Airbnb's early days living and working in an apartment

As Airbnb's Travel Stories feature gets noticed, here's the founders' early story

Just like Amazon has become more than just books, Airbnb has become far more than a place to rent your un-utilized sofa or bedroom. It's become a travel conglomerate. 

It's a place to share your adventures, book your local outings with Airbnb Trips (launched in 2016) and make restaurant reservations and now it's a place where you can share your story, or videos or photos about your vacation with Airbnb Travel Stories. 

Travel Stories, which was first reported by TechCrunch, lets users post videos and photos and edit them together. 

I've reached out to Airbnb for more on how this feature will enhance a user's experience. But it's pretty clear we all like sharing our stories. One of my favorites was a video montage a friend created when he did Swissman (the Iron Man in Switzerland). There's nothing like watching video to music and also hearing a person's thoughts at the time vs just looking at photos.  

At Vator, we've captured a number of stories. One of our products, Startup Sessions, was all about capturing the story of a startup in their early days. In the past decade, we've been fortunate to have followed some of today's iconic companies, notably back when their founders lived and worked together in one apartment. 

That company is Airbnb.  

When our videographer and reporter Chris Caceres produced this, Joe Gebbia, Brian Chesky, and Nathan Blecharczyk, co-founders of Airbnb, he captured the early days of Airbnb and the reason why the group started renting out extra space in their apartment. As Chris wrote, this activity soon became their "entrepreneurial calling." Airbnb, back then, referred to itself as the eBay of space.

At the time of this video back in 2009, Airbnb already spanned over 80 countries and had 25,000 users worldwide. Today, company stats show 300 million guests in double the countries.