The year was 2007. Brian and Joe — two of our founders and friends from design school — were looking for a way to cover the cost of their San Francisco apartment. That week, they saw an opportunity. An international design conference was coming to town, and every hotel was sold out. They quickly created a website, AirBedandBreakfast.com, with the hope of renting airbeds in their apartment to attendees of the conference. Three designers, Michael, Kat, and Amol, took them up on their offer and became the first guests of Brian and Joe, our first hosts.

When Brian and Joe told people what they were doing, they thought the idea sounded crazy. “Strangers will never stay in each other’s homes,” they said. But something unexpected happened that first weekend. Brian and Joe treated their guests like old friends from out of town, connecting them to a unique slice of San Francisco that they could never have experienced on their own. Michael, Kat, and Amol came as outsiders, but left feeling like locals. The experience left Brian and Joe feeling something special too — the excitement of sharing the city they loved and seeing their guests form a deep connection to it.

Brian and Joe started thinking: maybe there were more people like Michael, Kat, and Amol who would like to travel this way and more people who would like to host this way. These are the ideas that Airbnb was founded on.

In 2008, Nate, a software engineer, joined Brian and Joe, and together the three founders took on a bigger design problem: how do you make strangers feel comfortable enough to stay in each other’s homes? The key was trust. The solution they designed combined host and guest profiles, integrated messaging, two-way reviews, and secure payments built on a technology platform that unlocked trust, and eventually led to hosting at a global scale that was unimaginable at the time.

13 years later...

Today, the idea does not seem so crazy after all. Our more than 4 million hosts now offer everything from a private room in their home to luxury villas, from one night to several months at a time. Hosting has expanded from homes to now include experiences that can be taken in cities all over the world, or even online.

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I am absurdly lucky even to be writing this email. Ten years ago we started Airbnb. Joe and I couldn’t pay rent, so we created the first AirBed & Breakfast and invited three people we’d never met to stay in our home. People said our idea would never work – “Strangers will never trust one another!” A decade later, people have checked into an Airbnb nearly 300 million times.

I was thinking about the next ten years of Airbnb when I received a phone call I’ll never forget. A close advisor told me that now was the time to “institutionalize your intentions so that even as you grow, you can minimize what conflicts with your vision.” It made me realize that we should write down what we want to institutionalize before it’s too late. So I asked myself, if Joe, Nate and I were gone tomorrow, what would we want the world to know about Airbnb’s intentions?

Airbnb is still young, and the cement hasn’t hardened. We are now big enough where anything is possible, but not so big that a change would be nearly insurmountable. We can still be radical, and it couldn’t come at a more perfect time in the world. People are increasingly living in digital bubbles, trust in institutions is at a record low, and companies realize they have a greater responsibility to society.

It’s clear that our responsibility isn’t just to our employees, our shareholders, or even to our community – it’s also to the next generation. Companies have a responsibility to improve society, and the problems Airbnb can have a role in solving are so vast that we need to operate on a longer time horizon.

Technology has changed a lot in my lifetime, but how companies run has not. Companies face pressures based on legacies from the 20th-century, and the convention is to focus on increasingly short-term financial interests, often at the expense of a company’s vision, long-term value, and its impact on society. You could say that these are 20th-century companies living in a 21st-century world.

Brian is a signatory to the

Giving Pledge and has committed to donating the net proceeds of his CEO equity compensation to community, philanthropic and charitable causes. Originally from Niskayuna, New York, Brian is an Airbnb Experience host in San Francisco. A graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design, Brian has embedded his creative roots in Airbnb’s culture, product and community.

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