How Airbnb landed an investor with breakfast cereal and avoided bankruptcy

The former startup Airbnb has now become a listed company with a market capitalization of a good 75 billion US dollars. Airbnb almost went bankrupt shortly after it was founded in 2008.

As co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky recently told students at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the three founders – Chesky, Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk – saved the startup with breakfast cereal.

Because during the first few months, Chesky, Gebbia and Blecharczyk flashed off investors with their idea of ​​an online platform for arranging accommodation. To finance Airbnb, they rely on their own capital and the credit line of several credit cards.

According to Chesky, when the money ran out, the three founders finally came up with the idea that saved them. They left 1,000 Boxes with the likenesses of then-US presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain, filled them with breakfast cereal, and sold them for $40 each.

All 1,000 boxes were sold, giving the startup a cash injection of at least $30,000, as CNBC writes. One of the investors, who initially did not want to support Airbnb financially, got wind of the successful campaign – and was carried away to make an investment.

This was Paul Graham from tech startup investor Y Combinator. Graham is said to have said that if you can get people to spend $40 on $4 breakfast cereal, you can probably convince people to let strangers stay with you.

Y combiner rose according to Crunchbase as the first official donor to Airbnb. The startup accelerator put $20,000 on the table for six percent of the company’s shares. The shares would theoretically be worth a few billion dollars today.

Whitney Wolfe Herd, co-founder and CEO of dating app Bumble, felt the same way. Like Wolfe Herd at the Aspen Ideas Festival in the summer of 2022 toldher idea of ​​a nicer and more woman-friendly alternative to Tinder was not well received by investors.

For Wolfe Herd, the rejections were the motivation to continue. People just didn’t know how to visualize this new idea.

“People generally don’t know how to see things that don’t exist yet, so all you have to do is believe in yourself,” says Wolf Herd. She now sees it as her superpower to be underestimated.

Bumble is now also listed on the stock exchange and has a market capitalization of around $2.5 billion.