers and one engineer," he told ICON. "It was so improbable that it just didn't fit a success formula of the companies before us. They were usually technologists, computer scientists and maybe a sales guy as the founding team."
So they funded themselves. "We raised a round through Visa," Gebbia said. "We called it the Visa round, except Visa didn't really know about it! We actually took out credit card after credit card, we filled up binders." Each founder was carrying around $20,000 in debt. "I wouldn't necessarily recommend that. It was high anxiety and high stress."
What saved them, temporarily, was a piece of packaging. In the run-up to the 2008 election, Chesky and Gebbia commissioned an illustrator to design two cereal boxes, "Obama O's" and "Cap'n McCain's," printed 1,000 of them, filled them with ordinary supermarket cereal, numbered each box as a limited-edition collectible, and sold them for $40 apiece. They raised about $30,000. It was CritBuns logic all over again: an ordinary object, an absurd premise, a design flourish that turned a commodity into a conversation piece. The numbering on the boxes did more work than the cereal did. Sequoia Capital would later describe the trio, with the inevitable pun, as "cereal" entrepreneurs.
The cereal paid down the cards. It did not fix the business. "After the national convention, the numbers tanked and we entered what's called the trough of sorrow," Gebbia said, borrowing the term from Y Combinator's lore for the long flat stretch after a launch's novelty wears off. "For many, many months, our growth was completely flat. We were making maybe 200 dollars a week at best. This was bleak. If you crunched the numbers, and you put into a spreadsheet, the net result would have said, shut this business down."
Talking to the Observer in 2016, by which time the company was worth $30 billion, he did not dress it up. "It was probably the worst year of my life," he said. "Our team started falling apart. The band felt like it was unraveling, so it was just very dismal and lonely. I felt alone with my idea that I wanted people to believe in, but they weren't."
What sustained him, he has always said, was the memory of the three guests. "We had this intrinsic belief in ourselves. Only because we had guests staying in our apartment. We had our first-hand experience on what it was like—the magic that can unfold when you welcome people from around the world." It was not the data that kept them going, since there was hardly any data. It was a weekend in a living room, people sleeping on the floor and eating Pop-Tarts.
Go to the People
In January 2009, Airbnb was one of sixteen companies admitted to Y Combinator's winter batch. Paul Graham's program gave them $20,000 for 6 percent of the company. Graham had never funded a team with two designers at its core. "He took a bet on us," Gebbia said, "and now he looks for it when he's funding programmes or companies."
On the first day, the founders presented Graham with their plans for the next three months, which were mostly technical. Gebbia called them "brilliant tech strategies," with retrospective irony. Graham dismissed them and asked a question Gebbia would later call "maybe the single most important question in the history of Airbnb."
"Where is your market?"
They didn't have much of one. "Weekly revenue was less than what it costs to buy an iPad," Gebbia wrote in a 2012 blog post. But there was one city showing promise. "The 'city that never sleeps' had signs of people sleeping." New York had perhaps thirty or forty hosts.
— Paul Graham, as recalled by Joe GebbiaSo your customers are in New York, and you're here in Mountain View ... What are you still doing here! Go to New York City!
It was the first time, Gebbia wrote, that "we were given permission to do things that don't scale." The phrase would become Silicon Valley scripture, the title of a Graham essay, and Airbnb's founding parable. Gebbia's own gloss on it is more interesting than the slogan. "We had this Silicon Valley mentality that you had to solve problems in a scalable way because that's the beauty of code," he told First Round Review. "You can write one line of code that can solve a problem for one customer, 10,000 or 10 million. For the first year of the business, we sat behind our computer screens trying to code our way through problems. We believed this was the dogma."
Before they left, Gebbia had noticed something while scrolling New York listings with Graham. "There's some similarity between all these 40 listings. The similarity is that the photos sucked." Hosts were shooting their apartments with camera phones, at night, or recycling images from classified sites. "It actually wasn't a surprise that people weren't booking rooms because you couldn't even really see what it is that you were paying for."
Gebbia had taken photography at Brookwood and again at RISD. So he and Chesky rented an expensive camera, flew to New York, and went door to door through Manhattan and Brooklyn photographing hosts' homes for free. "We'd show them the photos after we took them, and they'd just be like, 'Oh my god, my apartment looks amazing. Do you want to stay for coffee or tea?' So we'd sit down on the sofa."
And on the sofa, the hosts told them what was wrong with the product. Gebbia's preferred interview question dates from this period: "Tell me a story about a time you faced a challenge using our service." It is a designer's question, open-ended, narrative, impossible to answer with a checkbox.
They went home, uploaded the photographs, fixed what the hosts had complained about, and watched weekly revenue go from $200 to $400. It was the first real improvement in about eight months. "I said to Nate, 'Is there a bug in the system?'" There wasn't. They had committed to reach "ramen profitability" ($1,000 a week, enough for rent and noodles) by Demo Day. They got there before it. When they showed Graham the doubling, he gave them the same instruction again: go back to New York.
In April 2009, Sequoia Capital led a $600,000 seed round, with Youniversity Ventures partners Jawed Karim, Keith Rabois, and Kevin Hartz participating. Shares sold for a penny each. Sequoia's partners recalled meeting the founders in "a tiny office on Rausch Street," pitching from a deck built on Sequoia's own business-plan template, with about a thousand listings on the site. That March the company had shortened its name to Airbnb, partly to get away from air mattresses.
Out of New York, Gebbia developed a vocabulary he would use for the rest of his career. The first word was a principle from a RISD project designing a medical device: be the patient. The students interviewed doctors, nurses, and patients, but "the big aha moment was when we actually had the existing solution applied to us, and we lay down on the hospital bed." The second was a phrase of his own, "enlightened empathy," for the step that comes after research, when the designer returns to the studio and fuses what he has heard with his own point of view. "Design thinking does not mean design by committee," he told Fortune. "It does not mean that you write down every feature request or every complaint that a customer has and just transmit that into a one-to-one match." And talking to someone, he added, "does not mean sending them a link to a survey."
It is a philosophy of deep, almost bodily proximity: lie in the bed, sit on the sofa, rent the camera. It also carries an asymmetry that will matter later. The customer supplies the data, but the designer keeps the point of view.
Olympic-Size Trust
"Early on we faced an incredible challenge," Gebbia told the South African magazine VISI, "a bias we've all been taught since we were kids: Strangers equal danger. When you're faced with a challenge, you fall back on what you know, and all we really knew was design." What they had been taught at RISD, he said, was that design was "not just the look and feel of something but the whole experience, so in this case we had to design Olympic-size trust between two people who've never met before."
As chief product officer, a title he held through the company's long ascent, Gebbia thought of trust as a set of mechanics. The photograph that made a stranger's apartment legible. The profile that made a stranger's face visible. The review that made a stranger's history available. Airbnb's reviews were double-blind, withheld until both host and guest had submitted, so that neither could retaliate. In the TED talk he cited research done with Stanford suggesting that a strong reputation could outweigh the social bias people bring to strangers unlike themselves. A well-designed reputation system, he argued, could do what centuries of etiquette had not.
His favorite review came from a guest who had a heart attack at an Airbnb in Uruguay. The hosts drove him to the hospital, donated their own blood for his surgery, and stayed while he recovered. The guest's review: "Excellent house for sedentary travelers prone to myocardial infarctions. The area is beautiful and has direct access to the best hospitals. ... They will rush you to the hospital in their own car while you are dying and stay in the waiting room while the doctors give you a bypass. ... Highly recommended."
There was the other ledger too. In the early days, Gebbia told the TED crowd, customer complaints were routed directly to his phone. "It hurts to even think about them." In 2011 a host's home was trashed by a guest. Chesky's initial blog posts about it were contradicted by the victim, and he had to write a public apology. The company expanded customer service and, in May 2012, introduced a $1 million Host Guarantee. Gallagher reports that Chesky considered the episode a "rebirth." The trust machine had been designed for the median stranger, and it had to be redesigned for the worst one.
The growth that followed was the kind that makes numbers stop meaning anything. A $7.2 million Series A from Greylock and Sequoia in November 2010; $112 million led by Andreessen Horowitz in July 2011; $450 million from TPG at a $10 billion valuation in April 2014; $1.5 billion in 2015; a $31 billion valuation in March 2017. Offices in Hamburg, London, Paris, Milan, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Moscow, São Paulo, Sydney, Singapore, and a European headquarters in Dublin. In June 2013 the company moved into 888 Brannan Street, a few blocks from the Rausch Street apartment where it began. On New Year's Eve 2017, Gebbia told CNBC, three million people were sleeping in Airbnbs on a single night. Scrolling the site once, he found a listing that "completely changed my point of view of the power of our platform. It wasn't a bedroom. It wasn't an apartment. It wasn't a home. ... It was an entire private island in Fiji for 400 dollars a night."
Not everyone found the scaling so delightful. The linguist Mark Liberman calculated in 2014 that Airbnb's terms of service, privacy policy, and related agreements ran to 55,081 words, "about the size of a short novel, though much less readable." The trust between strangers turned out to require a great deal of fine print between the strangers and the company.
Then there were the cities. As listings multiplied in Barcelona, Berlin, New York, and Amsterdam, residents and regulators began to argue that whole apartments were being pulled out of the long-term housing market and run as informal hotels. The company's most persistent critic was not a hotelier but a data activist named Murray Cox, an Australian-American who moved to Brooklyn in 2008, the year Airbnb launched, and who began scraping its listings in 2014. Working with a Canadian collaborator, Tom Slee, he found that just before Airbnb released a public data set for New York City in December 2015, the company had removed more than a thousand listings that appeared to violate the state's multiple dwelling law. Their report was titled "How Airbnb's Data Hid the Facts in New York City." Airbnb said the listings had been removed for violating its policies, and it has called Cox's work "garbage." Cox kept going, on about $10,000 a year paid by cities, researchers, and hotel groups who bought his data. He was another immigrant to a city of strangers who had learned to read the platform's photographs more skeptically than its founders had.
When CNBC's Christine Tan pressed Gebbia on regulation in 2018, he gave an answer that he repeated nearly word for word three times in four minutes: Airbnb had "struck deals with over 400 governments worldwide" to find "fair and balanced regulations." He pointed to Japan, where the Diet had legalized home-sharing nationwide in a country with about eight million empty homes. On Singapore, he deferred: "I think the team's probably better-tasked to answer that question." Here was a man who visibly preferred the studio to the hearing room. The critic Christopher Butler would later argue that the company's real innovation had never been design at all, but "regulatory arbitrage": "spend enough to ensure that regulatory enforcement costs more." One does not have to accept the whole charge to notice that the designer of trust between strangers had spent much of his career in a running argument with the governments that regulated those strangers.
The trust machine also had to reckon with what strangers did to each other. In 2016, after reports that hosts were rejecting guests with names that suggested they were Black, the company hired former attorney general Eric Holder to help draft an anti-discrimination policy. Guest photos were eventually hidden from hosts until a booking was accepted. In August 2017, the company cancelled bookings and closed accounts of attendees headed to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, citing a community commitment that members "accept people regardless of their race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, or age." In February 2017 it ran a Super Bowl ad under the hashtag #weaccept to protest the first Trump administration's travel ban.
In other words, the design of trust had become, inescapably, a design of who gets in.
The Spare Room
In late October 2012, Hurricane Sandy displaced tens of thousands of people in New York overnight. An email reached the company from a host in Brooklyn: "I would love to volunteer my five guest rooms for free to those displaced, how do I do that?"
The platform couldn't do it. Every connection required a transaction and a credit card. "We said but why?" Gebbia recalled. "So we reconfigured our entire platform in a couple days." That host and about a thousand others offered rooms to people displaced by the storm. The company partnered with the City of New York and launched a disaster relief tool. The idea expanded into a program called Open Homes, through which hosts could offer free housing after a typhoon in Asia, an earthquake in Japan or Mexico City, or a fire in Northern California. Eventually Open Homes worked with refugee resettlement agencies, including the International Rescue Committee, Solidarity Now, and the UNHCR, to house newly arrived families during "this gap period before you find permanent housing."
"These are people tapping into their natural generosity," Gebbia said, "saying, I've got something that somebody needs, and through Airbnb's platform of which we spend so much time connecting guests and hosts over vacation and travel, what if we use the same technology to connect them over shelter."
This was Gebbia's territory inside the company. By 2018 his portfolio as CPO included a humanitarian team called Human and an in-house design studio called Samara. He took up the refugee cause with an energy that went past corporate philanthropy. In January 2017 he told ICON about a "landmark philanthropic project, #withrefugees." In May 2017, when he attended the Met Gala, his guest was Yeonmi Park, a North Korean defector, brought along, as the Times noted, to draw attention to the global refugee crisis. In 2021, when Airbnb committed to housing 20,000 Afghan refugees, he gave $5 million to a $25 million company fund for refugees. He later executive-produced We Dare to Dream, a documentary that followed the 29 athletes of the Refugee Olympic Team through the Tokyo Games.
In December 2020, the week Airbnb went public, the company spun its crisis-housing efforts into an independent nonprofit, Airbnb.org. Gebbia became its chairman. In 2022, he said it was assisting more than 100,000 refugees from Ukraine. By 2024, the organization reported more than 1.4 million nights of free temporary housing. Among those nights were the several weeks Krista O'Connell's family spent sharing their Arlington home with an Afghan mother and her child.
Samara, meanwhile, was Gebbia's laboratory, the place where the landfill guilt went to look for a product. The word "failure" was banned there. "Failure is not actually a thing," he told Fortune. "There is an action that takes place, and you get a result that you want or that you don't want." In 2016 Samara built the Yoshino Cedar House, a community guesthouse in a depopulating Japanese village, designed with the Tokyo architect Go Hasegawa, built by local craftspeople and connected to a development fund for local artisans. It was the kind of project Gebbia loved: hospitality as a form of regional repair. In 2017 he designed a line of modular office furniture, called Neighborhood, with the 128-year-old manufacturer Bernhardt Design, inspired by watching how his own staff used their workspace. Samara also had a long-running project called Backyard, a prefabricated, net-zero dwelling meant to go behind an existing house.
All of this happened inside the triangle. When Tan asked in 2018 whether the founders actually got along after a decade, Gebbia laughed and reached for a piece of furniture. "We're like a three-legged stool, if you took a leg out, the stool would fall over." They had once taken a personality assessment that plotted each founder on a chart of quadrants. "We literally made it an equilateral triangle." What did they argue about? "Design," he said.
— Joe Gebbia, CNBC, March 2018We're like a three-legged stool, if you took a leg out, the stool would fall over.
The Third Leg
It is worth remembering how close it all came to ending. In March 2020, as COVID-19 closed borders and grounded planes, bookings fell by as much as 96 percent in some cities. In April, Silver Lake and Sixth Street Partners bought $1 billion in equity at an $18 billion valuation and lent another $1 billion at interest rates of 9 to 11.5 percent, the price capital charges a company it thinks might die. In May, the company laid off about 1,900 people, a quarter of its workforce. The New York Times headline captured how it felt inside: "Airbnb Was Like a Family, Until the Layoffs Started."
On December 10, 2020, Airbnb listed on Nasdaq, raised $3.5 billion, and ended its first day worth about $100 billion. The company set aside shares worth $238 million for hosts at the $68 offering price. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution noted that a Gwinnett County high school graduate, who according to SEC documents owned 14.1 percent of the company, was about to become one of the country's newest billionaires. His father, finishing his second term on the Brookhaven council, told the paper he knew how he wanted to spend his newly freed time.
Five days after the IPO, Gebbia gave $25 million to two San Francisco organizations working on youth and regional homelessness. The Chronicle of Philanthropy listed him among America's fifty largest donors for 2021. He had joined the Giving Pledge with his co-founders on June 1, 2016, among the youngest signatories. Over the next few years came $25 million to the Ocean Cleanup (the Dutch nonprofit's largest private donation) and another $25 million to the Malala Fund.
Then the stool lost a leg.
On July 21, 2022, Gebbia announced that he was stepping back from his full-time operating role. His letter to employees opened, as his stories always do, with the landlord's letter trembling in his hands, and it ended with an apology for the inevitable sentimentality. "When traveling, we leave a piece of ourselves at every destination, whether they're memories in the lives of people we've met or that one takeout container in the fridge." He would stay on the boards of Airbnb and Airbnb.org. The main reason, he wrote, was that "this is the only company I've ever helped build, and my brain is bursting with more ideas." The first idea: "a startup called parenthood, at which I'll be taking on the role of Dad." His wife, Isabelle Boemeke, is a Brazilian model whose online following grew around an unusual specialty: advocating for nuclear power. In 2023, on Joe Lonsdale's podcast, Gebbia explained why he too had come to regard nuclear energy as one of the most important technologies for the planet's future.
The other new ideas followed quickly. In January 2022 he had already bought a minority stake in the San Antonio Spurs, alongside Michael Dell. In September 2022, Tesla added him to its board. In November, Samara spun out of Airbnb as an independent startup selling Backyard, its net-zero accessory dwelling unit, which you could use as rental income one year and an in-law suite the next. He moved to Austin, into a home reportedly worth $10 million, and his friendship with Musk became one of the facts reporters reliably included about him.
He also began to sell. From July 2022 through July 2023, he sold more than $1.37 billion in Airbnb stock, more than $1 billion of it in the first half of 2023 alone, including 516,666 shares on a single day that July for $71.7 million. Fortune noted the contrast: Chesky had sold $7.3 million that year, Blecharczyk nothing. Gebbia was diversifying, as founders who leave do, and the numbers recorded what his letter had only implied. The stool still stood, but one leg had become an observer.
The two remaining founders went their own ways in public. Chesky, in September 2024, gave a talk at Y Combinator about how he had reclaimed detailed control of the company after the pandemic, a style Paul Graham called "founder mode," and became for a season the most-discussed manager in Silicon Valley. Blecharczyk, chairman of Airbnb China, had told a senior colleague in 2019, when Chinese officials pressed for more guest data, that the company was not there to "promote American values." The colleague, a former FBI deputy director, resigned. Airbnb shut its domestic China business in 2022. It is a small story, but it belongs here. Each founder, in his own way, had had to decide where the platform's openness ended and the state began.
The Apple Store and the Border
On January 19, 2025, the day before the inauguration, Gebbia posted on X about Donald Trump: "He is not a fascist determined to destroy democracy. He deeply cares about our nation. ... He deeply cares about government efficiency and spending. (I also care about the next generation, and love the whole DOGE initiative.)" Three days later, he wrote that he had voted Republican in November, "something the younger me would hate myself for doing." He had, he said, done his own research.
The younger him had been a Democratic donor. The new posts arrived alongside others criticizing "carefree borders" and "mass migration" in Europe and supporting a lawsuit by the U.S. attorney general against New York "for prioritizing illegal aliens over American citizens." The New Yorker described his feed as having "a MAHA flavor": exposés of Big Food ("The truth about Ketchup"), jabs at liberals afflicted with "TDS." He praised the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run Health and Human Services.
On February 20 he announced that he would bring his "designer brain and startup spirit" to DOGE, starting with the digitization of the federal retirement process, which still ran largely on paper. Government, he told Fox News's Bret Baier, could soon offer "an Apple Store-like experience."
The response on Airbnb's own community boards was immediate. Within a day, by the San Francisco Standard's count, more than half of the recent posts came from hosts and guests threatening to leave. Kathleen Zeren, a retired landscape designer in Candler, North Carolina, with more than 500 positive reviews, said: "If [Gebbia] is associated with DOGE and still a part of Airbnb, then I'm out of it." A host in Buffalo with twelve years on the platform wrote: "I will be looking to list elsewhere unless they lose Joe Gebbia fast."
— Krista O'Connell, Airbnb host since the early 2010s, February 2025Being in the D.C. area and seeing the impact that DOGE has had on our community and economy, I just feel like I can no longer be an Airbnb host in good faith.
The company responded with the language institutions use to cut an embarrassing limb without severing it. "Joe is joining DOGE in his personal capacity," said Christopher Nulty, Airbnb's head of communications. "While he continues to serve on the Airbnb board, Joe has not had an operating role at the company since July 2022, and his personal views don't reflect the views of Airbnb or Airbnb.org." In early April 2025, after a viral clip of anti-immigration remarks he had made in an interview, Gebbia stepped down from the board of Airbnb.org, the refugee-housing nonprofit he had chaired since its founding. Users on X pointed out that his wife had immigrated from Brazil.
That summer it emerged that he had given $1 million to Texas governor Greg Abbott's campaign through a trust. That fall, he gave at least $2 million to a super PAC backing Andrew Cuomo's mayoral bid against Zohran Mamdani in New York, the city where Airbnb was born a second time, where Gebbia had once gone door to door with a rented camera. Mamdani posted screenshots of Gebbia's tweets and wrote that "the single largest donor to a pro-Cuomo SuperPAC is Airbnb cofounder/board member Joe Gebbia, who promotes vile and racist messages about immigrants." Mamdani won.
Gebbia, according to Business Insider, found the backlash depressing. He did not retreat. On August 21, 2025, Trump signed the order establishing the National Design Studio inside the Executive Office of the President, with a three-year mandate and a requirement that agencies produce "initial results by July 4, 2026." Gebbia's post announcing it set out the program in four phrases: "beautifully designed, great user experience, run on modern software." David Sacks wrote that he would oversee the redesign of "roughly 26,000 federal web portals." The design community's reaction was not uniformly warm. Butler, the critic, called the appointment "a sickening travesty." He pointed out that DOGE had months earlier eliminated 18F, the government's existing digital-services team, which was modeled on the U.K.'s Government Digital Service and staffed with practitioners who had spent years learning to navigate federal bureaucracy. "His formative business experience taught him to break existing systems rather than designing better ones," Butler wrote.
Gebbia's own website, which narrates his life in the third person with the brisk confidence of a pitch deck, saw it differently: "Some designers scoff at the politics; Joe just builds."
And he did build. By early 2026, from an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the studio had rebuilt the federal retirement site, launched TrumpRx, where Americans could download coupons for prescription drugs, and set up Tech Force to recruit engineers for "the most complex and large-scale civic and defense challenges of our era." It redesigned the dietary guidelines page around a slogan, "We are ending the war on protein," that no committee of nutritionists would have written. Talking over FaceTime with Suzy Weiss of The Free Press, Gebbia admitted the trajectory surprised even him. "You could have made me a bet a long time ago that I'd end up here," he said, "and won a lot of money."
It would be easy to call this a betrayal or a conversion, and his former hosts and his new allies have done both. It may be truer to say that the same instincts have been pointed at a different object. The boy who sold drawings, the student who investigated the faculty advisors, and the founder who flew to New York because the photographs were bad all believed that the surface of a system shapes the behavior of the people who use it. Fix the photograph and the stranger books the room. Fix the website and the citizen trusts the state. What changed was the question that design had always quietly answered alongside the aesthetic one: whose door, and who stands outside it.
He had once been the man who asked 1,200 people to hand their unlocked phones to whoever sat beside them. He has never said, in anything on the record, that he stopped believing in that exercise. What he seems to have decided is that some strangers should be screened at a different gate.
In the closet of the Rausch Street apartment, in the autumn of 2007, before any of it, there was an air mattress. It had come west from Providence, where a stranger once slept on it while a twenty-three-year-old lay awake picturing the trunk of a red Miata. Nothing had happened to him. In the morning the stranger left, and the young man rolled up the mattress, and he kept it.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows are twelve principles drawn from Gebbia's career. Some are the lessons he teaches himself; others are lessons his career teaches whether he intended them or not. They lean toward the early years, when the craft was clearest. The last principle is a warning, because a playbook drawn only from triumphs is a brochure.
The Gebbia Playbook
- 1.Be your own first customer, literally.
- 2.Leave the computer when the numbers go flat.
- 3.Practice enlightened empathy, not design by committee.
- 4.Engineer trust as a system of small proofs.
- 5.Treat the image as the product.
- 6.Turn commodities into collectibles to buy time.
- 7.Overbuild once to recalibrate what's possible.
- 8.Build the founding team as a triangle, not a line.
- 9.Let crisis requests rewrite the platform.
- 10.Make your guilt the brief.
- 11.Reframe rejection as an invitation, and keep the evidence that justifies it.
- 12.Remember that a founder's voice never fully leaves the building.
⌂
From Air Mattress to Executive Order
The decisions that defined Gebbia's arc.
2005
Hosts a stranger on an air mattress in Providence; graduates RISD with dual BFAs; ships CritBuns.
2007
Rent hike on Rausch Street; emails Chesky; hosts three IDSA conference guests in October.
2008
Relaunch at the DNC (80 bookings); 0 of 20 investors bite; Obama O's raise ~$30,000.
2009
Y Combinator; New York photo trip doubles weekly revenue to $400; Sequoia seed; name shortened to Airbnb.
2012
Hurricane Sandy request prompts free-housing tool, the seed of Open Homes and Airbnb.org.
2016
TED talk on designing for trust; Giving Pledge; Samara's Yoshino Cedar House.
2020
Pandemic layoffs; IPO raises $3.5B; becomes chairman of Airbnb.org.
2022
Steps back from operations; joins Tesla board; Samara spins out with Backyard.
2025
Joins DOGE; leaves Airbnb.org board; named first U.S. Chief Design Officer on August 21.
Principle 1
Be your own first customer, literally
Airbnb's founders were not merely early users of their product; they were its first hosts. The three guests on the Rausch Street floor gave Gebbia something no market study could: a felt, bodily memory of what the product was for. When the spreadsheet said shut it down, that memory was the only asset the company had. "We had our first-hand experience on what it was like," he said, and that was what kept the business alive through the $200 weeks.
He institutionalized the habit. At Airbnb, employees were encouraged to host and every staffer got a travel stipend. "Every time we do that, we discover something that we can improve," he told Fortune. Blecharczyk, the engineer, has hosted hundreds of guests himself. Dog-fooding at this depth is different from internal beta testing. The point is to keep the people who build the product exposed to its emotional texture, the "tiny sense of panic" and the feeling of responsibility, which no dashboard records.
The principle has a corollary that's easy to miss. Once Gebbia stopped operating, he lost that daily exposure, and his later public statements suggest a man reasoning about hosts and guests from a much greater distance than the one who sat on their sofas.
Tactic: Require every person who shapes your product to use it in its most vulnerable mode — the role your customer fears most — at least once a quarter.
Principle 2
Leave the computer when the numbers go flat
For its first year, Airbnb tried to "code our way through problems," because that was the dogma. Graham's question ("Where is your market?") broke the spell not by offering a better algorithm but by offering a plane ticket. Revenue doubled because of what happened in strangers' living rooms, not because of anything in the codebase.
The insight is sharper than the slogan "do things that don't scale." Gebbia's version is about diagnosis. Software is excellent at executing a known solution to millions of people and terrible at finding out what the problem is. When growth stalls, the bottleneck is almost always a missing piece of understanding, and understanding lives in the field. "When we tried looking through a tech lens, it didn't work," he said. "The humanity was missing. ... When we left the computers behind, we grew."
⇄
Valley Dogma vs. the Rausch Street Method
How Airbnb's founders escaped the trough of sorrow.
| Dogma | What Gebbia did instead | Mode |
|---|---|---|
| Solve every problem with code that scales. | Rented a camera and shot apartments by hand. | Try |
| Survey users for feedback. | Sat on their sofas; asked for a story about a challenge. | Scan |
| Founding team = engineers plus a salesperson. | Two designers, one engineer. | Risk |
| Raise money before you have traction. | The "Visa round" and cereal boxes. | Risk |
| Fix the funnel with growth hacks. | Fix the photograph; the funnel follows. | Scale |
Tactic: When a core metric has been flat for more than six weeks, freeze new feature work and send the founders physically to the ten best customers before writing another line of code.
Principle 3
Practice enlightened empathy, not design by committee
Gebbia's design philosophy has two halves, and most people who quote him remember only the first. Part one is "be the patient": lie in the hospital bed, get as close as possible to the customer's experience. Part two is the turn back to the studio, where the designer combines what he learned "with your own point of view and your own creativity and your own imagination." Without part two, empathy produces a feature list. Without part one, imagination produces a vanity project.
The New York photo trip shows both halves. Hosts never asked for a professional photographer. They complained about other things. The photography fix came from Gebbia's own eye, informed by sitting with them. That is the difference between listening and taking dictation.
There is a risk built in, and it's worth naming. Enlightened empathy gives the designer final authority over what the customer "really" needs. At its best, that's leadership. At its worst, it lets a powerful person mistake his own convictions for his users' interests.
Tactic: After every round of customer research, write two documents: what customers said, and what you believe they need. Ship from the second, but never without having written the first.
Principle 4
Engineer trust as a system of small proofs
Gebbia's most important intellectual contribution is the claim that trust is not a mood but a mechanism, one that can be designed. Airbnb broke the "strangers equal danger" bias into components. The photograph proves the space is real. The profile proves the person is real. The double-blind review proves the history is honest. The guarantee proves someone will pay if it all goes wrong. Each proof is small, but together they let a stranger sleep in your home.
The unlocked-phone exercise at TED is the principle in miniature: it shows that the feeling of being trusted makes people behave responsibly. The design challenge is to manufacture that feeling at scale, and to keep redesigning when the worst cases show where the system fails. The 2011 vandalism crisis and the $1 million Host Guarantee that followed were part of the trust system, not an exception to it.
Tactic: List every moment in your product where a customer must trust a stranger or your company, and attach one concrete, visible proof to each.
Principle 5
Treat the image as the product
The forty New York listings had a common flaw: "the photos sucked." In a marketplace for something you can't touch before buying, the representation is the product at the moment of decision. Doubling revenue from $200 to $400 took no new inventory or pricing changes, just better images of the same apartments.
This is a designer's insight that engineers routinely underrate. Gebbia had studied photography since high school, and he recognized the problem because his training had taught him to look at the surface as functional rather than decorative. Airbnb later made professional photography a program. At the National Design Studio, Gebbia applies the same theory to the state: the citizen's experience of government is mostly the interface.
Tactic: Audit the first image or screen a customer sees for your top twenty offerings, and rebuild the weakest five by hand before optimizing anything else.
Principle 6
Turn commodities into collectibles to buy time
CritBuns turned foam into a cult object. Obama O's turned supermarket cereal into a $40 numbered artifact. In both cases Gebbia took something undifferentiated, wrapped it in a story and a scarcity signal, and sold the conversation rather than the thing. The cereal raised about $30,000, enough to pay down the Visa round, and later became the anecdote that helped persuade Sequoia that these founders would not quit.
The lesson isn't "sell cereal." It's that in the dead zone before a business works, founders can sometimes finance survival with side artifacts that use the same skills as the main product: design, narrative, timing. Seth Godin's Purple Cow, which Gebbia has said shaped Airbnb's early days, makes the same argument from the marketing side. Make something people want to talk about.
Tactic: If you need runway and investors are passing, design a limited, story-rich artifact your existing audience would pay a premium for, and number it.
Principle 7
Overbuild once to recalibrate what's possible
Told to make 12-inch models, Gebbia made sixteen full-size chairs. The exercise mattered less for the chairs than for what it did to his sense of limits. He came out of it with a working heuristic: "Anything I come across that feels impossible, I probably need to take a second look." That reflex later carried him through twenty investor pitches with zero checks, and arguably into Washington with a three-year mandate to redesign 26,000 websites.
Deliberate overbuilding is a way of recalibrating your sense of possibility early and cheaply, before the stakes are high. The risk is that the reflex hardens into contempt for real constraints. Butler's critique of the National Design Studio — that it began by dismantling an expert team — is in effect an accusation that the sixteen-chairs instinct has outrun the institutional knowledge it requires.
Tactic: Early in a new role, pick one assignment where the stated scope seems too timid and deliver at full scale, then write down which constraints turned out to be real.
Principle 8
Build the founding team as a triangle, not a line
"Two of us couldn't have done this alone," Gebbia said. The founders tested as an equilateral triangle on a personality assessment, and the company's structure reflected it: Chesky the vision and the voice, Blecharczyk the systems, Gebbia the product and the culture of design. Investors initially read two designers and an engineer as a weakness. Graham read it as an asset, and later began looking for it.
A triangle can hold disagreement without tipping into deadlock or domination. The founders disagreed most about design, which meant they disagreed about what they cared about most, the healthiest kind of conflict. The triangle also explains how the company absorbed Gebbia's departure in 2022 and his political turn in 2025: the other two legs had always carried their own weight.
Tactic: When assembling founders or a leadership core, map each person's instincts explicitly and refuse to add a second copy of any one profile until all three corners are covered.
Principle 9
Let crisis requests rewrite the platform
When a Brooklyn host asked how to give away five rooms after Hurricane Sandy, the honest answer was that the system didn't allow it, since every connection required a payment. The founders asked "but why?" and rebuilt the transaction flow in a couple of days. That small change grew into Open Homes, refugee resettlement partnerships, and eventually Airbnb.org, which provided more than 1.4 million free nights.
The principle is to treat user requests that break your business model as signals rather than edge cases. They often reveal uses of the platform that the founders never imagined and that can become a large part of the company's moral and reputational capital. That capital also binds. Airbnb.org's mission became the standard by which hosts later judged Gebbia himself.
Tactic: Keep a running log of customer requests your product "can't" fulfill for non-commercial reasons, and review it with leadership every quarter as a potential roadmap.
Principle 10
Make your guilt the brief
The trip to the Rhode Island landfill gave Gebbia "designer's guilt," and he spent years looking for a product that would answer it. Airbnb, a design that "doesn't create stuff in the world," was one answer. Samara's net-zero Backyard was another. His donations to the Ocean Cleanup and his interest in Cradle to Cradle belong to the same line.
Most founders treat moral discomfort about their industry as noise. Gebbia treated it as a design constraint, and the constraint produced an idea: get more use out of what already exists. Unresolved discomfort can be the most durable source of conviction, because it doesn't go away when the market does.
Tactic: Write down the one thing about your industry that makes you uneasy, then ask what product would exist if that unease were the core requirement.
Principle 11
Reframe rejection as an invitation, and keep the evidence that justifies it
"Every rejection that we took, we viewed it as an invitation to keep going," Gebbia told CNBC. "They said, 'No.' We said, 'Cool, thank you. Let's keep going.'" The arithmetic (20 contacted, 10 replies, 5 coffees, 0 checks) would have ended most companies. He calls this "somewhat irrational belief," and he's honest that it was lonely and frightening.
The reframe worked because it wasn't only willpower. It rested on a private piece of evidence, the three guests and the "magic that can unfold when you welcome people." Reframing rejection without evidence is denial. Reframing it with first-hand proof that the experience works is conviction. The skill is knowing which one you're doing.
Tactic: Before pitching anyone, write down the single first-hand experience that convinced you, and if you can't name one, go create it before asking for money.
Principle 12
Remember that a founder's voice never fully leaves the building
Gebbia stopped operating Airbnb in July 2022. Formally, his 2025 politics were personal; the company said so explicitly. In practice, hosts deleted listings, guests threatened boycotts, and he left the board of the nonprofit he had chaired. The 17.6 percent voting stake and the co-founder title meant that, to customers, he never left. A platform built on trust between strangers turned out to depend on trust in its founders too.
This principle is not a verdict on his politics. Many founders hold strong views. It's an observation about the asset he spent his career building. A brand that rests on values, whether "belong anywhere," #weaccept, or free housing for refugees, invites customers to treat its founders' public statements as part of the product. Gebbia designed exactly that relationship and then tested its limits.
Tactic: If your company's brand is built on a value, decide in advance — with your co-founders and board — how you will separate your personal voice from the institution's, and say so publicly before you need to.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Joe Gebbia, TED2016, as reported by VoxThat tiny sense of panic you are feeling right now is what hosts feel the first time they open their home.
— Joe Gebbia, Fortune, December 2017Design thinking does not mean design by committee. It does not mean that you write down every feature request or every complaint that a customer has and just transmit that into a one-to-one match.
— Joe Gebbia, ICON, January 2017Here I was, so excited to learn the craft of product design but, oh my god, do I really want to be creating more stuff in the world that is just contributing to making landfills bigger?
— Joe Gebbia, CNBC Managing Asia, March 2018The world is against you and you have to hang on to somewhat irrational belief that your idea is good, and it's worthy.
— Joe Gebbia, to The Free Press, 2026You could have made me a bet a long time ago that I'd end up here—and won a lot of money.
For the long version of the founding story, Gebbia's own account is in his TED talk, available as How Airbnb Designs for Trust.
Maxims
- Host before you scale. The founder who has slept on the floor beside his first customers has data no spreadsheet can overrule.
- Go to the people. When growth flattens, the answer is usually in a customer's living room, not in your codebase.
- The photograph is the product. In any marketplace for things you can't touch, representation decides the sale.
- Empathize, then author. Listen like a researcher, then decide like a designer; neither alone is enough.
- Trust is built from small proofs. Break the fear of strangers into parts and give each part a visible answer.
- Number the cereal box. Scarcity and story can turn a commodity into runway.
- Build the chair at full size. Overreach once, early, to learn which limits are real.
- Three legs stand. A founding triangle absorbs conflict that a pair can't survive.
- Let crisis rewrite the code. The request your system can't handle may be your most important feature.
- Your voice is part of the brand. Founders who build on values can't fully step back from the values they were seen to hold.
