Airbnb

SpaceX

Airbnb

Airbnb is a two-sided marketplace. Hosts list their homes, apartments, treehouses, or whatever else they've got.

Guests book and pay through the platform. Airbnb takes a cut from both sides — roughly 3% from hosts and up to 14% from guests as a service fee.

That's it. They don't own a single property.

They just built the world's largest hotel chain without owning a single bed.

SpaceX

SpaceX makes money three ways. First, launch services — companies and governments pay SpaceX to put their satellites into orbit.

A Falcon 9 launch costs about $67 million, which undercut the competition by 75% when it debuted. Second, Starlink — SpaceX's own satellite internet constellation, which is now generating over $6 billion in annual revenue from 4+ million subscribers.

Third, government contracts — NASA pays SpaceX to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station and the DoD pays for national security launches.

The secret sauce is reusability. Before SpaceX, every rocket was used once and thrown into the ocean.

SpaceX figured out how to land the first stage booster back on Earth and fly it again. A single Falcon 9 booster has flown over 20 times.

That's like the difference between throwing away an airplane after every flight versus keeping it for decades.

Airbnb

In 2007, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia were two Rhode Island School of Design grads living in San Francisco and struggling to make rent. A big design conference was coming to town and every hotel was booked solid.

They bought three air mattresses, put up a simple website called AirBed & Breakfast, and charged $80 a night including a homemade breakfast. Three strangers actually showed up.

That was it — the entire origin story of a $75 billion company is three air mattresses and desperation.

They recruited Nathan Blecharczyk, a Harvard-trained engineer Joe knew, to build the real website. But nobody wanted to fund them.

They applied to 15 investors and got rejected by every single one. To keep the company alive during the 2008 election, they designed limited-edition cereal boxes — Obama O's and Cap'n McCain's — and hand-assembled 500 of each.

They sold the Obama O's for $40 a box and made $30,000. That cereal money literally kept Airbnb from dying.

Paul Graham at Y Combinator finally let them into the Winter 2009 batch — reportedly because the cereal stunt proved they were "cockroaches" who would never die. YC invested $20,000.

Within a few months, Sequoia Capital led a $600,000 seed round. The rest is history.

SpaceX

In 2001, Elon Musk had just sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion and was sitting on roughly $180 million after taxes. Most people would buy an island.

Musk decided to buy rockets. His original idea was even weirder — he wanted to send a small greenhouse to Mars called "Mars Oasis" to reignite public interest in space exploration.

He flew to Russia three times to buy refurbished ICBMs. The Russians kept raising the price and at one point literally spat on him.

On the flight home from that last failed Russia trip, Musk opened a spreadsheet and started calculating the raw material costs of building a rocket from scratch. He realized the materials were only about 3% of the typical price of a rocket.

The rest was markup, inefficiency, and monopoly pricing by companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. He decided to build his own.

SpaceX was founded in June 2002 in a warehouse in El Segundo, California. Musk put in $100 million of his own money.

He hired Tom Mueller, a legendary rocket propulsion engineer who had been building rocket engines in his garage as a hobby. The first rocket, Falcon 1, was supposed to be the cheapest orbital rocket ever built.

It took six years and three spectacular explosions before it finally worked.

Airbnb

The early growth was pure hustle. Chesky and Gebbia flew to New York — their biggest market — and went door to door visiting hosts.

They noticed the listings with bad photos got no bookings. So they offered free professional photography to every host.

Bookings exploded. That single move — better photos — was probably worth more than any ad campaign they ever ran.

They also pulled one of the most legendary growth hacks in startup history. They reverse-engineered Craigslist's posting system so that Airbnb hosts could cross-post their listings to Craigslist with one click.

Craigslist had millions of people looking for rentals. Airbnb had none.

The hack funneled Craigslist's traffic straight into Airbnb. It was borderline shady and absolutely brilliant.

Word of mouth did the rest. Every guest who had a great stay told their friends.

Every host who made easy money told their neighbors. The product sold itself because both sides benefited immediately.

By 2015, Airbnb had more listings than the top five hotel chains combined.

SpaceX

SpaceX's growth strategy was simple: be cheaper than everyone, then be better than everyone, then be the only option.

They started by undercutting the launch market. The United Launch Alliance (Boeing + Lockheed Martin joint venture) was charging $300-400 million per launch.

SpaceX offered $67 million. Government agencies and commercial satellite companies started lining up.

Reusability was the real game-changer. Landing a rocket booster looked like science fiction when SpaceX first attempted it in 2013.

They failed over and over — spectacular ocean landings, explosions on drone ships, near-misses. But in December 2015, a Falcon 9 first stage landed back at Cape Canaveral.

It was the first time an orbital-class rocket had ever landed after a mission. Now they do it routinely — it's almost boring.

Starlink created a completely new revenue stream. Instead of just launching other people's satellites, SpaceX launched thousands of its own.

By 2024, Starlink had over 4 million subscribers and was generating billions in revenue. It turned SpaceX from a launch company into a telecom company.

Airbnb

Regulation. Full stop.

Cities around the world have gone to war with Airbnb. New York, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin — all have passed laws restricting or outright banning short-term rentals.

The hotel lobby has spent hundreds of millions fighting Airbnb at every level of government. In New York City, a 2023 law essentially banned most Airbnb listings overnight.

Then COVID hit. In March 2020, Airbnb's business dropped 80% in eight weeks.

Chesky had to lay off 1,900 employees — 25% of the company — in a single memo that became famous for how honest it was. He gave everyone 14 weeks of severance and a year of health insurance.

The company burned through its IPO plans and took on $2 billion in emergency debt at brutal interest rates.

But here's the thing — COVID also saved them. People stopped wanting hotel lobbies and started wanting isolated cabins and rural homes.

Airbnb's bookings came roaring back by summer 2020, and the rural/unique stays trend became permanent. They IPO'd in December 2020 at a valuation that stunned everyone.

SpaceX

The early days nearly killed the company. SpaceX's first three Falcon 1 launches all failed.

The first one in 2006 crashed 25 seconds after liftoff due to a corroded fuel line nut. The second in 2007 reached space but the second stage shut down early.

The third in 2008 failed because the first and second stages collided during separation. Musk had enough money for one more attempt.

If flight four failed, SpaceX was dead.

Flight four worked. On September 28, 2008, Falcon 1 became the first privately developed liquid-fuel rocket to reach orbit.

Musk has said he was so stressed during that period he was throwing up regularly.

The financial pressure was existential. Musk was simultaneously funding Tesla, which was also on the brink of bankruptcy in 2008.

He had to split his last $40 million between the two companies. He borrowed money for rent.

But right at the end of 2008, NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to resupply the International Space Station. That contract saved the company.

Starship development has been its own saga. The rocket has exploded multiple times during testing.

Each failure costs hundreds of millions. But SpaceX treats failures as data — they move faster by blowing things up and iterating than competitors do by being cautious.

Airbnb

Airbnb Stays is the core product — book someone's home instead of a hotel. Airbnb Experiences lets you book local activities run by hosts, like cooking classes in Rome or surf lessons in Bali.

Airbnb Plus is a collection of verified, high-quality homes that have been inspected in person. Airbnb Luxe is the ultra-premium tier — think private islands, castles, and villas with dedicated concierge service.

Categories (launched 2022) lets you browse by vibe — treehouses, lakefront, tiny homes, mansions — instead of just searching by location.

SpaceX

Falcon 9 is the workhorse — the most-launched rocket in the world. It carries satellites to orbit and astronauts to the ISS, and the first stage lands itself for reuse.

Falcon Heavy is three Falcon 9 boosters strapped together — the most powerful operational rocket in the world until Starship came along. Dragon is the spacecraft that carries astronauts and cargo to the ISS.

It's the only American vehicle currently flying humans to space. Starlink is the satellite internet service — over 6,000 satellites in orbit delivering broadband to 100+ countries.

Starship is the big one — the tallest and most powerful rocket ever built, designed to carry 100+ people to Mars. It's still in testing but has already completed a full flight.

Airbnb

Y Combinator, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Founders Fund, General Atlantic, Jeff Bezos (personal investment)

SpaceX

Founders Fund, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Google, Fidelity Investments, Valor Equity Partners, Baillie Gifford, a]6z (Andreessen Horowitz), NASA (as customer/partner)