Airbnb – inside a design-led business

In this documentary, we visit Airbnb’s San Francisco headquarters and speak to co-founder Joe Gebbia to find out about how the company is using design to develop and grow.

Airbnb was founded in 2008 by Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, both graduates of Rhode Island School of Design, along with third co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk.

The service allows people to find and rent homes around the world. It now operates in 190 countries and has more than 1,500,000 listings in 34,000 different cities.

In this documentary, we go behind the scenes at Airbnb’s headquarters in San Francisco, to find out how the company is taking a design-led approach as it grows and develops.

Forging a design-led approach

We speak to co-founder Joe Gebbia, who tells us about what building a design-led business is like and how Airbnb ruffled feathers in Silicon Valley by taking a “non-scaleable” design approach to problems, rather than relying on code.

We also speak to Airbnb’s environment’s design lead Aaron Taylor Harvey and his colleague (and wife) Rachael Yu.

They tell us what it’s like to be designers in a design-sympathetic business and also how Airbnb is using its office design to try to recreate the experience of staying in one of its listings.

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