Joe Gebbia

Gebbia is the 286th richest person in the world according to Forbes, with a net worth of $7.9 billion, mostly due to his ownership of 53 million shares of Airbnb.

Joseph Gebbia Jr. (born August 21, 1981) is an American billionaire designer and a co-founder of Airbnb.

Gebbia was born August 21, 1981, in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of Eileen, an independent health food sales representative, and Joe Gebbia of Italian ancestry.

He grew up in Lawrenceville, Georgia and has one sister, Kimberly.

As a child, Gebbia was passionate about aesthetic and design, music, and athletics, crediting his parents for their support.

He was a ball boy for the Atlanta Hawks.

Gebbia was known as the "art guy" in grade school when he started his first business selling illustrations of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to his classmates.

Gebbia attended Brookwood High School in Snellville, Georgia, where he took classes in ceramics, photography, and jewelry metalsmithing.

He also took classes in figure drawing and painting at the Atlanta College of Art on weekends.

In high school, he also was a member of the Governor’s Honor’s Program, where he spent a summer taking college-level art courses.

There, one of his professors encouraged him to go to Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and he spent the following summer taking courses on the campus.

In one of his first courses at RISD, Gebbia took a 3D foundations class with a semester-long project aiming to produce 12-inch scale works of a famous artist or designer.

Gebbia decided he wanted to create life-size models so he could use them afterwards, but his professor dismissed the idea and told to stick to the achievable.

Gebbia set out to prove his professor wrong and produced sixteen full-sized chairs for his final project.

He refers to this anecdote as one of several examples that allowed him to transcend beliefs of what was possible.

Around this time, Gebbia also became inspired by the work of Charles and Ray Eames and switched his studies from painting to industrial design.

One of his first design-business ventures was CritBuns—soft, foamy cushions to keep art students’ pants clean during their hours-long critique sessions, known as "crits".

He developed the idea at RISD and the design was selected as the senior gift for his graduating class of 800 students.

After two years developing his sales pitch and story, the product was featured in I.D. and was sold by many retailers.

In 2005, Gebbia graduated from RISD with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Graphic Design and Industrial Design.

Gebbia took supplementary business-related classes at Brown University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) while attending RISD.

After graduating from RISD, Gebbia moved to San Francisco to work as a designer for Chronicle Books.

There, he was the only industrial designer in a company of 200 people who focused on graphic design.

He also founded Ecolect, a green-design website.

In 2007, Brian Chesky, his classmate at RISD, moved in with him, and they both quit their jobs to start a company together.

That same week, their landlord raised rent by 20%, to an amount they could not afford.

Knowing that the Industrial Design Society of America conference was to be hosted in San Francisco and many hotels were fully booked, Gebbia came up with the idea of renting out airbeds in their apartment to conference-goers.

They marketed the beds by creating a website called "AirBed & Breakfast” and emailed design blogs to garner interest. They received three bookings and were able to pay their rent to stay in the apartment. In 2008, another of Gebbia's roommates, Harvard graduate and technical architect Nathan Blecharczyk, became the third cofounder. He said he was inspired to co-found Airbnb due to a landlord increasing the rent on the San Francisco apartment he shared with a roommate, believing that there should be competition to this practice.

While struggling to find initial angel investors, Gebbia and Chesky created two boxes of cereals, Obama O’s and Cap’n McCain’s, to sell online before the 2008 election.

They found a small manufacturer in Berkeley who agreed to fabricate 1,000 cartons in exchange for a cut of the royalties.

The team bought generic Cheerios and Chex, and placed the cereal into their boxes.

The boxes, which cost $40 each, received coverage from CNN and Good Morning America; Katy Perry auctioned off an autographed box to her fans.

The promotion netted Airbnb $30,000; sales were strong at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

Impressed by the cereal boxes, computer programmer Paul Graham invited the founders to the January 2009 winter training session of his startup incubator, Y Combinator, which provided them with training and $20,000 in funding in exchange for a 6% interest in the company.

Gebbia helped early hosts present their listings.

When the company was struggling to gain traction in New York City, Gebbia and Chesky booked with two-dozen hosts and discovered that many hosts were taking low-quality photos that did a poor job of presenting the listing.

Leveraging Gebbia’s background in design, they rented a camera and took high-resolution photos of the listings.

Gebbia offered complimentary professional photography services sourced from a community of over 2,000 freelancers.

As a result, Airbnb's revenue in the city doubled and the Airbnb Photography Program was created.

In March 2009, the name of the company was shortened to Airbnb.com, and the site's content had expanded from air beds and shared spaces to properties including entire homes, apartments, and private rooms.