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There were plenty of ways to get paid on the internet before stripe. On paper it didn’t look like they were doing anything new. They just did it better.

Airbnb… idk. Who wants to rent their house out to total strangers? I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t have thought it would take off like it did.



Airbnb is mostly commercial listings that are basically unlicensed hotel rooms / appartments. I don't think people renting out their personal living spaces is a big part of their income. It's just a story they use to get around regulations.


That's true now, but not when they first took off.


None of that existed when they first started. The pitch was to rent out your house while you're out of town.


But they only got big when the commercial "hotels" came on and saw they could "work around" laws like that.


Yes... later. They couldn't have predicted it when they started. It sounded like a stupid idea when they started.


That's the point--their utility wasn't obvious at first, until a new market showed up.


It was commercial version of couch surfing and/or web2.0 version of vrbo. I was highly skeptical of it taking off because it was “a copycat”! How wrong I was…


Man, I used to use couchsurfing.org to get free places to crash in grad school.




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