Airbnb's Brian Chesky Talks with Fortune
A spirited conversation with Airbnb's cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky in which we delve into the process of designing and building a platform for sharing homes, explore the company's new push into the travel guide area with its Lonely Planet competitor, and talk about the challenges of scaling a truly disruptive business model.
Presenters
Brian drives Airbnb's vision, strategy and growth. Always pushing the status quo, Brian aims to disrupt the industry with ideas that change the way people live. He is committed to assembling a passionate, top tier team to deliver on this promise. Before Airbnb, Brian ran an industrial design shop in Los Angeles, and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in industrial design from the Rhode Island School of Design.
Jessi Hempel covers technology and the Internet as a senior writer for FORTUNE. She also co-chairs FORTUNE's annual technology conference, Fortune Brainstorm Tech, and is a seasoned speaker and panel moderator.
Hempel's cover-story subjects in FORTUNE have included Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, as well as IBM and RIM. She has written in depth articles on the structural problems that may hinder Twitter's growth as well as the emerging competition between Facebook and Google over the social web. Hempel was the first to profile the Russian investor Yuri Milner who has bought a substantial share in Facebook as well as nearly every other consumer web company today.
Prior to joining FORTUNE in July 2007, Hempel covered design and technology for BusinessWeek, where she wrote the first business cover story on social networks, "The MySpace Generation." Earlier in her career, Hempel taught fourth grade with Teach for America and then reported from Hong Kong for TIME Asia.
Hempel is a graduate of Brown University and received a Masters in Journalism from The University of California at Berkeley.
Sunday, March 10
