Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…It wasn't widely known yet. Brian and Joe, they're thinking YC is great. They're going to apply. The winter batch for YC was the next application, so they're going to gear up for that. In the meantime, they got to do something over the summer. They're like, what are the next events that are coming up? The presidential campaigns are happening. The conventions are happening, maybe we can use Airbnb at the convention. They do the same thing. I think the Democratic convention is in Denver. I forgot where the Republican one was. They emailed local press outlets. They get some bookings. They actually get about 100 bookings that summer, which is great, but they're not making that much money. They're about out of money and this is when the famous serial story happens—the Obama O’s and Cap’n McCain’s. David, I texted you, let's not go too much into this story because everybody already knows it. There's so much more to talk about in recent Airbnb history. As I went back and read the email exchange between Fred Wilson and Paul Graham, and then I read Fred Wilson's blog post talking about how they passed, I actually realized I had the story wrong. I didn't realize that the Airbnb guys made up Obama O's and Cap'n McCain's. I thought what they did was they went out and bought a bunch of them and then when the store ran out, they resold them. I didn't realize they took Cheerios and just made their own cereals. Yeah. It's pretty crazy. I think that's the thing, everybody knows this happened, but the actual story was they didn't have any money. They're still trying to basically make their rent on the Rausch street apartment in SoMa. They had this middle-of-the-night crazy idea of let's go make some boxes, pour Cheerios into them, and sell them. It’s a limited edition.…

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