Biography | Brian Chesky — Niskayuna High School, the Class of 1999

People treat Airbnb as a San Francisco company that arrived already named after a listing page. The first diploma sat here. Niskayuna High School occupies 1626 Balltown Road in Niskayuna, a suburb of Schenectady about ten miles northwest of Albany. The campus opened in 1957. Chesky graduated with the class of 1999. He was born Brian Joseph Chesky on 29 August 1981 in this town. His parents, Deborah and Robert, worked as social workers. The high school, not a design studio, was the last public room of his childhood. In 1999 the Wall Street Journal listed Niskayuna among the country's top-performing public high schools. That year he left for the Rhode Island School of Design. Eighteen years later the district brought him back. On 22 June 2017, at the class of 2017 commencement held at Proctors Theatre in Schenectady, the school inducted him as the 64th member of its hall of fame. Principal John Rickert presented the plaque. The Associated Press and the Albany Times Union both recorded the date and the class year. The pin is the school, not the downtown theatre. The 2011 expansion changed the fabric of the original 1957 building. What a visitor finds on Balltown Road is a working public campus, not a museum of the class of 1999. The yearbook line that later circulated in profiles belongs to that graduating class. Treat it as a local joke that aged oddly, not as a prophecy. From this lot the next room was Providence. Photo: Brian Chesky in 2016, U.S. Department of State photograph, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Venue: Niskayuna Town Hall on the same civic stretch of town, UpstateNYer, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.