The $40 Cereal Box That Built Airbnb
When your startup is dying, sometimes you gotta get creative with breakfast
Brian Chesky was drowning in debt. Credit cards maxed out. Bills piling up.
His roommate Joe Gebbia wasn't doing much better. Their "revolutionary" idea of renting air mattresses to strangers wasn't exactly setting Silicon Valley on fire. In fact, most investors thought they were nuts.
"Nobody will sleep in a stranger's house," they kept hearing. "This will never work."
It was October 2008. The economy was tanking. They were running out of runway fast. Game over, right?
Wrong.
Enter the breakfast revolution.
While watching the presidential debates, something clicked. Obama vs. McCain was everywhere. People were obsessed. What if... what if they made it edible?
So, they did what any sensible broke entrepreneurs would do. They designed cereal boxes.
"Obama O's: The Breakfast of Change"
"Cap'n McCain's: A Maverick in Every Bowl"
Hand-drawn logos. Custom designs. Real cereal inside. They spent what little money they had left getting 1,000 boxes made - 500 of each.
Then came the hard part: convincing people to pay $40 for a $4 box of cereal.
And here's the crazy thing is it actually worked.
They hit the streets during the Democratic National Convention. The Obama O's flew off the shelves. People loved the novelty. News stations wanted to interview the "cereal guys."
The Cap'n McCain's? Well, let's just say they learned something about political preferences in San Francisco that week.
But it didn't matter. They made around $30,000 total - enough to keep the dream alive.
Paul Graham from Y Combinator heard about this ridiculous cereal scheme. Instead of laughing, he had one thought: "These guys are scrappy enough to survive anything."
That scrappiness? It got them into Y Combinator. Which led to real funding. Which led to the platform that would eventually host over 4 million properties worldwide.
The twist ending? Those original cereal boxes became collector's items, with some selling for hundreds of dollars online. Not quite the thousands that internet legends claim, but hey - not bad for breakfast.
Chesky still keeps an Obama O's box on his desk. Not as a trophy, but as a reminder: When you're out of money, out of options, and everyone thinks you're crazy...
Sometimes the answer is simpler than you think.
Sometimes it's just breakfast.