Times Square was mostly vacant on the morning of Airbnb’s public offering, save for the dozen or so mask-clad photographers gathered in front of the Nasdaq building to document Brian Chesky’s enormous face, stretched across 9,000 square feet of LEDs. It was December 10, 2020, and Chesky, the high-spirited CEO of the world’s most highly valued hospitality company, wasn’t live from New York for the opening bell, but alone in his attic in San Francisco. Joe Gebbia and Nate Blecharczyk, his cofounders, appeared in dual video feeds below him.
A small group of Airbnb employees and alumni, huddled nearby, high-fived when the clock struck 9:30, the starting gun for Wall Street. “I think the stock market is thoroughly detached from reality,” one of them admitted, shrugging at the screwball logic of investing in a travel company in the middle of a pandemic.
It was a staggering public debut, even by the reality-defying standards of Silicon Valley. Eleven months earlier, the…
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Source : fastcompany.com
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