Nate Blecharczyk at Startup School 2013

Blecharczyk shows Airbnb’s guest growth across five years: it took four years to serve the first four million guests, then nine months to serve another five million. He says that success can look easy from the outside, though building a company is exceptionally difficult.

Blecharczyk traces his path from teaching himself to program at 12 to earning money from software as a teenager, leaving a corporate job, and learning from a struggling startup. He met Joe through a shared house in San Francisco and describes how Joe’s design skills complemented his own engineering background and Brian’s.

Joe and Brian first rented air beds to conference visitors after the hotel rooms in San Francisco sold out. The founders built a simple event-based listings site, then added payments after Brian’s stay at South by Southwest showed how collecting money on arrival could disrupt the host’s hospitality. They later broadened the service so travelers could book homes outside event weekends.

After publicity around the 2008 Democratic National Convention brought a brief spike in attention, bookings and momentum faded. The founders joined Y Combinator, set a goal of earning $1,000 a week, and met all 40 New York users, taking photos and helping improve listings. Curating 20 to 40 properties helped them get bookings, and Sequoia Capital later invested $600,000.

Blecharczyk says Airbnb’s later growth followed a difficult stretch of setbacks, fundraising failures, and focused work. He urges founders to treat each experience as preparation, keep learning, and pace themselves for a long journey.