Biography | Brian Chesky — RISD, the Industrial Design Degree of 2004

People treat Silicon Valley as the school that trained him. The degree sat on College Hill. The Rhode Island School of Design occupies 2 College Street in Providence, next to Brown University. Chesky arrived from Niskayuna in 1999. In 2004 he finished an industrial design degree. The campus is the one he later credited for teaching that a design problem can be solved without a business-school script. He captained the RISD hockey team, the Nads. He met Joe Gebbia here, the roommate who would share the San Francisco apartment where the airbeds went down in 2007. On commencement day in 2004 he gave the student address. A VHS copy later surfaced at the school: he came on in cap and gown to Billie Jean, dropped the robe onto a white tuxedo, and danced. Fast Company recovered the tape in 2012. The joke is the record. The work was the degree. After graduation he moved to Los Angeles and designed products at 3DID, including work on a television-contest toilet seat. The commute and the brief soured him. Gebbia was already in San Francisco. Thirteen years after that commencement, on 3 June 2017, RISD gave Chesky and Gebbia honorary doctorates of fine arts. Chesky delivered the address to 488 undergraduates and 238 graduate students. The Industrial Designers Society of America recorded the ceremony. The pin is the College Street campus, not a later office. A visitor still finds studios, the Waterman Building of 1893, and a working art school. The unofficial mascot he once designed is campus folklore, not a plaque. From these studios the next room was a rented flat in San Francisco, already covered elsewhere on this map as the three airbeds on Rausch Street. Photo: Waterman Building entrance, Kenneth C. Zirkel, CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Brian Chesky at LeWeb, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.