Biography | Brian Chesky — 320 Pioneer Way, the YC Dinner of 6 January 2009

People treat Sequoia and a SoMa atrium as the rooms that saved Airbnb. The first institutional cheque cleared here. Y Combinator spent seven years at 320 Pioneer Way in Mountain View, a one-storey industrial building around the corner from Easy Street. Paul Graham's batch still used that address in the winter of 2009. The firm moved across the road only in 2012. Airbed and Breakfast had launched in 2008 and was running out of money. Michael Seibel, then at Justin.tv, told Chesky and Joe Gebbia to apply after the deadline. They woke Nathan Blecharczyk in Boston and filed by midnight. They drove Gebbia's Jeep down from San Francisco for the interview and brought the Obama O's and Cap'n McCain's cereal boxes they had sold during the 2008 campaign. Graham later said the cereal is what convinced him. Wired published the sequence in 2017 from the founders' own account of that week. The terms were standard for the batch: 20,000 dollars for about six percent. They were due at a welcome dinner on Tuesday, 6 January 2009. TechCrunch recorded the mid-batch rebrand. On 4 March 2009 the site relaunched from Airbed and Breakfast to Airbnb and opened the listings beyond air mattresses. Sequoia followed later that year. The building on Pioneer Way is no longer YC. A visitor finds an ordinary Mountain View industrial park. The date that matters is the dinner, not the later Sand Hill term sheet. Do not confuse this pin with the Rausch Street apartment. That October 2007 weekend is already on the map as a retail-history memory. This is the Mountain View room where the company stopped dying. Photo: 335 Pioneer Way, the next lot on the same street, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Brian Chesky, TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.