They’d come from 110 countries, including Cuba, New Zealand, Kenya, and even Greenland. They’d spent $295 for three days of talks, parties, and sightseeing as part of the second annual Airbnb Open. On an unseasonably warm November afternoon, they gathered in a tented, football-field-size arena in Paris’s Parc de la Villette, 5,000 wildly enthusiastic hosts who offer apartments and bedrooms for rent on Airbnb. The company’s CEO, Brian Chesky—a compact and well-built 34-year-old with an aquiline face, muscular neck, and square jaw—spoke to them. “Share your homes, but also share your world,” he said, explaining how Airbnb’s competitors in the travel industry had lost touch with their customers, boxing up their guests in ticky-tacky hotel rooms and antiseptic resorts, as if the goal were to ensure that nothing remotely interesting happened. He urged his hosts to strive to be different and give guests a real sense of what life in a foreign country is like.
Later that evening, Chesky gathered with his parents, his sister, his girlfriend, his cofounders Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk, as well as Airbnb’s first 40 employees, at a rented Airbnb apartment in the 18th arrondissement for a catered dinner to celebrate. The company has more than 2 million listings and a valuation of $25.5 billion, which makes it bigger (at least on paper) than any hotel chain in the world. The nine-year-old brand lost money in 2015 in part because Chesky spent lavishly to attract hosts, but financial documents that leaked last year suggested it was on track to book $900 million in revenue, with projections rising to $10 billion per year, by 2020. (Airbnb collects up to 15% of every booking from guests and hosts. The company expects to be profitable this year.) Chesky counts Jonathan Ive, Marc Andreessen, and Bob Iger as friends. He is reportedly worth $3.3 billion. He recently appeared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. Now he was surrounded by his family and closest friends in one of the world’s most vibrant centers of culture and intellectualism, which also happens to be Airbnb’s biggest market.
He glanced at his phone and read a news alert. A shooting had been reported at a restaurant near Canal Saint-Martin, the picturesque waterway two miles south. When he looked again, a few minutes later, there were reports of explosions at the Stade de France, the big soccer stadium, and mass shootings at sidewalk cafés elsewhere in the city. Now everyone in the room was staring at their phones.
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