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Air BNB

Started as a tool for renting rooms in cities during conferences, where hosts were expected to provide no more than an air mattress.

Pivoted to full on house renting.

Chesky talks about it all here in the blitzscaling series, an interview series conducted by Reid Hoffman:

https://youtu.be/W608u6sBFpo



Hardly a pivot. Paul Graham’s write-up on their very early days: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/the-airbnbs and a pretty gushing wired article about how AirBnB got into ycombinator: https://www.wired.com/2017/02/airbnbs-surprising-path-to-y-c...


that doesn't really seem like a pivot, moreso a big expansion of their original niche


Yea, the story is still interesting, how they chose that path. Highly recommend watching the link i provided.


This is perhaps the best talk I've ever heard on startups, ever. Chesky is such a good story teller and Reid Hoffman is such a great interviewer. I think a lot of founders would benefit from watching this.


narrative fallacy is a cruel master though.


I mean if we're going with Airbnb then might as well mention Uber's pivot from black car service to ridesharing (along with new CEO.. basically rebooting the company)




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