The Tim Ferriss Show - #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb

Episode Date: March 8, 2018

Joe Gebbia (@jgebbia) is a designer, entrepreneur, and global explorer. He is the co-founder and CPO of Airbnb, which has changed the way the world travels and how people connect in more than 190 countries.In this wide-ranging and hilarious interview, Joe delivers the details on his path to Airbnb, and he shares the decisions, hardship, failures, and successes that prepared him for Airbnb.Enjoy!This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, “If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is, inevitably, Athletic Greens. It is my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body and did not get paid to do so. As a listener of The Tim Ferriss Show, you’ll get 30 percent off your first order at AthleticGreens.com/Tim.This episode is also brought to you by LegalZoom. I’ve used this service for many of my businesses, as have quite a few of the icons on this podcast — such as Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame.LegalZoom is a reliable resource that more than a million people have already trusted for everything from setting up wills, proper trademark searches, forming LLCs, setting up non-profits, or finding simple cease-and-desist letter templates.LegalZoom is not a law firm, but it does have a network of independent attorneys available in most states who can give you advice on the best way to get started, provide contract reviews, and otherwise help you run your business with complete transparency and up-front pricing. Check out LegalZoom.com and enter promo code TIM at checkout today for special savings and see how the fine folks there can make life easier for you and your business.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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and everything in between. This particular episode features a friend of mine, a very, very entertaining, very competent, very eclectically skilled Joe Gebbia. Joe Gebbia is a designer. He is co-founder of Airbnb, certainly an entrepreneur, currently chief product officer at Airbnb. He has helped to redesign the way the world travels and how people connect. And many of you are familiar with Airbnb, of course. It's created an entirely new economy for millions of people in more than 190 countries. But what you don't know is very likely the first half of the story. What happened before Airbnb? What were the projects

that worked out, the entrepreneurial ventures that failed, the pitches that were so important, the critical decisions, and where do Crit Buns fit in? You may not know of Crit Buns, but you will. I'm sitting on a butt pad right now as I record this called Crit Buns, and it is a critical piece of the puzzle in the story of Joe Gebbia. He's hilarious. He does deliver the nitty-gritty, and you get to see and get to understand the experiences and decisions, hardship, failures, and successes that then prepared him for Airbnb. It doesn't happen overnight, folks. So there are some long winding stories in this one. So fasten your seatbelt, sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride. And Joe Gebbia, G-E-B-B-I-A, you can find at

joegebbia.com, on Twitter at jgebbia, and on Instagram at JoeGebs, G-E-B-S. And without further ado, here is Mr. Joe Gebbia. Joe, welcome to the show. Tim, thank you so much, buddy. Yeah, man. I'm so excited to finally have you here. So thanks for flying out. Of course. My pleasure. Here we are in Tejas. And where to begin? I mean, we've had the opportunity to get to know each

other over the last while, which has been super fun. We've had some unique peak experiences, which I'll leave nebulous just so everyone's really uncomfortable with that statement. And where to begin? We were talking about this. I was having excessive numbers of macchiatos earlier while I was watching you eat your French toast. And I think the question to start with is, what is your first memory of causing trouble or getting into trouble? Well, let's see.

To go back, I think it would probably be around second grade. Because, uh, second grade, well, you have to understand, um, when I was young, I was really into art and was into drawing. And around the second grade, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles came out, right? Like big deal, big deal. I was totally hooked. Donatello, Michelangelo, Raphael, everybody like I was, I was in it. And so I started drawing them and I just had such a good time drawing them. I would show them to my classmates. I remember in the second grade and my classmates started to want to buy them for me. And so I would Mount them on this like really special poster board. And I'd come into class, and I would be selling these for the total of $1.

If you wanted to get a big one, I would sell you the bigger ones for $2. And so I was having a ball, doing what I loved, making drawings. Classmates would make an extra allowance every week. A dollar is a lot of money when you're in second grade. It's a big deal. It's a big deal it's a big deal and so uh i at one point my teacher pulls me aside and she says i need to talk to you and she begins to explain to me that students were so interested in these drawings that they were asking their parents for extra lunch money and

their parents were like what do you need extra lunch for? And they traced it back to me, and the teacher shut me down. Said, you can't be doing this. All right, so already signs of looming misbehavior. Yeah, and signs of spotting an opportunity and doing something about it. And entrepreneurship. Yeah. Yeah, it was also, you know, you could say my first brush with regulation. Yeah. Right. Yeah, it was also, you know, you could say my first brush with regulation. Yeah. Right.

First brush. That may or may not come in handy later. Maybe. And where were you at the time? Just place us geographically. Where did you grow up? My parents are from New York. My grandfather's heritage back in Italy and Ireland.

Grandfather's in Brooklyn. parents grew up in Long Island, moved to Georgia right before they had me. So I grew up in the Deep South. I was in the town of Lawrenceville, which is next to Snellville, which is near Lilburn, which is not far from North Cross, which is kind of close to Atlanta. So if you went an hour in one direction you'd be in you know farm fields and you know horse ranches and um it'd be uh you know it was it was the south right in every kind of way

so you're selling these drawings now where did that impulse come from? And I ask because I've had the chance to spend some time with your dad. Awesome guy. That's true. We were together at a Date with Destiny event, and you had the very good idea of basically creating Animal House by renting a house together on Joe B&B, otherwise known as Airbnb. And your dad's awesome a also seems to be very entrepreneurial so that's why i'm asking i'm not implying it came straight from your dad but uh could you maybe talk about that and then also

what were what were some defining characteristics of your childhood? Well, certainly both my parents, including my dad, were very entrepreneurial. They both worked for themselves growing up. So I had this, you know, environment where I saw my parents forging their own path. Sort of their success was fully dependent on how hard they worked and how ambitious they were in their, their careers of what they were doing. And my dad certainly was entrepreneurial. You know, he was always coming home with something on the weekend saying, I've got this new product idea. I've got this new service I found. And, and, um, you know, our basement was full of these

different attempts at different things. Um, and so there was this, this spirit of trying things out by all means in our household. What were some of the things that your dad tried? Oh, my God. I don't know, some early Internet things in the mid-'90s as the Internet started to come out. You know, I don't remember. What were some of the things that caught?

What did he end up doing? Well, he ended up working with my mom and they both were in the health food industry so when you go into whole foods and you see you know vitamins and supplements in the vitamin aisle they were the representative between the manufacturer of those products and getting into the shelf of those stores it was interesting was to tag along with with them on business trips where they'd drive around the South from South Carolina to Tennessee to Alabama and getting to see how they interacted with these store owners. Because it wasn't just Whole Foods, it was also the mom and pop vitamin stores as well.

The independents. The independents. And so it was really fascinating watching them interact with the store owners and just seeing how far they would go to serve people. You know, I remember one time specifically we were in Tennessee, and it was really late at night. All the other store employees had gone home. It's my dad, myself, and the store manager, and we're sitting there stocking shelves.

So this is Tennessee? Yeah, we're doing there stocking shelves. We're like... So this is Tennessee? Yeah, we're doing somebody else's job, but for my dad, it was just about creating a connection with the store owner and really, I guess, going above and beyond what was required of you.

And so I really took away from that those observations of watching how your parents treat people. It was really nice to see, and it definitely planted a seed in me of, like, going out of your way for those that you're serving, for your customers. Was it your dad's idea to bring you along?

Did you ask to be brought along or something else? I don't know. Yeah. I remember the very first morning in the house that we rented in Florida, we had heard of date with destiny being nicknamed by some people date with death because the schedule is so intense, right?

Yeah. 12, 16, God knows how many hours it's up to, up to the powers that be the big man and so on. And it can be very hard to get food. It can be very hard to get a break. And even if you do get a break, maybe there's a line of 300 people from 60 countries waiting to get a chicken wrap. So you're not going to get your chicken wrap. And so we had stocked up with bars and mixed nuts and

yogurt and jerky and everything imaginable. And it was scattered all over the place and got up in the morning and the entire collection of food had been rearranged like a point of sale display. It was in perfect order. It was ready for a storefront and i was just like did you do that to my to my friend av and he's like no i definitely didn't do that i and then i knew amelia hadn't done it i was like who did that and i was like oh then joe senior like would you like some eggs i'm happy i'm making some eggs would you like some i was like wow wow yeah so it makes sense it makes sense that attention to detail You got a little taste of it. Oh, it was great. I was thrilled. Uh, what else did you, what else did you experience in childhood

that stuck with you? And I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll lead with one thing that I originally asked you all about. And when we initially spent time together. Also, related to Tony Robbins, Tony's the glue that holds us together, which I didn't expect to really be verbalizing, but it seems, at least up to this point, that he's been a consistent character in the background or in the foreground.

He's a big dude, hard to miss. But we began talking about tennis because I had just taken my first ever tennis lessons with Jim Lehrer and Lorenzo Beltrame, an incredible coach down in Florida. But you were wearing a Nick Boletari or Boletary Academy shirt. And I knew just enough having read the open autobiography by Andre Agassi to recognize the name. So I asked you about it. So it seems like tennis was certainly something that was also part of the family. So maybe you could talk to that. We had a tennis family, you could say.

I think that's what they call that at the time where every member of the family plays tennis. We did coaching together. We played in Alta and USTA together. We did competitions together. And it was a truly a family sport growing up. And so tennis was a huge part of my life as a kid, amongst a lot of other sports. I think that's of things that stood out to me of childhood and things that one of the things I'm really grateful for is that whatever my interests were, my parents would support it. And I think they learned this lesson the hard way. How so? They got me into violin when I was really young, when I was like about four or five years old.

Which you were interested or not interested in? I mean, no. And so I was really young, when I was like about four or five years old. Which you were interested or not interested in? No, I mean, no. And so I was taking violin lessons, and there's a recital that, I don't remember how old I was, maybe six. And at this recital, it's in Savannah, Georgia. I'm sorry, Augusta, Georgia. And I'm definitely out of my depths here. Like all the kids are bigger than me.

I'm not being able to keep up with everyone else's playing. And apparently I sat down on the front of the stage and just put my violin down. And there's my parents in the back, probably with a terrified look in their face. And after that experience, they switched their perspective and said we're going to support whatever his intrinsic interests are right and so i was really grateful for that you know throughout

my childhood sports music and art were the three things that uh anytime i threw my weight behind something they were right there to support me, whether it was a sports practice or sports equipment or music lessons or art supplies, whatever the thing was, they were there to support me in it. What, if not violin, where did you gravitate towards it in music? In the violin lessons, I do remember this part, I was so eager to finish the violin lessons that I could go bang on the piano that was in the same music room. And sure enough, I started taking piano lessons,

and I've played ever since. Cool, so you still play? I do, yeah. I've got a piano at home, and it's like one of those things, it's the first thing I do when I get home at the end of the day, is I just go jam on the piano.

I either play some of my favorite music from Thelonious Monk or Dave Brubeck, or I just mix stuff up and kind of riff. What other entrepreneurial experiences do you recall from elementary school or high school after you got the kibosh thrown on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? That certainly wasn't the end. You know, I distinctly remember a whole bunch of things from part of the common stuff, right? Like, I started a lawn mowing business in my neighborhood.

So I put around flyers on people's doors in my neighborhood and offered lawn mowing and car washing. And so, you know, I'd go mow a lawn for 20 bucks. That just was quick money in my pocket as a kid. Kind of getting into high school, there was one moment where senior year came around and the senior year t-shirt that I did in my high school, it was pretty uninspiring. Let's just call it that.

And I thought, you know, I bet I could do something better than that. At this point, I just got my first Mac, my first Apple computer, and it had Photoshop on it and Illustrator and the graphic software that you needed to, to make, you know, visuals. And so, um, that's what it was actually one of my introductions to Photoshop was I just redesigned the t-shirt and I didn't have any money really other than the lawn money, money that was coming in. And, um, I figured out how to get these t-shirts made. I went to a local printer, um, figure out how to do all the transfer the files to them. And suddenly I'm, I'm sitting on about 300 t-shirts and I realized I gotta go sell these

things okay got it so you took it upon yourself to redesign the was it the high school t-shirt yeah like this the senior the senior like the senior t-shirt the senior t-shirt and then went out and now you have a bunch of inventory I got a bunch of inventory and I got to go sell them, which would come up again later in another story. But yeah, it was fun. And actually, I remember I did better than break even on those. And people were really happy to have a really memorable... What did the shirt look like? You know, it was a riff on the Tide logo, the Tide detergent.

Sure. And so instead of saying Tide, it said seniors, class of 2000, Brookwood High School. And it did really well. So you didn't bet the farm and lose the farm. You at least broke even. Yeah. Yeah, it was fun to learn how to use some of the graphics programs

like Photoshop and then also figure out how do you turn that into something. How does it leave your screen and become something physical? And so it was a great lesson, if anything. Where did you think, now this was senior year in high school. Yeah. What did you think you were going to do when you grew up per se at that point? Well, or what did you want to do? So every year from elementary, middle and high school, the art teacher would tell me, you need to take more art classes. Because it was a talent that I had that stood out, and they recognized it and were telling me about it. And so year over year, I would invest more into art classes. And at one point, I was driving downtown to the Atlanta College of Art on weekends to take figure drawing classes.

Sometimes on weeknights, I'd drive down for painting classes. And then something really incredible happened. I applied for this program called the Governor's Honors Program in high school, where they take students from around the state of Georgia across all disciplines, math and science and languages and art. And they pick about 30 students out of the state for each discipline. And then if you get in, you go to a college campus for the summer

and you actually study college level coursework in whatever the discipline is. So I went for art and I had an incredible time. Here I was surrounded by some of the other, the best artists in the state of Georgia and other high school students. And I had teachers who were collegiate level, challenging us the same way they would a college student.

And I freaking loved it. And there was one woman in particular, her name was Donna. And she was like one of those people in life that you have along your journey who helps you see something else about yourself that maybe you don't quite realize yet. And so she sat me down one day during this program and really kind of laid out

what it might look like if I pursued art after high school. And she was one of the first persons that got me really excited about, she made it realistic for me to even think about, is that even a practical idea? And she's like, there's one school you have to go to. It's the Rhode Island School of Design.

And I'm like, the what? Where's that? Is that in the Bahamas? Yeah. Rhode Island. She put RISD on the map for me. And I was during that program, during that summer, I really dove into painting.

I did this painting that was about eight feet by four feet wide, stretched my own canvas, and really threw myself into understanding materials and paint better than ever before. And we had this show at the end of the program, so everyone in art, the discipline, got to have a gallery show.

And there was my painting on the main wall when you walked in. It was a moment for me to realize that, A, people appreciated the images that I made and my art. And second, I loved it. I really felt challenged. I felt creative. It was allowing me to fulfill all these desires that I had to create things. How much of that was the environment versus the medium, do you think? I think probably the environment a little bit more,

because the medium could have been anything. Right. I mean, we did Raku pottery and firing. We did figure drawing and painting. We were exposed to all kinds of different mediums and materials. I think the environment is what I fell in love with. The being challenged, mostly? The being challenged, being surrounded by other creatives. And really, that's what triggered me to say,

ah, this Rhode Island School of Design thing. So the next summer, I did their high school program and got to spend six weeks on campus, basically as like a, you really act like a freshman, right? They give you, again, college-level courses. At RISD. At RISD, I fell in love with the campus, fell in love with the people. And, you know, as a junior in high school, I'm like, I got to go here. This is, this is where I feel challenged. So then, then what happens? Well, so before I leave high school, there's another story about an entrepreneurial Joe.

So I haven't told the story in a while. But so when I got to high school as a freshman, the senior class right before me had pulled off this amazing senior prank. So at our high school, the mascot is a Bronco horse. So it's the Brookwood Broncos. And they went down the street to this, like a country Western store where you get cowboy boots and cowboy hats. It's called Horsetown East. And on the top of their sign, which was pretty tall there's a couple stories a couple stories tall was this giant full-size plastic horse

and somehow the senior class figured out how to get the horse down from the sign and then they put it on top of our school and so the last day of class everyone came in there's a giant full-size plastic horse on top of brookwood and so when i showed up as a freshman everybody was talking about it i everyone's like yeah did you hear what the senior class did last year before they graduated yeah and it i just started to think to myself i can i want to outdo that i've got four years to think of something like surely I can come up with something better than the horse on top of the school. So I set myself a challenge of figuring out a prank by senior year.

So the years go by. It's now senior year. And we have about four months to go. And I still haven't thought of anything. And the clock's ticking. It's now three months to go. I still haven't thought of anything. And the clock's ticking. It's now three months to go. I still haven't thought of anything. It's now two months to go.

And I get onto Google and I search high school senior pranks just to see what else is out there because I'm still committed to figuring something out. And so I keep coming across the same stuff. You've got super glue the locks, the doors. You've got fill up cups with water in the gym and put them all next to each other

so they knock over. And then you've got put three pigs out into the school and label them one, two, four so everyone thinks there's a third pig running around somewhere. You know, it was like the repetition of how many sites were covering these pranks is like, these are not original. And that was one of my criteria. Like this needs to be something

original. I'm not going to just like copy another prank. And so we're now like three weeks until graduation. Don't have any prank. I haven't figured it out yet. And my sister was a cheerleader. And so she'd have this cheerleading practice after school, and normally I'd have to hang around and take her home. And so I'm outside after school one day, and she's nowhere to be found. This is before cell phones. And the way that you track somebody down at that time

was to, they'd make some announcement over the intercom system, and they'd call their name. So I go into the front office, and by the way, I went to the high school in Georgia that was one of the largest. We had over 4,000 people in our high school, right? So it's one of the biggest high schools in the state. And I thought that to access the intercom would be some, you go in some room, there'd be some big system and it'd be super complicated. So I'm in the front office and I'm looking at the secretary and I go, hey, I'm just trying to find my sister Kim. Can you, can you page her over the intercom? And the secretary goes, oh sure, just a minute.

She picks up the phone and she hits pound zero zero on the dial pad. And then she talks into the phone. Hey Kim, Kim Gebbia, your brother's here, please come to the front of the building. And everything she said into the phone came out over the intercom system. And I'm watching this and I'm going, it's that easy to get into the intercom system of the largest high school in the state of Georgia?

All you have to do is have access to the phone line and hit pound zero zero? I'm like, oh my God. It was this big aha moment as I'm watching this unfold in front of me. And I go, all I have to do is get one of those splitter jacks, plug it into the same phone line, and then I can run a cord of another phone somewhere else in the closet or something. And then I could call in and have access to the whole intercom system. So for a week, I'm toiling on this. I'm like, how am I going to route a phone cord without

anybody noticing it? And then finally, it dawns on me, just get a cordless phone. You can be anywhere in the school and have access to the intercom. So at this point, I recruit one of my buddies, Mark Eisenhower, who, looking back, probably wasn't the best accomplished for this mission because he played on the basketball team is about six foot four with bright blonde hair. Right. Not inconspicuous, not inconspicuous at all. And so we go, we go to the school that weekend and we have this grand plan that will maybe trick one of the janitors into letting us into the main office.

And when he leaves, somehow we'll plug in this cordless phone into the school. It definitely was not a well-thought-out plan at this point, but we didn't have a lot of time, so we just went for it. And so we went to the school. It was on a Sunday afternoon. I think the janitor saw right through us. He did not let us in the office, and so we left a bit empty-handed,

but we weren't giving up. This was too good. So I employed another friend. Her name is Chelsea Hughes. And so the three of us came up with a better plan that we'd go up on a week, uh, on, on a weekend. And there was a community school office that we knew would be open on weekends. And that office connected like these inner chambers to the main office. And if we could just get into that one, we, the thought was you could go through the sequence of other doors to get into the main office. And so Chelsea went up and tried to figure out where that principal

was, that community school director. And so she identified him on the far side of campus. She signaled to Mark. Mark signaled to me. And I'm outside in a black hoodie with my backpack, full of the phone, a flashlight, and Mark gave me the signal. Full-on Mr. Robot. Totally. I go running in through the lobby of the school, right into this community director's office, and then it's pitch black, and I'm going through all the doors. It's chamber by chamber until you get to the main office, the front desk.

I'm there, and I move the desk to the side and there's this just giant jumble of cords underneath and i'm trying to figure out which one what the hell is the phone line and then i trace it back to the wall i pull out the splitter piece i put it in and then i plug in the cordless phone and the phone from the desk into the same line and i'm trying to bury the chord base underneath the pile of chords and at this point i'm sweating my heart is racing i'm like i'm in the darkness of this office definitely not supposed to be there and all of a sudden there's a tap on my shoulder my heart jumps i turn around it's it's mark hovering over me goes joey we gotta go mr chelka is on his way.

And I'm like, all right, I'm done. So we push the desk back. We go out the back entrance into the parking lot. We meet up with Chelsea. I pull the cordless phone out of my bag. I turn it on and we get a dial tone. We have access to the intercom. So the next question is, what do you do with that axis? Right. So, the next day,

I decided that I was going to make a tape mix of different songs to play over the intercom system. And I put together a mix of Pink Floyd, We Don't Need No Education,

and Alice Cooper, Schools Out for Summer. And I even got so detailed about this that I had my mom help out at home. She didn't know she was helping me. But we had two phone lines in the house, one for the business, one for personal use. And I would call one phone line to the other and have the tape player next to it

to figure out the right volume on it, the right distance from the phone, and have my mom on the other end telling me if it was loud enough or not. So she helped me calibrate the right volume for the tape player. So the phone is embedded. The tape mix is made. It's now the last day of school. And I woke up that morning, and I was nervous. I'm like, gotta do this today.

All right. Prank is happening. So I go to school a little bit late on purpose. So as it works, I park my car in the parking lot, and in one pocket, I've got the phone. In the one pocket, I've got the phone. In the other pocket, I've got this tape player, like a handheld, like a Sony Walkman.

And I'm walking through the parking lot. It's just me. There's nobody else. And then all of a sudden, our school police officer shows up on his golf cart. And he turns the corner. And he's coming straight towards me. And there's nobody else around. It's just him and me. And he's coming at me and i'm staring at him and i'm like just be cool just be cool he doesn't know and like as he's getting closer my heart's racing faster and i'm like oh my god i've got this the bulges in my pocket of the phone of the

tape player and he makes eye contact at me and the the golf cart goes by. Like, okay. So I walk to the front of the school, and there's like this overhang area where the bus is pulled up, and there's these benches, and then these glass doors before you go into the main lobby. And so everything's cleared out except for this one kid.

He must have been like a freshman or a sophomore or something. And he's sitting there and I'm like waiting for him to leave because I didn't want anybody to see what I was about to do. And he's not going anywhere. And I'm thinking to myself, I have to do this now. Like I can't wait any longer. So I just run up to him. I get right in his face and I go, look, you can't say anything about what you're about to see. And he was just totally freaked out. And he goes, okay. And so I go behind one of these brick columns that was holding up the overhang.

And around the column, you could see into the glass doors and where the office is, where the phone base is. So I pull the phone out. I pull out the tape player. My hands are shaking. And I'm like,

I'm just thinking to myself, all right, it's go time. I turn the phone on, get the dial tone. I hit pound zero, zero. My hands are shaking even more. I take this deep breath and actually this beep comes over the whole school to signal there's an announcement. And I can actually hear myself breathing through the intercom. I'm like, thinking to myself, all right, I got to do this right now. So playing the tape player, I set the two down next to each other. And as I'm doing it, I flick the volume all the way just to be safe because I'm thinking to myself, I don't want to come across as too soft in the volume.

So I'm like, I got to throw the volume all the way up. So I set the two down next to each other and I walk into the building. And that's when all hell broke loose. I open the lobby. I go into the building and that's when all hell broke loose i open the lobby i go into the lobby doors and the music is blasting out of the intercom system school's out for summer it's like the speakers are about to explode it's like so freaking loud and um when you get to school late you had to go to like a check-in line to sign in. And so I'm in the check-in line. There's like two people in front of me.

And this is a scene. I'm in this like, you know, kind of high school lobby. To my left are all the offices, including the one where the phone is. To my right is the gymnasium. Out of the gymnasium, two of my buddies come busting out while this music's blasting. They're laughing so hard because they realized that it was me. The coach comes out of the gym, starts yelling at them, hey, you get back in here.

We don't know what's going on, but you've got to get back in here. I'm just sitting there with a straight face, I'm not cracking a smile. I sign in, and then to get to my class, I have to walk past all these offices, right? And so while I'm doing that, I hear what's

going on. They're yelling at each other. People are sticking their head out of the office. Is it coming from in there? No, I don't know where it's coming from. They've got the phone in their hands. You can hear on the intercom them hitting like numbers on the phone, trying to shut it off. They had no idea where the heck it was coming from. And so as I'm walking past these sequence of offices, I catch a glimpse into the principal's secretary office and then into the principal's office, which is even a deeper layer. And I see, I catch her face and it's bright red

and she's yelling at somebody while this music's still playing. Right now we're on to Pink Floyd at this point um we don't need no education right and so so this has been going on this is like three four minutes in at this point yeah i'm walking through my classes in the very back of the campus i'm walking through the halls i'm totally by myself while the music's playing and every time i walk past a classroom there's a little skinny like glass window and you can kind of get a glimpse into it and as I walk past these classes I take these double looks and people are like on top of their chairs and on top of their desks and people are dancing and I get to my classroom right as the tape ends and look I thought for sure

they're going to shut this off in like 20 seconds right Right. So I didn't make a tape very long. It was a couple minutes. If I made a 20 minute tape, I probably would have played for 20 minutes. Right. So I get there right as the tape ends. I open the door. People are standing on top of their desks.

People are dancing. The teacher's at her desk with her head in her hands, like totally lost control of her class. And it's like the record stops. I walk in, everybody turns and looks at me and goes, Joey, was that you? And I'm like, no, I don't know what that was. And so finally the teacher gets control of the class. Again, we sit down and everyone's looking at me like, Joe, that was awesome. What was that? I'm like, I don't know. I don't know. And so not two minutes later, there's a knock on the door. An administrator walks in.

She walks over to the teacher. The class goes dead silent. They whisper something to each other, and then they both turn and look at me. The administrator comes by my desk. She goes, Joey, get your stuff. You're coming with me. And I'm like sinking in my desk. I'm like, oh no. She gets outside. She slams the door. We're in the hallway. And she goes,

you want to tell me what just happened back there? I go, I don't know what you're talking about. She's like, we've got Mark in the office. We know what happened. And I'm like,

I don't know what you're talking about. She goes, you can make this hard or you can make this easy on yourself. At that point I was like, ah. So we walk all the way back to

the front of the campus and the whole way she's berating me chewing my head off of all the damages that i cause and all the issues that were created with the phone system and we go to the secretary's office and we walk through and i see mark there and he's got his head in his hands. And Mark is your very tall, very tall, very blonde, very blonde, very obvious accomplice. Yes. Yes. He was, he was a good buddy and a good friend. And, um, I appreciate his help in this endeavor. And so he's got, he's down like this. He's like totally crushed. And he sees me and he looks at me and he goes, and I couldn't tell what he was saying. So he's just trying to mouth the words.

He mouths something to me. And so what he was saying, he goes, it was the janitor. I'm like, the what? So we get through the secretary's office into the principal's office, Connie Corley. I'll never forget her name. They slam the door, and I'm standing there with my backpack, wearing a green Eyes Odds shirt. I'll never forget this. I They slam the door, and I'm standing there with my backpack, wearing a green Eyes Odd shirt.

I'll never forget this. I'm in my brown khaki pants, my green Eyes Odd shirt, with my backpack, and there's Connie Corley at her desk with her arms like this, kind of huffing and puffing. Her face is bright red.

She's got the phone and the tape player and the phone cord and the phone base on her desk. And around her are the 20 administrators, including the school police officer. It's the biggest school in the state of Georgia. We had our own police officer. And so they're all like this. Arms crossed, huffing and puffing.

Right. And I'm like, oh, fuck. Like, my heart's racing. I'm like, what is going on here? Every one of them took a turn at me just to yell at me about something. Connie Coy starts yelling at me. How did you get in the office? You broke an anoreen.

And she's like, like really angry. And I'm like, oh, like, like I'm starting to feel a little bit bad about this. Like, like I'm not sure where this is going to go. Like, is this, am I going gonna get off on this or like? Are there some consequences here? I have no idea And so from that they lead us into this other Like negotiation room, which I've never seen before it was this long wooden table with these like leather chairs around the whole side Principal Corley's at the head of the table mark Mark and I are now sitting across from each other.

We've got administrators standing over us with their arms crossed, like we're going to make a run for it or something. And she like starts like negotiating with us. And this is the part that actually pissed me off the most is that she started to threaten our scholarships. And she looked at Mark, she goes, Mark, you know, I know you've got a basketball scholarship to this school in Georgia that you're going to I'd have to call the coach and tell him about this incident

she goes Joey I know you're going to that art school in Rhode Island I'd have to call their admissions office and tell them about this incident

and at that point I was like there's no way you're getting in the way of either of our dreams because we tapped into the high school intercom system so she made an offer she goes we could press charges for breaking the

entering and tampering school property and some other things or you can do this list of things which included wiping down computer screens in the library you know during the summertime ironically setting up and taking down the sound equipment for graduation. And a few other chores and manual labor, basically. And so Mark and I, obviously we say, well, we'll do the chores and the manual labor so that we can graduate. Because pressing charges is somehow equated to not being able to graduate and get your diploma.

And so from there, we go into the school police officer's office. His name was Officer Harrelson. That's a good cop name. This guy had the deepest kind of grisly voice that you could imagine. Officer Harrelson here at Brooklyn High School. So we're in the office office and he calls our parents and this is this is like probably where the worst part of the whole story he did not know the update that we opted in to do the manual labor he thinks that we're not graduating high school no so he calls my mom he goes miss, Miss Gary, this is Officer Harrelson here at Brookwood High School.

Yes, ma'am. I've got your son in custody here. Yeah, that's right, ma'am. It doesn't look like he's graduating this year. Oh, no. Yeah, ma'am. He's right here. He hands me the phone.

And I heard this tone of voice from my mom I've never heard since. I never want to hear it again. She goes, you get right home after school. I can't believe you. Click. I'm like, mom, but wait, we're going to graduate. So she thinks her son's not graduating high school. I'm like, thanks, Officer Howson.

That was really kind of you. And does the same thing to Mark. And we're walking out of his office. And this is the best part. He pulls us to the side. And he goes, Mark, Joey, I've been at the school for over 20 years and you need to know that was the best damn prank I've ever seen. Officer Harrelson.

So we go through graduation. One little funny stunt movie is that, you know, you had your honors cords and different club cords that you wore around your neck. Mark and I wore phone cords to honor the senior prank. People were raving about it. And we came back, you know, two weeks later to do white computer screens in the library. And I'll never forget, we're outside underneath the same overhang like dusting off our rags and all these buses pull up and all these bus drivers

start pouring into the school pasta. So he has like some bus driver, you know, end of year celebration or something. And one of the bus drivers actually walks over to us

and she goes, are you the two boys that pulled that prank with the intercom system? And Mark and I look at each other and we're like, yeah. She goes, you know, y'all, you two are legends in this county.

Mark and I were like, what? Like, how did they hear about it? Like, all the bus drivers in the county that we lived in. So it was just an incredible moment of, you know, having an idea, having this ambition to do something that was original. In this case, there was no property damage. Nobody got hurt, which is, to me, the essence of a great prank. And that was part one of the story.

Part one of the story. Well, all right. I'll bite. I'll bite. What's part two of the story? What's part two of the story? What's part two of the story? I'm in college. This is about two years later.

And one of my roommates comes home one day, and he says, Hey, have you heard of that show? It's on MTV. It's called High School Stories, Pranks, and Controversies. And I go, no, no, what was it about? He's like, yeah, I was just watching. It's like they showed this, some high school, they had this high school prank.

I was like, I sat up in my chair. I go, really? Tell me about that. And he goes, yeah, they film these guys who, get this, they super glued the locks in the doors of this high school. And I'm like, you have to be kidding me. The oldest trick in the book. MTV's making a show about high school pranks, and they're doing a super glue in the lock prank.

I'm like, I have to get in touch with the producer. So I get online, and I track down the producer of the show. And I sent him an email that was a teaser of the story, but not the full one. And basically said, if you want to hear the rest of it, here's my phone number. About 30 minutes later, my phone rings with a 212 area code. NYC. NYC. And I get on the phone with this producer.

And he's like, I'm really intrigued by your email. I'm always looking for good stories. What do you got? And I told him the abbreviated version of what you just heard. And he's like, oh, I love this. I'm going to pitch this to my executive producer. We're going to get back to you. It's about three or four days later, get another phone call from a 212. Hey, this is Leslie from MTV. I'm the executive producer here. Really loved your story. I want to hear more about

it from you. So by the end of the call, she's in love with the story. And she's like, you know what we're going to do? We're going to send a crew down to Georgia. We want you to come back this summer. We're going to reenact the whole thing and include it in the next season of our TV show. So that summer, we got to go back to Georgia and reenact the whole thing. Now, however, this is only two years later. The same administration and principal is still there. And they did not have a lot of forgiveness. I was going to say, the wounds haven't healed over quite yet. The wounds had definitely not healed.

They definitely had a grudge. Because if anything, we just embarrassed them. They had no idea, had to turn it off. Again, there's no damage or anything that was really done. It's permanent. And so they declined reenacting at the school. So ironically, we went to one of my rival high schools and refilmed the whole thing there.

And even more ironic is that the principal, the new principal there, was a former administrator when I pulled the prank at my other school. So he was intimately familiar with what had happened. At that point, he could laugh about it. So that summer, we reenacted the whole thing. Chelsea and Mark, and got a couple of other friends to be extras in the background,

and it aired later that year on MTV. Amazing. So it seems like your brushes with mischief just seem to reinforce your appetite for mischief of sorts, in a way, perhaps. Now, when we were hanging out earlier today, I asked a question that I often ask of friends I'm going to sit down with, and it was, in effect, can you give me any cues?

I don't want to hear the story, but can you give me any cues that might lead to a fun discussion? And one of them, I said, I don't want to hear the story, but can you give me any cues that might lead to a fun discussion? And one of them, I said, I don't want to know the story because I want to hear it fresh when we're recording. And one of them was NBA. Time worked with or in NBA. And I have no idea what this refers to, but that's a cue. Tim, I think this story starts by telling you a fun fact. I've seen Michael Jordan naked in person.

Okay. This is a good start. Now we're talking about locker room, hotel room, barbecue. My job, I had a high school job where i worked as a ball boy in the nba for the atlanta hawks that was my job in high school okay i love basketball i played my whole life and i was reading the news i used to read the newspaper every morning when i was growing up over breakfast whatever i just consumed the. And so one day I'm in the sports section and there's an article about being bat boys for the Atlanta Braves and being ball

boys for the Atlanta Hawks. At the very end of the article, it said, if you're interested in becoming one, send a letter about yourself to this address. And I'm like, oh my God, yes. Like that would be so cool, right? So I sent a letter, but actually I sent it on the day of the deadline. Like months had passed and I sent them the day of the deadline and I kind of forgot about it until the next summer.

I get a phone call and this guy introduced himself as Chris Tucker, the strength coach of the Atlanta Hawks. And he goes, yeah, we got your letter. We really liked it. We want you to come down and interview for one of our ball boy positions. I go, this is awesome.

I'll be there. So we get down to, at the time, it was the Omni before they had Phillips Arena. And I'm interviewing with them, telling them about my life and my love for basketball and these things. before they had Phillips Arena. And I'm interviewing with them, you know, telling them about my life and my love for basketball and these things.

And I get a call back a few days later that I got the job. So this, I'm like a freshman in high school, right? I'm like barely, like 16,

maybe 15, 15 years old. And I start working, you know, in the locker rooms of the Atlanta Hawks. Actually, my very first game, I'll never forget this, was the Hawks versus the Toronto Raptors.

And they threw me onto the visitors because they're ball boys for the home team and the visiting team. Can you explain what a ball boy does in basketball? Absolutely. Because I'm an idiot when it comes to group sports or team sports. I know what a ball boy or ball girl does in tennis. Yeah. But in basketball, I have no idea.

So there's different tiers, right? The entry-level tier is you're wiping the sweat on the floor when a player falls down in the middle of the game. All right. Right? You've seen this. Yeah. Like people go out with the mop and the towel,

and you're just wiping the sweat so the player doesn't slip on the court. That's like the entry-level position position and they did plenty of that as you work your way up the tier then you work on the side of the court and you'd actually run and grab the player's warm-up pants and jacket when they went to check into the game so you'd be half like sitting on half court with them and you'd hand them a towel when they came in you know sit back down on the bench and then the next tier was you'd work behind the bench and actually assist the trainer and so you'd hand them a towel when they came in, you know, sit back down on the bench. And then the next tier was you'd work behind the bench and actually assist the trainer. And so you'd be handing the Gatorade over their shoulder. Oh, cool. And they'd sit down, give them the towel,

get them their warmup, their jacket, their hoodie. And then the highest level was doing that for the visiting team, right? And so, and whatever they needed, you set up the locker room before the game, you'd run any errands that needed to get done. You'd break the locker room down at the end of the game, that whole thing.

So you get through the game like three hours early to do all this. You end up running errands for the players sometimes, give you a nice tip. I remember Horace Grant one time gave me a $100 bill. It's a big deal. He took his bag to the bus. Yeah, it was pretty cool.

And so they threw me, my very first game, they threw me to the visitor's side. Toronto Raptors. Toronto Raptors. And it was my first experience, right, of like being around some NBA greats. Marcus Canby, I remember, was on the team at the time. This guy I watched play at UMass in college

and like really admired. And it was my first exposure to professional sports locker room too. Everybody comes in, and they just take the clothes off to get changed, and nobody gives a shit. It doesn't matter at the end of the day. But for me, it was like, whoa, whoa, where am I? Lots of naked professional athletes.

That was my first experience. Of course, you get used to that. It's no big deal at a certain point. So I'm in the NBA, and I did it for three seasons. I got to work alongside Lenny Wilkins, the head coach, Dikembe Mutombo, Steve Smith, some of these NBA greats. And there were some really incredible moments that happened. One of them was when the Hawks played the Chicago Bulls.

Jordan's still playing. This is 1999, one of his last seasons. And I'll never forget this. So you have to imagine the scene. We're in Phillips Arena, and the Hawks are actually winning, which is amazing. And the place is going nuts. You can't even hear yourself think.

It's so loud. People are screaming. They're playing music over the loudspeakers. And I'm working the Bulls bench, right? Which is, like, you've got Scottie Pippen, Steve Kerr, Dennis Rodman, Michael Jackson, Phil Jackson, Michael Jordan, like the whole crew. Hell of a roster, yeah. Yeah, hell of a roster. And so I'm working the Bulls bench. They're down.

Phil Jackson calls a timeout. And the place goes nuts because the Hawks are up. And in front of me, Jordan pops down. Rodman's on the left. Pippen's on the right. Phil Jackson is like right here. And he's furious. Like this guy's using expletives like you'd never believe.

He's yelling things. I feel like I can feel his spit like hitting my face. He's just like, and I'm right behind Jordan. He's right here. And the place is, again, so loud. People are screaming at the top of their lungs. And I'm doing my job, right? I give the guys a towel and then I'm giving them a Gatorade. So I'm like, I'm going to start with Jordan. Obviously he's right in front of me. So I reach around, I reach on this side. Um, so left, left hand, like over the shoulder,

left hand over the shoulder. Jordan is facing this way, talking to Pippen, who's right next to him. I reach around, and Rodman, who's to my left, turns quickly, bumps my elbow. The Gatorade quickly goes upside down and straight into Jordan's lap. There are only a few times in my life I've been as terrified as that moment. Phil Jackson's yelling at me. Michael Jordan spins around and he goes, hey man, watch it. And I'm like, oh my God, like my heart's rate. I'm like, Jesus Christ. So I did what anybody would do in that moment. If you spill something, you tend to wipe it up. Right. So I grabbed the towel and I'm patting down Jordan's thigh. Like now I'm like in the huddle, right? Right, right.

Rodman's laughing at me because he realized what he had done. Phil Jackson's like right here, like spitting. He's yelling so hard. And I'm like, I'm sorry, Jordan. I'm like trying to like dry his leg up with this Gatorade spill that went right to his lap. And oh man, I'm like sweating profusely, right? Because again, you've got the TV crews who are in the huddle too.

You've got the cameras in your face. It's like a high stress moment as a ball boy. And so you had one job. Don't pour the Gatorade on Jordan's balls. Well obviously, unfortunately Rodman made that quick spin. No, no. He knocked me not your fault so um like the the buzzer goes off and it's like time to get back on the court i'm still

like patting down like jordan's leg and he's like oh come on man and they get up and um i think right after that he actually had like a whole bunch of. He threw down a slam dunk or something. I think the moral of the story there is, when you spill Gatorade on Jordan, make sure you clean it up. It seems like there's another pattern here, which is getting comfortable with uncomfortable situations. Right? Or exposing yourself to discomfort

so that your comfortable sphere of action expands. Right. What was your next brush? Once you get to RISD, so you're in RISD, were there any formative entrepreneurial experiences that come to mind? Absolutely were. And I should explain also, if I may interject just for a second,

that one of the reasons I wanted to explore a lot of these stories is that it's easy. And I think typical for people to take a single chapter in someone's life and isolate it and view it as the whole story. Right. But there's so much backstory and so much development and so many experiences that lead up to the small piece of the puzzle that people tend to think is the

whole puzzle. So just for people listening and watching, and I just enjoy your storytelling, so that's another piece of it. But the RISD, this is a level up. I mean, RISD, you have a lot of talented people at RISD. Any entrepreneurial memories or experiments that come to mind from RISD? Yes. So I decided to go to RISD to study fine arts, to be a painter. And I didn't really know

what that meant. I had this vision of maybe one day, you know, being able to exhibit in New York or something like do the gallery scene. I couldn't actually picture it, but I really wanted to go study art and painting. So when I got to campus, they have this week of orientation. And you get your class schedule, and you get to meet upperclassmen. So I'm talking to this guy. Fellow student. Fellow student, upperclassman. And he's saying, oh, who do you have for your courses?

And freshman year, they give you the foundation stuff, like drawing, two-dimensional design, three-dimensional design, liberal arts, art history. And so I'm going through the list of teachers and I say this one teacher's name that makes his eyebrows go up. I go, I've got Gareth Jones for 3D. And he goes, you've got Gareth Jones? Oh man. I go, what is it? Who's this guy? And he goes, you've got Gareth Jones? Oh, man. I go, what is it? Who's this guy? And he goes, just wait for the chess set project. And I go, what's the chess set project? And he goes, you'll see.

So my very first class is with this guy, Gareth Jones, teaching three-dimensional design. And picture this. We're in this art studio with these concrete floors, these rickety metal stools, plaster covered kind of work surfaces. It's a little bit cold. It's September in New England. And, you know, it's a very first class. And I'm sitting around with, you know, 18 other freshmen. We're all trying to make sense of where we are in the world and what this RISD

thing is all about. And this is about to be our first impression of what is it like to be a student at RISD. And so we're sitting there and all of a sudden this guy wearing all black with this big poofy head of hair comes out and he stands in front of us and he's got this Welsh accent and he goes, I just want you all to know that half of you are going to fail my course because you won't finish the chess set project. And I'm thinking to myself, oh my God, that's what it's going to be like here. Like half the people, I look to my left, I look to my right, one of them's going to be gone because they're going to fail out. I'm like, oh my god. And we're all looking at each other like, is he serious? And he goes on to explain the Chesed Project. So in addition to your weekly assignments,

the Chesed Project is this semester-long project that takes place outside of the classroom, on your own time, where you have to choose a three-dimensional artist, like a sculptor, like Henry Moore, an architect like Frank Lloyd Wright, a furniture designer, a fashion designer, and you had to find a book about them. And from that, you had to select pieces of their work to recreate. And you did it in the format of a chess set,

which means it didn't have to look like actual chess set pieces but you take one of their creations and replicate it eight times for your pawn and had to look exactly like the picture in the book you took another one of their creations and you had to replicate it twice for the rooks in 3d in 3d and you had to do it at 12 inch scale oh my god just looking at a picture you need to figure out what it's made of, what's the backside look like, what's the underside look like. And at this time, I had a growing interest in furniture, furniture design. And I came across this furniture designer from the 1920s and 30s named Gerrit Rietveld. He was a Dutch architect and designer.

And he did these really beautiful chairs that are actually in the Museum of Modern Art. They're classics. And I thought a couple of things. One is, as I got to know Gareth Jones, the professor, it became very clear that this guy was super opinionated. He would argue to the death to make sure that he was always right. I would watch him just argue students relentlessly to make his point. And out of that, I just had this growing thinking of like, wow, I'd love to prove this guy wrong at some point. And so I also thought, I'm going to throw myself into this project. There's no way I'm failing.

In fact, I want to complete this project. And if I'm going to commit so much of my time to this, and I'm going to make chairs from this designer, Garrett Riefeld, at the end of it, I want to come out with something I can use. I don't want 12-inch chairs. I actually want full-size functional chairs. And so I'm like, this is a really great idea. I'm going to share this with Gareth. So I call him over and I'm like, Gareth, I want to

make full size functional chairs. And my expectation at this time was that he's going to, you know, give me a high five and say, Joe, you can do it. You got this. I believe in you. Instead, Tim, he goes, Joe, I really don't think you can do it. Really focus on the smallest scale. And he walks away. And I'm like, no fucking way. Like, all right, buddy. Now you really have to do it.

All right, pal. Like, you just lit every fire that you needed a light to figure out how to do this. The thing is, I didn't know how the hell to make a chair. I never worked with wood before. I never worked with power tools, like actual machine shop tools. And I was really stepping in the unknown on this. And I had a semester to figure it out.

So I just committed all of my time to making this project happen. On weekend Saturday nights, my friends would be going out to parties on campus and I was in the studio trying to figure out how to make chairs. And so I started by going to the furniture department and talking to upperclassmen. And I actually sat down with the head of the furniture department. Name is Roseanne Somerson. And I told her about my ambitions. And she looked at me with kind of a crazy face. It's like, you're never going to figure this out. But she was encouraging and she, um, pointed me to some

upperclassmen who then started to help me understand wood and machines and the tools, table saws and bandsaws and lathes and the things that you need to make furniture. And so piece by piece, I started to figure out how to make these chairs. I was sourcing wood. I had access to the shop that they were giving me. And the thing is, I never told Gareth where I was in the project. So every check-in he'd be like, how's it coming? I'm like, it's all right. Right. And I would downplay my progress. Meanwhile, in my dorm room, it's starting to fill up with these chairs everywhere. Right. And so I like, I worked my butt off and I just, I, that whole semester I was like hacking my way through it and I get to the, the pawn. So I have to pick one of his chairs and

make it eight times. He made this beautiful bench out of just four pieces of wood. And I'm thinking to myself, wow, these benches are really big. That's a lot of wood. I can't afford this. I don't know. I'm just a freshman in college. And so you had to cover all your material cost. Oh yeah. Okay. No, no, no. That's an important detail, right? So I have a study job at the time. I was trying to like fund this however I could. And so I'm in the quad one day outside the freshman dorms and I'm, I make an observation. Everyone's standing around smoking here in the quad. And there's actually nowhere to sit. Huh. I've got this bench design that I'm going to make. What if I approach the school, get them to pay for the wood, I'll make the benches for my project, then they can have them afterwards to put in the quad for people to sit on. So I go

to the head of residence life. I pitch him the idea. He loves it. They fund a few thousand dollars worth of this inch thick plywood. And in doing so, I get access to the school's wood shops and the school's craftsmen who work on campus. And so now I've got their help to help fabricate these benches. Amazing. And they paid for all the wood, which I definitely could never have afforded and so um by the end of the semester i've amassed 16 full-size functional chairs and gareth had no clue and actually finished the last chair at about two in the morning the night before the final crit the day before the final crit crit crit is critique right yeah a critique in art school you have these critiques where you put

your your work out and then the professor in the class critique you and that's how you learn how to improve as an artist or designer and so it's like now december it's freezing cold outside it's providence and i specifically chose the slot right after lunch to present because i figured when everyone's out getting lunch, I'll get my roommates and a couple of buddies to help me carry all these chairs and assemble them in the space. And when people come back, there'll be this great reveal moment because nobody has any clue except a couple of friends, exactly what I've pulled off here. And Tim, my only regret from this project is that I did not have a camera in my hand to take a picture of Gareth's face when he entered the studio.

I swear, I'm standing there and he comes marching in and he picks his head up and he looks at the room suddenly and you can see him counting in his head. It's 15, 16. And he looks at me and he goes joe you've done it you've proved me wrong and i'm like yes and for the rest of the critique we all sat in my chairs and we talked about the project and um i got very high marks obviously and, it was one of those breakthrough moments where you have somebody that you look up to tell you, you can't do something and you are literally tasked with something you've never done before.

And somehow you persevere through it. You, you ask for help. You, um, you figure it out. And, and on the other side of that, I was sitting there in this chair thinking, wow, if I could figure this out, what else could I figure out? This seemed like an impossible feat before this whole thing started. And here I am, I'm sitting in these chairs, the professor's beaming at me.

And it was just one of these moments that one has in life where you sort of cross a threshold of of understanding your limits and at that point I had a new a new bar or a new set of limits how did you feel for from the point that he said that for the rest of the day I mean what what did what did the rest of the day look like? I mean, well, first of all, I was so tired. I'd been up for, actually,

I hadn't slept for about three days before that. So over 48 hours, I was without sleep. So I was delirious, A. B, I was just so relieved. And then third, I was like, there's this excitement inside of me of like, I just, I just proved myself wrong. What else can I prove myself wrong on? And suddenly it's like, there was so much possibility of anything at this point forward that I come across that feels impossible. I probably need to take a second look at that and rethink that based on this experience.

Because again, like how do you make a chair? And then how do you make 16 full-size functional chairs at the end of the, over a course of a semester? And so what's cool is that the benches got installed. Students were sitting in them for, they lasted for a couple of years after that. And so the legacy of it, not only went to the benches, but the story of what had happened became his story that he told every class after that. So that's really powerful on a bunch of levels, right? Because not only, and I have to, I don't know the guy, of course, at all, but I have to give the professor credit for being willing to say, like? Like you proved me wrong, right? Because also just in that moment, the power of that reinforcement for you is a, is a big deal.

I mean, that's a really big deal, potentially life defining inflection point of sorts. Secondly, a few things occurred to me. You created a, you also created a, a product,

an outcome that people could use versus a scale model. And you created a story that would then set the bar infinitely higher. Not necessarily the pass-fail mark, but the you-can-fucking-do-this mark for students for generations to come right many many classes to come that's a big deal i've said big deal a lot because i think you're a big deal joe uh it's true and uh one question that occurred to me while i was listening to this was related to the moment when he said that you couldn't do it or he that you couldn't do it, or he thought you couldn't do it, and how you responded to that. It made me think of a story that I heard from Alexis Ohanian,

co-founder of Reddit, when they went in early, relatively early in the development of Reddit, to meet with Yahoo. And they were showing traffic numbers and analytics to this Yahoo exec. And the Yahoo exec made this comment, which probably to him or her at the time didn't seem like a big deal. But they said, oh, well, this is a rounding error for us. And to my recollection, Alexis and his team went back to the office and they put you are a rounding error up on the wall

to motivate the team. But not everybody responds to what you could view as a death blow that way. So where did you get that from? I mean, is that from sports? Is it from your parents? Is it from somewhere else? Is it just your programming?

Where do you think that comes from? I don't know if there's just one source i think sports is definitely a way to to if i had to point to something you know i played so many sports growing up from tennis to baseball to basketball the track and field the cross country um like some of those are team sports some of those are individual sports and in all of those i mean in any some of those are individual sports. And in all of those, I mean, in any sport that's competitive, you're trying to ultimately compete with yourself to do a better performance than you did the last time. Right.

Um, and so I, I looked at sports as this constant, um, I was, I was in a game with myself and like cross country was a great example. That sport, like for me was,

I feel like where I honed my goal setting and was able to was a great example. That sport, like for me was, I feel like where I honed my goal setting and was able to practice pushing my limits. So every race, um, I would, if I crossed the finish line and I could still really like walk and had energy to me, that was energy I could use on the course to run a faster race. And so eventually I got to this point where I literally would collapse after the finish line. And it became so well known that like the medics would be waiting for me and they'd have the ice bags and like, they'd have like the IV just in case. And like the parents would be there to like pick me up. And, um, um, in the last, you know, 800 meters to the finish line, I'd always

try to find somebody who was running a little bit faster than me, and I just would try to accelerate to catch up with them, draft them a little bit, and then sometimes I'd be neck and neck with them, like in the finish lines, with insight so close, and I would just say out loud to them, I'd say, you're not beating me,

you're not beating me, and I'd use that to motivate myself just to try to run faster to get a better time. That's amazing. So there, I'm glad you brought up the sports because part of the reason I asked is that it, and it's a slightly different lesson maybe, or one lesson that I took from sports. I went to two different high schools. The second high school I went to had mandatory sports, which I felt was really in retrospect, important for a lot of kids. And by being forced to do various sports, primarily wrestling in my

case, if you want to get better, you're going to train with people who are better than you. By definition, you are going to be beaten by other people. And at least in my experience, I started to view any type of failure in that capacity, being beaten, as feedback. It's like a crit. It's a sports it's a, it's a, it's a sports based crit. And, uh, that's why oftentimes, you know, when, uh, and if you have a good coach, they're also going to be pushing you beyond what your perceived limits are. 100%. Right. So you get into the habit, perhaps subconscious or otherwise of asking, is this impossible, really impossible?

Because I never thought I would break whatever six minute mile and i just did that and then i never thought i was gonna break 530 mile and my coach just helped me to do that or i figured out this hack which is chasing the fastest person in front of me and then saying you're not gonna beat me you're not gonna beat me and then i collapse in a big mess of a heap at the end but nonetheless hey i just beat 530 exactly or whatever it is um and you you feel like you've you've expanded like you've you've pushed the limits of what you thought was possible within yourself and that that for me was like one of the greatest feelings yeah that i had at that time and what strikes me is that for me i didn't have many vehicles for expanding that capability

that was that was as tangible as sports, but design is super tangible, right? I mean, you're building these chairs and these benches. Totally. And I should also just mention as a side note that I want to come back to RISD that I don't think it's ever too late. People might be listening saying,

well, hey, I didn't have a great cross country team or wrestling coach in high school. So kind of up shit's creek. It's like, no, actually you can still develop that right with physical training and, and other outlets to expand your capabilities and your perception of what's possible. Sure. And it's so funny because that was a piece of advice I got in seventh grade when I started playing basketball, the basketball coach said, Joe, if Joey, if you want to get better at basketball, you need to play with people who are better than you. Yeah. And so when I used to go to the, to, to the Y to shoot hoops on the weekend, I wouldn't play with people my age or younger. It actually play with the high schoolers

who are much bigger, much stronger, much more talented than I was. And, of course, I got pushed around and I, like, you know, you get bumped around by guys who were playing on the varsity team. But, man, my skills, the learning curve that year, I feel like that was like another kind of threshold moment of, like, I'm not very good at basketball until actually, okay, I've got some skills now. And so I think since that, since that moment, I've always sought to try to find people to play with who are better than me. And that'll sort of come up back up when we talk about Airbnb. So the, so the Welshman concedes defeat, so to speak. Gareth Jones.

I, by the way, I, I caught up for him with him. I caught up with him for a coffee about 12 years later. And I had to ask him, I'm like, here was my experience of that conversation. Like, what the hell were you thinking? Why didn't you get behind me? And he goes, Joe, come on. I knew that if I told you you couldn't do it, you would. I was like, ah! Oh, you.

Oh, you. Good man. We have a great relationship, and I see him when I go back to campus. That's very cool. So phase shifts. You have that experience. Yeah, I have that experience,

and it's a great segue of sports into my RISD experience. I love basketball, as we've been talking about and I walk into the office of student life one day and I go to the guy at the front desk and say, I want to play on the basketball team. And he gives me this funny face and he goes, we don't have a basketball team. And all of a sudden there's this awkward silence

and we're just staring at each other. And he breaks the silence by saying, you can start one if you want to. And I go, really? What's involved in that? And he goes, well, if you collect a list of 12 other students that want to play, bring it back to me.

I'm like, that's it? I'm like, okay. So I run off and I spend a week putting posters up around the dorms. And I gather names of 11 other people who play basketball. It wasn't actually that hard. And I come back to him like, okay, cool. Now what?

He goes, okay, fill out this form. Take this to the student government meeting on Wednesday to get recognized as a student organization. I'm like, okay. So I go to the meeting. I present the concept. I have a basketball team. Here's the paperwork. Here's the names. Here's like what we think we might need for a budget. It gets approved from the student government. So then I'm like, I go back to him, like, what's the next step? He's like, okay, well you need to find a gym. And, and so one of these,

one thing led to the other. And that year we, we started Rizzy's first basketball team in 40 years and we started this this team it was like a hodgepodge group of of other students and we would rent gym space at a private high school in Providence to go practice in and at this point we're just practicing like we literally have there's no season there's no games there's no other, there's no games, there's no other competition. It's just us scrimmaging each other. And, um, we made some really basic uniforms and just got things off the ground. The next year when I came back to campus, um, was, was different. I'm like, okay, this year we're going to make a season. We're going to play the teams. Like let's turn this into something. Um, and so I get on the phone and I start calling colleges in new England. I'm calling community colleges and, you know, junior, junior

varsity schools. And, um, I get on the phone with some of these coaches and I introduced myself, Hey, this is Joe Gabby calling from the Rhode Island school basketball team. And I'd like to, hello, hello. Pretty much everybody hung up on me in the first couple of phone calls. But then there was one college that took my call. I'll never forget it because I had to sneak out of my graphic design class to take the call. It was a Clark university in Massachusetts. I'm on the phone with their head coach. He's like, yeah, okay, cool. We're not going to send down our varsity team, but I'll send my JV team. And I'm like, perfect. We'll take it. So on December 4th, 2001, we had the first RISD basketball game, RISD versus Clark University.

And at this point, like it's so informal for us. We've got these basic mesh jerseys that are like reversible, basically a practice uniform for anybody else. And I'm player coach leading the team at this point. And we're in not even our own gym because we don't have one. We're in some private high school gym around the corner. And the Clark University bus pulls up and their players start to get off the bus. And I'm going, oh my God,

their shortest guy is taller than our tallest guy. And they get the head coach and three assistant coaches and a trainer comes off. Meanwhile, it's just like 12 scrappy art school students on the court with like basic mesh practice jerseys. And I think once the coach came down to the court, he kind of recognized what he got himself into. And he's like, oh boy.

And so we had a few i think about 150 fans yeah rizzy students show up that that first game um i'd say we got blown out it was 94 to 49 but in my mind that was a huge win because we established something like we got a team established and off the ground it's a real milestone at rizdy yeah and it was an incredible experience the next couple of years um because it was like running a startup. You know, you had to put a team together. You had to raise funding. You had to create a brand.

You had to market that brand. You had to get people into games. And one of the things I was most proud of is that at RISD, the workloads are incredibly difficult. And once you get into your majors, they say sometimes you never see anybody again because they're just so focused on the workload. And other than graduation, the basketball games became the only other time

really during the year where you'd have the full cross-section of campus under the same roof at the same time. Students, faculty, administration, professors, alumni, people from Brown who were just curious and wanted to come over and see what this crazy RISD basketball team was doing. And so it was this really cool moment

where you just bring people together. And that was, I think, really the undertones, the undercurrents of what the team was really about. Sure, it was about sport and competition and staying in shape and the camaraderie of being on the team. Second, that was also about bringing people together. Thematically makes sense. If we're time traveling, looking forward. Yeah. So that was a great experience. I think a lot of people ask what the name of the team is. And because we're an art

school, we didn't have to have traditional names. You know, RISD and any art school is all about self-expression and not holding back. And so there was a legacy of names on campus that all had a particular theme to them. And so the hockey team on campus is called the NADs. So when you cheer, it's go... Go NADs. Yes. nads so when you cheer it's go go nads yes and so when we started the basketball team we had to sort of fall in line with the theme so the team's called the balls and both the nads and the balls are supported by the jock straps which is the cheerleading team and um there's a whole theme

probably maybe we won't go into it here but there's like a whole theme of of sports at risdy that um adds to the i think the the levity and the humor of it are they all testicle related um there was a there was a um i think there was a rowing team at one point called the uh the shafts it might have been the lacrosse team i think was called the shafts at one point um so side note side note makes them well caffeinated do you know where the the word avocado comes from i don't i will tell you it comes from i believe it's i want to say an older mayan language but someone can correct me on the internet i'm sure they will comes from a word ahuacatl tl at the end ahuacatl, T-L at the end, ahuacatl. And avocado grow on trees

hanging one lower than the other in pairs, and that means testicles. So if you want to make a RISD, current RISD students who might want to start another team, you could go with the avocados, but it requires a bit of explanation. What would that sport be?

The most boring juggling team and intramural juggling, remedial juggling team. Juggling team. The first and only juggling team in college. So I have to ask because I've been wanting to debut this question for a while. We talked about crit. We've talked about balls,

which I think is a bit of a reach, but we can segue to buns. When does crit buns enter the picture here? All right. So it's freshman year at RISD. I'm in a drawing class. And the way it works again is like you'd come in and it'd be an eight hour class so in the morning

you'd pin your work up on the wall your drawing assignment from the week before and you'd literally spend all day critiquing it or having to crit and you know people would ask afterwards how'd your crit go oh man my crit was so hard my teacher was so rough on me or like it didn't go well or it was great and about four hours in your picture that the environment you're in an art studio hardwood floors metal stools wooden benches four hours in sitting on these hard uncomfortable surfaces your butt starts to feel it and everyone's wiggling around trying to get comfortable so by the end of the day, you're incredibly sore. And I watched as my classmates exited the art studio with this bun print on the seat of their pants

because all the charcoal dust, paint, and ink that's on these studio surfaces rubbed off onto our pants. And sure enough, I look at mine, my pants are ruined too. So I'm walking back to my dorm room, and I'm thinking, there's got to be a better way. If we're going to endure these crits for the next four years, what if you had a seat cushion that you could sit on to make you comfortable and to keep you clean? And so I got back to my dorm room and I pulled out my sketchbook and I drew that same bun

print shape on the seat of our pants and gave it some dimension. And I called it Crit Buns. And, you know, at this point, I had no idea how to make a product. It's just your first year of design school. So I tucked the sketch away. Now fast forward to five years later. I've now done a dual degree in graphic design

and industrial design. And at this point, I know how to make a prototype. I know how to translate something from a sketchbook into a real working prototype. And so I make crit buns out of hard foam. You can actually sculpt it out of this special foam. And now I have this full-size, hard representation of the shape, which is like two buns that come together

and there's a handle for portability. I take that hard model, I cast it in rubber, and then I pour into the cast a expanding polyurethane foam. So when I took the lid off, there was, looking back at me, the first soft Crip Buns seat cushion. And it was great because now I could walk around to my classmates. I could

say, hey, what do you guys think? How much did you pay for this? What kind of colors would you want? And people, of course, had a cracked a smile when they saw it and they had a good laugh. But I really hit a wall because I had a one-off prototype, but I didn't know how to get it to the next stage. And I certainly didn't have the money or the funds to do that on my own. It was around this time, my senior year, where I noticed a poster on campus that says, competition for the design diploma, submit your ideas here. And at RISD, they give you your, you know, degree, paper degree, and they also give the graduating class a different object every year. So I submit Crip Buns for the competition, and it wins. It gets selected to be given out to every graduate from the RISD class

of 2005, which is like freaking incredible. However, they tell me this on May 1st, graduation is on June 1st. That's not a long time. And in between that, I have to deliver two thesis projects for graphic design and industrial design. I definitely don't have time to take on anything else. How many students are in the graduating class? It's about 600. 600. So I'm like, I'm so exuberant and excited that like, oh my God, they'll pay for the manufacturing of a couple hundred cushions. At the same time, I'm like,

how the hell am I going to get this done? Like there is absolutely no time. And so I start, I get onto Google and I research, I search foam manufacturers. Tim, I called every single search result for the first 15 pages. I was calling people in India. I was calling people in England. I was calling people in Texas. I was calling people in England. I was calling people in Texas. I was calling people in California. And everybody said the same thing. Well, son, you know, it's going to take you about six weeks just to make the metal mold and about another four weeks for production. Sorry, quick. And I just happen in time. Now, um, at this point, the school's getting a little bit nervous because the clock is ticking here and they call me and they say, um, how's the project coming? And I'm like, it's cool. Don't worry. And they go, uh, so is it going to happen? And I'm like, probably. And they go, well, you have until Friday at five o'clock to tell us if it's a go or not.

So I'm like, okay. And what is this on a Monday on a Tuesday? Something like Monday. All right. So fast forward, it's four o'clock on Friday afternoon. I have no options. Everybody's telling me, no, it's never going to happen. It's impossible. The manufacturing can take many, many weeks, if not months. And I'm like, I don't have that many weeks. We've got three now. And so I go outside the industrial design building. It's like a sunny afternoon and I'm laying on the grass right on the, on the river in Providence. And I feel the breeze on my face, the sound of the birds and I'm looking up at the sky and I'm thinking to myself, I have to figure this out. I can't,

I'm not going to give up on this. What haven't I thought of yet? And I realized that the guy that runs the metal shop in the industrial design building, this guy, Steve, I haven't talked to him yet. So I run back into the industrial design building. I go, Steve, here's what's going on. And he goes, I've got this friend, Sam up in Cumberland, Rhode Island, who's got a tool shop. Why don't you give him a call? Maybe he'll help you out. So I get on the phone with this guy, Sam, and I just pour it out to him. I'm like, Sam, this is what I want to do. I give him every ounce of enthusiasm that I have. And at the end he goes, Oh, you really want this, don't you? And I'm like,

yes, whatever you can do. And he goes, all right, here's what I'll do. I'll move a couple projects around. If you send me the 3D CAD file today, I can make the tool this weekend and send it wherever you need me to send it on Monday. And I'm like, oh my God, I'm going to call you right back. Because I remembered

there was a pool float company that I spoke to the week before in Connecticut who... Pool float. So it's like they make like water wings or whatever you would lay in in your pool. Yeah, pool float noodles and the things that float in water made out of foam.

And the guy told me, he said, well, I remembered something. He goes, you know, we can't make the mold in time, but if you find somebody else, we can produce the cushion. And the other thing is it had to have a silk screen on the top that said RISD 2005 on it. And so I call back this guy, Christoph,

at like 4.50 PM, right? On a Friday. He should have been gone. Like, I don't know how I caught him still in the office. And I go, Christoph, it's Joe at RISD. I found somebody to make the mold. He'll have it to you by Monday. Can we wake at work? And he goes, you really want this, don't you? I'm like, yes, whatever you can do. And he goes, all right, here's the address to send it to you. So I literally called the school back. It might as well have been 5 o'clock. I'm like, we got it.

Here's where to send the purchase order, da-da-da-da-da. Two weeks later, the day before graduation, 600 Crip-Ons showed up on campus with a silkscreen on top that said RISD class of 2005 it was the day before it was the impossible

of how do you make 600 Crip Bones 300 red 300 blue with a silkscreen on top in such a short amount of time and everybody's telling you no

like everybody just stared at me and was like, this is never going to happen. I was exhausted by the time that happened. However, it was so fun to see my classmates running around with Crip Buns. Everybody had a pair and it was really fulfilling. And it was worth all the effort and all the energy. And I finished my two theses successfully on time, and I got to graduate and everything. And while a lot of my classmates went off to great jobs at some at NASA doing industrial design

and some at some of the big design firms like IDEO and others, I made a decision. I said, you know, RISD and just design school in general does such an exceptional job of helping you come up with a creative process to think of really original creative ideas. They usually hit a wall, though, which is that you stop at the prototype and then you move on to the next project. And for me, it built up this incredible desire to figure out how did, how did, how do you get to the shelf of a store? Like, how does your idea transition from that one-off prototype all the way to the shelf of the store? And so I thought, well, I want to, I want to decode this black box. I have to figure

this out. So I made a decision that I was going to use Crip Buns to help figure out how you get a product from an idea in your head to a sketchbook at the shelf of a store. So the day after graduation, I started my first company to make and sell Crip Buns. And the beauty of it is that I didn't get paid for the graduation project, but they gave me the metal mold afterward, which is a few thousand dollars. So with the biggest expense out of the way, I was off the run. So what happened to Crip Buns? Why aren't you making Crip Buns today? So that summer, I started to develop the brand.

I followed the patent, which has a design patent on it. I followed the trademark and everything. And I went back to the school that summer and I said, you know, that was so fun for the graduating class. What if we did this for the incoming class as a welcome to RISD gift? And they love the idea and they placed their first order. And so on top of that order, I, I tacked on my own inventory. So I did this production run of I think a thousand cushions. Right. And two things happened. The first is that there were now 400 students running around campus with Crip Buns, actually using them in the studios. I could go talk to them.

I could take photos of them. I could actually start to build stories and narratives around how they use the product. And the second thing that happens is, I'll never forget, in my apartment in Providence, in the basement of like this really old kind of early 1900s apartment, I had about 10 boxes of hundreds of Crip Ones, like filled up this entire room. And I'm sitting there staring at them and thinking, oh boy, nobody's coming to my basement to buy these things. I have to go out into the world and figure out how to sell these. How do I sell these things?

So I put together a sales sheet and Um, and, and I, um, put on my best shirt and my best shoes and like just the best kind of like professional look that I could have. And the first star I walked into was the Brown university bookstore. And I asked for the store manager and we sit down in this little conference room and I started to go through my spiel and I put the sales sheet in front of her and a sample cushion and I'm going through the whole thing and I'm like, you know, giving all my enthusiasm and about 30 or so seconds in, she looks at me, she goes, no thanks and gets up and leaves the room. And I'm just sitting there in this tiny little fluorescent lit conference room by myself with my cushion, my sales sheet and no sale, like actually a pretty

horrible rejection. Um, so I walked back to, uh, to my apartment, very slow walk, kind of like a Charlie Brown, Snoopy kind of walk. And, and I'm thinking to myself, well, that sucked. I'm like, how the hell am I going to sell these cushions if that's the reaction I'm thinking to myself, well, that sucked. I'm like, how the hell am I going to sell these cushions if that's the reaction I'm going to get? And it was in that moment where I remembered this sales equation that I had heard at this entrepreneur weekend at Brown University that I snuck into one time. And the guy talking gave this equation

for whenever you introduce a new idea into the world. It was an equation for receiving rejection and how to move past rejection. And the equation was SW squared plus WC equals MO. Wow. Hell of a memory. Yeah. I'll give myself zero seconds. I already forgot it. All right. One more time. SW squared. SW squared. Plus WC. Plus WC equals MO.

All right. So SW squared is some will love your idea, some won't. Plus who cares equals move on. I like it. I like it. So I'm telling myself, okay, SW squared, who cares? I just got to move on. So I'm telling myself, okay, it has to be square. Who cares? I just got to move on. And so I did. I'm like, all right, I'm just going to find another store. Some people are going to love it. Some people aren't. It doesn't matter. I just got to keep going. I can't get hung up in one person saying no. I need to go keep going until I can find somebody that says yes. So I went to the next store. They said no. Went to the third store.

They also said no. I went to the fourth store, which was this little tiny gift boutique store on Thayer Street in Providence. I know Thayer. Yes. Had a Halloween on Thayer. It's a hell of a Halloween. It is.

That's a crazy street to be on for Halloween. So I go into the store. I give them the pitch, the sales sheet. At this point, I'm tweaking everything. I'm iterating as I go. And the woman goes, I'd into the store, I give him the pitch, the sales sheet. And at this point I'm, I'm tweaking everything. I'm iterating as I go. And the woman goes, I'd love to bike. I'd love to buy some cushions from you.

And I'm like, Oh my God. And she goes, I'd love to buy four. And I'm like thinking inside, hell yeah, she could have bought one and I would have been happy. So she starts to go to the thing.

Well, here's, you can ship them to, and here's the address. And I go, Oh no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'll go pack them up at my house and bring them back to you today.

She's like, really? I'm like, yeah. So I ran home, I packed up my cushion. I was so excited. I gave them to her.

I went back later that night after they closed. It's like, uh, it's dark on Thayer street. I go to the front of the store and I press my face up against this cold glass and I can kind of see my, my breath in the glass and there's a dim light on in the back of the boutique. They're closed and I'm scanning the store and I'm squinting and there it is. I can see Crip-Uns on the shelf of the store. And I'm like, fuck yes. Like did it. Like, everything after that point was downhill.

Like, I was like, I knew how to walk into a store. I knew how to talk to a buyer. Downhill in a good sense. Like, you're pushing the boulder downhill. Right. Before, I was like trying to climb uphill against all these obstacles. Now, it was just like coasting downhill. Now, was that because you had the skills or because you had proven to yourself that you could do it?

Proven to myself I could do it. It was that, like like one proof point? Four cushions, four cushions on the shelf of the store. I'm like, hallelujah. Somehow it happened. Um, now I have like even more confidence to walk into a store, meet with a buyer and ask the question, you know, what's the process to get a new product into your store? And I could sit down with them and talk about the products,

how original it was. Um, so I make trips to Boston and talk about the product, how original it was. So I'd make trips to Boston and talk to stores there. I'd go down to New York. I'd talk to Pratt. I'd talk to School of Visual Arts. I'd talk to Parsons. I'd talk to more stores in Providence.

What was the furthest away you traveled to sell Crip Buns? When I'd go home to Atlanta for the holidays, I'd sell them at stores in Atlanta. I mean, everywhere I went, I was always carrying a cushion with me. I talked to anybody about it. It was like everybody I talked to, I was just practicing the sales pitch and just to get comfortable with it.

So that product and that concept, it was never meant to be anything huge. It was just meant to be grad school in essence, to help teach me like the whole stack of product development, because I was doing everything out of my apartment from the distribution, the packaging, the fulfillment, the website, the press, like everything was run from my desktop computer next to my bed in my bedroom. Um, and so I got like in a very micro, like, you know, very small scale. I got the full, you know, ecosystem of what it means to run something obviously at a very small manageable scale, which is perfect. Um, and so one of the, one of the defining moments was I set a goal for myself. I said, what's the store shelf that would be the pinnacle for me?

Like, what would I just be the most proud of? And one of the most heralded shelves for any designer to get on is a shelf at the design store at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Huge. Huge. I mean, there's legends there. Like, you can get Eames stuff. You can get George Nelson stuff.

You can get, like, the greats of the greats, right? Along with modern things, of course. And so I set my goal. I'm like, I'm going to figure out how to get Crate Buns into the MoMA store. And after two years of just not giving up, I finally got my first order from MoMA. I will never forget that phone call. Okay. Now you are clearly gifted or you've developed and cultivated gifts with art and design. You've also had a lot of practice pitching, right? Through good and bad experiencing rejection and acceptance. So what, what got you the acceptance i mean what was what was the like what was the what was the pitch what was the process at a certain point i think they realized i wasn't gonna go away and they're like all right let's just just ease your life this guy who knows i never i never asked them um but the product ended up selling out of their store did you sell people did you send

people there to buy them i didn't have to I remember going, I definitely made a trip down to New York after I shipped them the order and I walked in and there it was on the shelf of the moment. I took a picture and I just thought like, wow, like this seemed, if you, if you, if I had told myself three years earlier that I would have made a product that would be on the shelf of the moment store, I would have said, you're crazy. Like that's impossible. So what gave you the chutzpah to pursue it for two years? Was it the fact that you'd, I think it was just, there were so many impossibles that you'd proven possible to yourself. Was it something else? It was just wanting to experience that feeling. Like what I imagined it might feel like if I

were to ever accomplish something that was so such a stretch goal for me. Um, I don't know, like I just developed a relationship with the buyer at the time. And I think that just evolved into an order eventually. And, um, you know, at that point, like, wow, what was next? Right. So was that now I'm going to prompt one thing because it just popped into my head was MoMA before or after, I want to say trade show in Japan. It was before it was before. Yes. We can't, I only remember bits and pieces of this, but can you describe Japan? So the product ended up taking me around the world. And this was still for colleges?

Well, no, I mean, this is for any kind of, you know, gift fair or any kind of event where there's other designers selling their things. So I got connected with this website called designboom.com, one of the biggest design blogs in the world. And they had this thing called the Gift Mart. And they basically would invite designers from around the world to come sell their things at these big design week events where it would be really hard to afford access to it

as an independent young designer. They would kind of create that opportunity for you. Pay for the booth. Exactly. They have the entire space. You get a small fee to pay, but nothing like the actual cost. And so they subsidized it to make it possible. And so I got involved in that and it took me all over the place.

I traveled to Sydney, Australia, where I sold the cushion. I traveled to New York and I traveled to Tokyo for Design Week one year. And this was fascinating because I got to experience what it was like to sell the cushion in person directly to consumers. It's one thing to sell to a store manager than it is to sell to the actual customer. Very different. The other thing was RISD has these events where the alumni can come together and sell their creations. Whether it's ceramics or furniture products. And so at this point, I had figured out, after hundreds of interactions with people face-to-face,

I had designed my stand with the cushions and the big signs that crit buns, supporting creativity where others can't. And I actually have seen it so many times at this point, I was able to break the sales process down into five steps. There were five stages to the Crip Ones sales process. The first stage is what I call the, what the hell is that stage where people are walking by and they do this double take and they look at it and they're like, what is that? But the shape and the color is interesting enough to draw them in. And so then they get to stage two, which is called the touch and feel phase. They grab the product off the stand. They squeeze it. They realize it's soft. The first smile. This is also my dating process, by the way. Please continue.

They, they kind of get a smile on their face, and they flip it over. Right. And they enter stage three, which is the story phase. So on the back of the package, I tell the story in a couple of lines. How the product was concepted,

how it was created, who made it. And so you see them reading the story. Ah! And then they smile, and they make the connection of why the thing is the way it is. Then there's stage four. Step number four is tried and true. I've seen this everywhere. They immediately start going like this with the cushion there. They're looking around because they want to try it out. Does it deliver what it says it's going to do? Does it make any hard surface more comfortable? So I always have a demo chair nearby for people to try it out. And so people sit down on it and

as they're sitting on it, I had a chair next to them and I'd lean over to them and I figured out the question to ask. I asked somebody, how do you see this fitting into your life? And what's amazing is that people told me all kinds of different uses that I never even imagined for the cushion. There's actually 35 different uses for it. People use it for camping trips. People take it to baseball games. Soccer moms love it for their kids. Pregnant women love it because it takes pressure off your tailbone when you sit down because it's got a dip in the middle. People with sciatica love it because again, the dip in the middle takes pressure for tailbone. I learned so many uses for that thing just by asking people that question.

And the minute that people could connect it to something that's important in their life, there's a very high percentage that they bought it. And in 1999, it wasn't a huge commitment. Bank breaker. So that was stage four. Stage five, I never could have predicted. And this was really the magic of learning what it's not only about a product, but it's about a story as well. I would literally watch people buy my product. They'd stand up. They turned to the next person in line. He'd say, what the hell is that? And

the person who just bought it would literally tell them verbatim the story about the back of the package. They would sell the product for me. I would just sit back and watch this happen. And I'm like, this is amazing. And I realized the power of story in that moment, that design is more than just a product. It's more than just, you know, digital experience. It's that cushion is 50% foam and 50% story. It was a really valuable lesson. And so I learned from that every time that I went to these different events. So here we are in Japan. We're in Tokyo.

And it's really exciting. My first time to Japan, I'm like thrilled. I'm like, my senses are just like overwhelmed with everything about Tokyo. And I'm at this five day design event for design week. This is back in like 2008, 2007.

And so I go out there with, um, 40 cushions, which are these two giant boxes. Like these, they take up a lot of volume. Right. And I'm like,

I take those things on the plane and then I take them to the Tokyo subway system. And like, it's really awkward because you can't carry, you have to like drag them. And it's like, I take those things on the plane, and then I take them through the Tokyo subway system. And it's really awkward because you can't carry them. You have to drag them. And it's like, I'm like this. For those people who haven't been to Tokyo, every once in a while you'll encounter a subway car that has lots of space. That is not the default,

particularly if you're going during any busy period. There are, in fact, certain stations where they have attendants wearing white gloves will push people into the car so that the doors can close and it's sardines in a can. So I'm just imagining you dragging these things around. giant cardboard boxes of 20 Crip Buns each that are like heavy and awkward. I'm trying to navigate the narrow subway system of Tokyo. And I get to my setup at the design fair and I've got this little tiny folding table to my left and right and all around me are other designers as part of Design Boom. And I'm so excited.

As people come walking up on day one, I start talking to them to try to tell them the story and nobody speaks English. And by the end of day one, I've sold a total of zero crit buns. And I'm thinking to myself, Oh my God, this is, this is not good. I'm definitely not going home with 40 cushions. I need to change my strategy here because this is not going to work. The story is not translating. The power of the story that works so well has no impact here whatsoever. So thankfully, the young designer next to me was Japanese and we struck up a friendship because we're going to be together for the next couple of days. And I'm like, I have a friendship because we're going to be together for the next couple days. And I'm like, I have a problem here. I need to translate these things. She's like, well, I can help you translate if you want to make any written material. So I designed this poster

overnight, this giant poster that is all in Japanese with pictures of crit buns. I had a picture of a stadium seat with an arrow pointing to it and stadium seat seating in Japanese and then I had somebody kneeling in a garden. I had somebody meditating on it and she was so kind to translate for me. I ran into Kinko's that night, got it printed in downtown Tokyo

and the next day I had this beautiful poster that did all the explanation and had demo chair printed out in Japanese on the demo chair. And one by one, somebody actually made a sale and I was like, Oh my God, okay, this is going to work. And then I had another guy who actually happened to be a RISD grad who was there just visiting. He spoke Japanese. He's like, if you want to help translate, I'm happy to do this for you. So, uh, bless his heart. He was amazing. He actually would like draw people over to my little folding table with my stacks of Crip Buns everywhere. And he would tell the story in Japanese. And I'll never forget the last day. It was like towards the end of the day, I mean,

kind of closing down and we sold the last pair of crib buns. And there's this picture of him and I sitting there at this empty table being like, Oh my God, I can't believe we did it. So I was able to pay for my trip basically by the sale of these crib buns. Um, it was just a great lesson in like having to figure out how to translate your story, um, beyond just, you know, English speakers in my case. Um, that was a, a role and an experience. So man, that, that project took me all over the place. I got to meet the, the guy who invented

the foam finger, this guy, Gerald Foss, who's here in Texas, um, uh, to see if he wanted to do manufacturing at one point. Um, and you go into his lobby and he's got like the original foam finger from the 1970s in the glass case. Right. Totally random. Um, I got to meet the late Billy Mays. Oh yeah. Infomercials. OxiClean.

So I applied at one point. And many, many more. Yeah. Hey, I'm Billy Mays. Welcome. We're going to show you this right now. And, um, there was this, uh, uh, the reality show at one point for inventors and people that made products,

and for some reason, I was inspired to submit Crip Buns, and so I flew to LA one weekend, and I'm in this lobby for the casting with all these other inventors, and everybody had really weird stuff, like a lot of stuff for cats. I feel like cats running around, and it's like a lot of pet stuff.

And there's me like in one of my best shirts holding my crit buns like really proud. And the producer comes over and they mic me up and they're like, OK, we want you to walk down that hallway and go through those double doors. And that's all they said. And so I'm like, OK, so I got my products. Proud entrepreneur here. I walk down the hallway. It's just like dark. The lights are off this dark hallway.

All I can see is like these two illuminated doors at the end. And I opened the doors and there, this huge conference table is Billy Mays and one other co-star. And then there's like all these cameras and all these lights pointed at you. He goes, Hey, I'm Billy Mays. Come on in.

And I sit down in the chair and suddenly I'm on this like pitch session it was like shark tank before shark tank right right like i'm having to pitch him on why my product's so great and um it wasn't going so well until he tried it out and he like actually got up and he sat down before he goes goes, Oh yeah, this is pretty good. And, um, and then they said, okay, thanks. And like I walked out, it's like, it's like blitz of like five minutes of just pitch mode. And it was like getting peppered with all these questions and all these lights on you and this cameras. I did not get on the show. Um, but it was just one of these crazy moments of like these unexpected things that this this product these experiences this product brought me so so why are you not why are you not the the titan of the crit buns empire why did you stop so crit buns this goes back to risd i switched from being in painting to being into industrial design largely in part because i learned about Charles and Ray Eames, two designers from the mid-20th century that were a couple. Ray was the wife, Charles was the husband.

And they produced design that is legendary. It's still referenced today. It's in the MoMA, in the permanent collection. It's iconic. And they dedicated their lives to producing the best design to the most people for the permanent collection. It's iconic. And they dedicated their lives to producing the best design to the most people for the least price. And they were really celebrated for democratizing good design and making it accessible.

I'd also had the chair project with Gareth Jones and fell in love with making things and realized that I wanted to switch from, you know, this more creative pursuit of painting, which was more about, you know, the expression of ideas through that medium into the expression of ideas through industrial design, which was cool to me because you could make something, objects, and it could be replicated thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of times. You could actually touch millions of people with your designs, just like the Eames had.

And so this was my motivation to switch into industrial design. You could use design to improve people's lives, and it could be done at scale. You could touch a lot of people all at once. And so RISD in the industrial design department did something brilliant. Our first year in the program, they put us all in the school vans, and they drove us out to the Rhode Island State landfill.

And here we are driving through these canyons of trash. Like you have your faces pressed up against the bus window, and you can't even see to the top of the landfill for the state. And you get out to the top, and you get out of the vans, and you're looking back over this just landscape of garbage. And for me, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I'm like, wow. I do not want to spend my life making things

that contribute to making the landfill better, bigger. That is not interesting to me. It was like a really impactful moment where I just started to feel a slight sense of guilt that I was now studying a discipline that was about making more stuff. And so it really kicked off this enthusiasm or consciousness around how do you make stuff that's environmentally considered. Cradle to cradle? Cradle to cradle. Yeah. Bill McDonough's book, which was also came out around this time was hugely influential. Natural capitalism kind of came around in this time. These, there's starting to be this, this other

way of thinking about how we consume things in the planet. And certainly you feel a responsibility as a designer because you're pretty close to the origins of those things. Sometimes you don't decide the strategy of, hey, we need to make this product, but you're definitely in the field of view of being able to decide what kind of materials to use, what's the whole life cycle of a product. And so with Crip Buns, I actually delayed the launch of that for six months

because I was trying to find a foam that was environmentally considered. And I called everybody. I was talking to people in the Midwest making foam out of soybeans at one point. I found a woman in England who started to make plastic out of bubble gum that you scrape off of the sidewalk. Um, but I couldn't find anybody that

made a foam that was appropriate for the product. So I decided to go forward with the product and, um, that sparked this other idea, which was, okay, um, I've learned two things from this. A, the foam doesn't exist. And B, there wasn't even a good source to try to find the foam in the first place. Right? Like Amazon was starting to really emerge at this time and it was so easy to find a book on Amazon or like content.

I was like, why isn't there a site where you can find sustainable materials? I talked to some of my classmates that we had graduated at this point and became very clear that whether you're in architecture or fashion design or package design or industrial design, there was a growing consciousness around we want to feel good about the things that we're making. And so I realized, well, I'm not a material

scientist. Maybe I'm not going to invent a foam. However, I know how to make a website. So what if I started a site that would allow any designer to connect with the sources of sustainable materials, whether it's bioplastics or, you know, reclaim glass or, you know, organic cotton.

And so a classmate and I partnered up together, a buddy named Matt, and we created this website to help solve our own problem of having access to sustainable materials. And, um, you know, the site started, and it was this combination of ecology and intellect, so we called it Ecolect. And it was basically Google for sustainable materials.

And we'd find manufacturers around the world, and we'd plug them into the system, and it was basically like a really high-end search engine and community for people who cared about this topic. So we slowed down CritBs to work on this website. You know, the thing is that the product remained. I had figured out manufacturing abroad. The Crip Buns website was up.

It was getting press at this point from around the world. It was getting blogged about. I was shipping orders out of my garage. At this point, I moved to San Francisco, my garage became Crip Buns headquarters, and it got into some of the big catalogs in the US. One of them's called Solutions Catalog, which went out to like, I don't know,

hundreds of thousands of homes. And I had these orders flowing in my garage, I had to employ some friends to come help pack up Crip Buns, these orders of hundreds at a time, It was insane. Great learning experience. And, you know, in fact, Tim, there's something I brought for you today. You're kidding. I have one of the original pairs of Crip Buns for you, my friend. Amazing. This is incredible. Thank you so much. Oh my God. Crit buns for you, my friend. Amazing. This is incredible. Thank you so much.

Oh my God. Look at this. You're very welcome. Crit buns, a seat cushion for artists and designers. For the love of the crit. And then on the back, we've got buns, TM. These buns approve for use on hard surfaces. Buns are not a life-saving or flotation device.

Good. Good note. They're intended solely for cheek-to-cheek comfort. Amazing. Thank you. You get the story on the back of the label. Oh yeah, here we go. The Crip Buns story. Hours of critiquing from the cold, hard, dirty floor gave a young design student

more than a sore bum. Provided the inspiration for a better way, colon, a seat cushion offering day-long comfort and cleaner pants to art students worldwide. The name and shape? They originated from the charcoal bun prints students left behind on metal stools and hardwood floors. www.critbuns.com

The term crit, slang for critique, is the presentation of a student's artwork before professors and peers and is a staple of every art and design school experience. Wait a minute. My favorite part. So you've got patent spending, trademark and copyright.

2005-06 Juice Studios, LLC. Critiqued in USA All Rights Reserve drop us a line highbrow at crippuns.com printed with soy ink approved by the CBBOD I don't know what that is and then you have a bun shaped barcode on the back

for scanning this is great man I can see how... That chair's already pretty soft. It is already pretty soft. I think I will save this for my traveling hard surface experiences. Thank you. You're very welcome. So, Crip Buns is slowing down,

but it's funny, every so often I still get an order. I still go down to the garage. Still? Still. And I still pack it up and ship it out. And, you know, life's changed quite a bit since then. But it's a great reminder for me of, like, those early days. I was just hustling.

I was trying to get stuff done. And of, like, the enthusiasm and the exuberance of bringing an idea to life. It was a rush. And then you go from physical to digital. What did you learn from the eCollect experience? Well, eCollect launched at a time, and this might be hard to understand now, but if you go back 10 plus years, around 2007, Web 2.0,

it's happening on the internet, and revenue is not cool, right? It's crazy to think about now. The new economy. Web 2.0 revenue wasn't cool. Eyeballs were cool. Traffic was great, but revenue didn't matter.

And so, unfortunately, we subscribed to that as well with eCollect, and our service was free, and we didn't make any money on it. We bootstrapped the whole thing and never took investment on it. And the one thing that we did innovate on that actually did make money for us is we called the Green Box. And the Green Box was basically like a physical magazine that we shipped out on a quarterly basis

that allowed people to build an actual materials library for themselves. So we'd ship actual samples with these beautifully designed placards that gave you all the information about it with a special integrated hook. So you can imagine a whole wall of materials that you'd have in your design studio or your design team in-house or consultancy, whatever the thing was, or even a design school for materials library. And that all right except it was so laborious I'd be down in the garage like zip tying things together and design all these cards and then to get the stickers and like it just it took way too long versus on how much we made and so around this time I also have a day job. What's your day job? My day job was I got a fellowship from a book publisher called Chronicle Books.

Yes. And they had a fellowship, which is a six-month program for recent graduates, typically for graphic designers. They introduced one for industrial designers. I'm thinking, oh, my God, this is perfect. I've got a graphic design background as well. Chronicle makes beautiful, beautiful books. Their books are like objects, right?

They really, what I learned there was about the importance of detail and craft. Now by fellowship, I mean, that sounds like you're given a stipend to pursue your art, but are you also? It was like a glorified intern glorified intern yeah much more attractive when you call it fellowship it is much more desirable and it worked and i got that role for six months and um had a great time there um really got to work alongside some world-class graphic designers so that's how you're paying the bills while you're offering this free service and um i i eventually get a full-time offer and I take it.

And so I'm there doing industrial design work, working on packaging for high-end books. So they did the book for George Lucas on Star Wars. And I got to design the really high-end case. So this book was huge. It was like 20 pounds. It's like one of those really thick coffee table books. I did a package for Hugh Hefner.

He did a book on the centerfolds, every centerfold since 1954, I believe, starting with Marilyn Monroe. And so I got to design this custom leather briefcase that this book came in with the blind emboss of the Playboy bunny on the front. Anyway, there's a lot of cool projects there. But at a certain point,

Ecolect was growing and I realized it needed my full time efforts. And so I made a decision. I said, you know, um, I need to either stick with this job, which is getting very comfortable at that time, or I need to take this plunge into really doing the startup full time. And so, um, I quit my job. It's like 2007, 2008, 2007.

It's my job to do e-collecting Crip Buns full time. And around this time, the rent goes up on our apartment. And it's around this time that my former classmate, Brian Chesky moves in with me to be my roommate. And this is foreshadowing another major event in my life, but we won't get there just yet. All right.

So make this plunge of stepping into Eclect and Crip Buns. Now, all this while, I'm now living in San Francisco. And the thing is, since high school, since the first.com, when I was living in Atlanta, I would come home every day and I would be enthralled at the stories that I was reading about of all these internet companies that were starting. You had, um, you know, eBay and Amazon and Yahoo and excite.com and Lycos Lycos, and there was so much entrepreneurial spirit. And I had this sense that one day I wanted to run my own thing. I didn't know what it was going to be.

Maybe it was a gallery or something. Who knows what kind of business it would be. And so Chronicle was my path out to San Francisco, which is where I always wanted to be, because that first.com, all paths led back to the Bay Area. Oh, for sure. And I'm like, well, that seems to be the place to go if to the Bay Area. Oh, for sure. Right? And I'm like, well, that seems to be the place to go if you want to get an idea off the ground.

And so I finally move out there. I bring Crip Buns with me. I bring the Ecolect concept with me. And I'm living in San Francisco. And during RISD, I had this radar on in the back of my mind that people that I met with, friends that I made, I was sort of like trying to find somebody else who had similar aspirations that I did,

somebody else who may want to co-found something with me in the future one day, and like be a partner in a business of some kind. And so at the end of RISD, there was a very short list of people that I felt I would just absolutely love to start something with. The guy at the top of the list was this guy named Brian Chesky. We got to know each other through sports on campus because I ran the basketball team.

He ran the hockey team. So we got to know each other via sports. And there was one project that we had together in industrial design where it was for a client in the hair care space. And we got to reinvent hair care products like blow dryers and curling irons. And for the final presentation, Brian and I went in with this team and our concepts were so wildly different than everybody else's that I remember looking at being like, wow, like this guy, when we're in a room together, we can do really creative things. And as the year went on and before we graduated, I just had this growing feeling that like there was something special about this guy. He knew how to rally people together. He knew how to get them excited. Uh, he had his own project,

um, around fitness that he got people to volunteer their time to help do design on and marketing on. And I just remember being really inspired by him. And it's the night before graduation. He's about to move to Los Angeles. I'm about to, you know, I was going to stay in Providence to work on Crip Buns. And I decided to invite him out to dinner to tell him how I feel about this. And so over a slice of pizza on Thayer street, I tell him, I go, Brian, I just want you to know, I think we're going to start a company one day. I think they're going to write a book about it. And he kind of

laughed it off. Oh yeah. Yeah. And, um, he ends up going to Los Angeles. I ended up finding my way to San Francisco via Chronicle Books. And very quickly, once I'm in San Francisco, recognize that it is, in fact, an epicenter for entrepreneurship. There's so much activity going on around me. Web 2.0 is like the web is back. And I start calling him like, Brian, I know what's going on in LA, but you got to get up here.

Like, there's so much activity, so much action happening here. And he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I got some stuff going. And like, this went on for at least a year of trying to recruit him to get up to San Francisco. And so at a certain point, the roommates that I was living with move out and I'm left with this three bedroom apartment. And I call him like, Brian, I've got a room available. It's now or never. If you're going to move, this is the perfect window to come up here. I've got a room available. It's now or never. If you're going to move, this is the perfect window to come up here. I've got a room waiting for you with your name on it. And I have to give him a lot of credit. He made a courageous move. He quit his job. He packed his life into his Honda Civic and he drove

from Los Angeles to San Francisco and became a roommate. I have to tell you, Tim, there was this incredible excitement in the air. It's like the band was back together. All right, what are we going to do? What could we possibly create together? And this is the same week that I quit my job at Chronicle. I've got Crit Buns and E-Collect in the background. We're going to come up with something big together,

Brian and I. And that's when I opened the mail one day, that same week he arrives. And it's a letter from my landlord. And it says, dear Joe, your rent is now 25% higher. And I run to my online bank account and I see that, um, I actually don't have enough money in the bank cause I have no paychecks coming in to make rent. Brian has the same problem. And suddenly our backs are against the wall. There's like this dark stormy cloud that forms over our apartment. All the enthusiasm is gone.

Now it's just terror and fear. How are we not going to get evicted next month? We need to make the rent check. And that's when I'm sitting in my living room one day that week, I've got my laptop open and I'm looking at the website for a design conference for industrial designers coming to San Francisco, you know, two weeks later. And it says in big red letters, hotels are sold out in San Francisco. I'm thinking, oh man, what a bummer for somebody who wants to come last minute,

they've got nowhere to stay. And I glance over the top of the laptop screen into the vast space of the living room and start to think, what if I pull my airbed out of the closet and blow it up on the floor? We could host a designer for less than the cost of a hotel and maybe make some money to make our rent check. So I email Brian, and he loves the idea.

We actually get two more airbeds, and we start to think through this experience. What if we offered airport pickup? What if we gave them a map to San Francisco and a BART pass at the subway and we cooked them breakfast in the morning? And so we created this concept called the airbed and breakfast. We made a website, airbedandbreakfast.com. It was four pages, pictures of us, pictures of the airbeds. We talked about the neighborhood. And we were so proud of our website, except who the hell on earth knew to go to airbedandbreakfast.com?

Nobody. Not exactly a high-volume search term. Right. So one night, we realized that we have a marketing problem. The conference has come up pretty quick. We need to get the word out. So we emailed the design blogs, the top design blogs that were covering the conference.

And neither of us had really been on design blogs before, other than Ecolact and CritBuns. And it was kind of a Hail Mary. We just sent these emails out to like, presstips at blank.com. The next morning, we came down, we opened our computers and Tim, it felt like Christmas.

There we were at the top of the design blogs with headlines like need a place for the conference this weekend. Crash with Joe and Brian and there's some aloft. Amazing. One was like networking. Your jam jam is on air bed and breakfast. And this idea that we had, you know,

a week or two earlier was now being blogged about to the world in the design community. And so they responded. We had emails from all over the world, from Brazil, from England, from Japan of people dying to have one of these airbeds in our living room. People started sending us their LinkedIn profiles and their design portfolios and their resumes being like trying to convince us to pick them to be one of the lucky three guests. Amazing. At one point, my phone rings with an area code that was unfamiliar. I didn't answer it. Suddenly I have a voicemail. I'm listening to the voicemail and it's this guy named Amol who's

telling me he's going, my name's Amol and I just saw the airbender breakfast concept and I have to stay with you guys. Call me back. I have to stay at the airbender breakfast. Here's my phone number. And then in my inbox, I've got like two emails from this guy. I'm like, how did he find my information? Um, so I call him back and he sends his design portfolio, checks out. He's, you know, a grad student at Arizona state university studying industrial design. And he becomes our first guest. And then we accept two other people, one woman named Kat, another gentleman named Michael, all were over the age of 30. Kat was a single, a solo traveler from Boston. Michael was a 45-year-old

husband and father of five from Utah. And there was all this excitement when the guests arrive. It's like, you know, we made sure the bet, the airbeds were properly inflated. There was a mint on the pillow. Like we cleaned the place up in advance. We stocked the fridge with OJ and bagels and, you know, fresh eggs. And, um, we had everything ready to go. I have to tell you, Tim, the next couple of nights were just some of the most exciting because this thing unfolded that we didn't expect, which is that, yeah, we made some money on it, but more than that, we became friends with them. And we really got to show them San Francisco through the lens of us,

through our favorite things to do, our favorite places to eat. So imagine the difference of this. You're at a conference, and at the end of the day, you can retire by yourself to a hotel room that maybe is so much generic or lacks some general personality, or they came back to our apartment, which was lively.

We're cooking dinner together. We're sharing stories from our days at the conference. It was like night and day for them. And they had such a good experience. We took them to our friend's house parties after the conference some nights. We took them to the best burritos in the Mission District, to the farmer's market, the Ferry Building one morning.

And at one point we gave... It's a great place to take visitors. It is. Ferry Building. There was a pachacacha talk during the conference. Who's a what? Pachacacha. It's that format where you have 20 slides in like four minutes.

Right. And the slides just move and you got to give a quick presentation. And so we gave a presentation about Airbed and Breakfast in the moment that we're hosting people on Airbed and Breakfast. And we had our guests up there with us and talked about this concept that came together, you know, two weeks ago is now actually unfolding in front of us right now. And it was just like really met a moment where the guests are now part of the presentation about themselves. And it was totally insane. That's step five of the Crip Buns, aka Airbnb sales process.

Share the story. So I'll never forget when saying goodbye to them, the door click closed. And I look at Brian and I'm like, did we just get paid to make friends? And that, Tim, is when the gears began to turn. Maybe there were other people like us who would also enjoy sharing their extra space

with people coming to their town who want a local experience. And so we told my previous roommate, Nate, who I found on Craigslist, who was a computer science graduate from Harvard, who when he moved out, Brian moved into his room. Now, Nate, the story with him is we lived together for a couple of months and at night we'd come home from our day jobs and we would work on our own projects in the living room. I was working on Crit Buns,

Nate was working on his own startups. And it was remarkable, I'm looking over my shoulder thinking, wow, this guy loves to work. We have similar work ethics. And I'm like, if I ever need a computer programmer, I'm gonna call on Nate. Little did I know that Nate was saying the same thing about me. If I ever need a designer, I'm going to call on Joe. So Nate moves out, Brian moves in. And

after this one weekend, um, yeah, a couple months actually passed and we didn't move on the concepts. We went home for new year's that year. This is 2007. So it happened in October. We go home for new year's in 2007 and invariably people ask you, Hey, how's it going? What are you working on? What's going on in San Francisco? Um, like we're entrepreneurs and they go, great. What are you entrepreneuring? And like, didn't really have a lot going on. CryptBones was kind of there. EqualX kind of struggling along. There's no funding at this point.

But I did tell people about this crazy weekend where we had these three guests sleep on airbeds in our apartment. And it was remarkable what happened next. People either leaned in and went, oh, my God, that's amazing. I would love to travel and stay with a local. And the other half of people went, oh my God, you're crazy. You had a stranger in your home.

What were you thinking? And this like visceral reaction that caused people in these conversations was like, wow, like this really gets people fired up in either direction. Maybe there's something here. So Brian, we come back in January. Brian comes back.

He's from New York, upstate. He comes back, and we had similar experiences. He's like, yeah, I told people about it, and they either loved it or hated it. And we're like, yeah, maybe this is the idea that we should expand on. So we're like, okay, we know we need a real programmer. So I'm like, well, I'm going to call on Nate. So I get a drink with Nate. I tell him about this crazy weekend with these three guests. Nate loves the idea.

He's like, wait, we can use the internet to get people offline back into the real world with each other. He's like, I would love to spend my time on this. So at this point, we think the big opportunity is a website for conferences for people to sleep on airbeds in living rooms. This turns out is a very narrow market. We did not know this at the time. So our logical next step is, what's the next big conference coming up

where hotels will sell out? Well, it turns out that right here in Austin, every March, there's quite a large conference called South by Southwest. It also happens to be the place where some preeminent tech companies went to launch and took off like rocket ships,

including Foursquare and Twitter and some others. What year was this? 2008. So we're like, we're going to build the next version for South by Southwest and this is going to take off just like the others. So Nate hunkers down with us. We start to code out the next more robust version of the site becomes more

than just four pages. And we pull all nighters for like two weeks and we launched just in time for South by Southwest and all this excitement, all this energy. Tim, we got a total of five hosts, two reservations. I'm no mathematician, but that ratio doesn't sound favorable. Well, one of the reservations was us.

It's actually Brian. And Brian stayed with this guy here in Austin named Tien Dung. And he had everything laid out. He had the pillow and the towels and the mints. And he had some soup cooking in the background. He was a great host, right? He was taken really seriously.

At this time, it was just a classified service, right? You came and you paid somebody on arrival. And Brian tells the story that he forgot to go to the ATM machine. And so he gets there and he goes through the whole night and wakes up the next day and the host has to awkwardly ask him by the way where's my money and ron's like oh no shoot i forgot i'll go to the atm today brian forgets to go to the atm another night goes by and at this point the host is like what kind of joke is? These guys just make a website to freeload accommodations when they travel? And so Brian eventually got to the ATM and paid him.

But he said that experience was incredibly awkward, paying somebody cash in person inside their home is just not a great experience. So afterwards, it was not a successful launch whatsoever. I think we got one mention on Mashable. Like it was dismal. Um, and we debriefed on the whole thing and we, we realized two things because we're getting emails from people who are like, Hey, I want to stay in a home, but there's no conference in the city. How do I use your service? And so we realized something. Well, maybe this is more than a conference website. Maybe this is just a travel website.

And what if we got rid of the awkwardness of payments in person and allowed people to pay with a credit card in advance online? And we just removed that whole awkwardness from the customer experience. And in doing so, we're like, wait, if we did the transaction online, we could take a small transaction fee. And a business model was born. And so at this point, Nate needed a little bit more enthusiasm to get back involved in the concept. Of the three of us, we all balance each other out really well.

Nate's the pragmatist of all three of us, we all balance each other out really well. Nate's the pragmatist of all three of us. So he, you know, helps ground us in reality and progress and shipping things. Well, sometimes Brian and I can be, have our head in the clouds and really dream. It's a perfect balance. And Nate needs some convincing that this can actually work. So in the summer of 2008, we realized that we could use some kind of event to give this thing a spark for this thing to take off. And if you remember back in 2008, what everybody was talking about, especially in the summertime, the year of a presidential election,

John McCain versus Barack Obama. And Obama was attracting these historic, record-breaking crowds. He spoke in Portland to 75,000 people. And it was identified in June that the DNC, the Democratic National Convention, later that August, there was going to be a bit of a problem. Because they moved the venue from the basketball arena of 20,000 seats to Invesco Stadium which had 100,000 seats

to attract more people to come to Denver to see Obama speak. There lies a problem with the amount of housing that exists in Denver. They have 20,000 hotel rooms. Most of them were already taken up by delegates. And the headlines started to read housing crisis impending on Denver. They have 20,000 hotel rooms. Most of them were already taken up by delegates and the headlines started to read housing crisis impending on Denver. The mayor started to hold press conferences to say he might open the city parks for people to pitch tents because there was nowhere to sleep. So we recognize and say, wait, what if we relaunched in time for the DNC

so we can ride the coattails of all this press to gain awareness for the next iteration of Airbed and Breakfast. So Nate loved the idea. We hunkered down. We spent the summer rebuilding the site with online payments and the ability to travel anywhere at any time. So this was the carrot for Nate. Nate needed to know that there was

some reliable mechanism to create awareness on the horizon because to build a marketplace without any awareness is like you know

difficult to say the least difficult to say the least so we hit the ground in Denver we I remember we built a website

this shiny new version of Arab Better Breakfast and we get on the phone with press trying to pitch them like we had no idea what we were doing I'm on the phone with c like cnn and they basically

hang up on me but i have experience with that from some other projects in the past um so i'm like i'm just gonna keep going and sw squared plus wc equals ml beautiful memory so what we learned what we started to do is actually contact local bloggers in Denver. Like CNN is not going to answer a call, but a local blogger loved the story cause it was of their neighborhoods. And, um, it was very human oriented of Denver residents opening their homes to

support other fellow Obama supporters. Um, and so these blogs would write about it and and it turns out that's where the newspapers look for story ideas. So then the newspapers wrote about it, and it turns out that's where the local TV broadcast looks for story ideas. So then we get a call from NBC, local affiliate, and when NBC does a story, CBS and ABC is where we follow. So then we've got the Denver Press covered. It turns out that's what the Boulder Press looks to for story ideas. And we started to become a regional story.

And it turns out when you have a regional story, that's what CNN looks to for story ideas. So within a matter of about two to three weeks, we went from zero listings in Denver to 800 people sharing their homes. Wow. Just through this awareness, through press. Again, we had no money. We couldn't hire a PR firm. We couldn like go buy online ads. Like this is all just word of mouth, like the press talking about us. And then we get the call from CNN and there's this funny moment where Brian and I are doing a live interview in our living room on a laptop through

like Skype or something. And we have, we're sharing earbuds, and we look like we're conjoined to each other because we're sitting so close. And we're doing this live interview with this guy, Errol Barnett on CNN, and talking about this website and what it means to people to be able to stay in a home for anybody going to the DNC. And then when you'd have a CNN story, that's what international press look to to create stories. So then Le Monde picks us up and The Guardian and press out in Europe. And it's just amazing to see what happens when an idea or a story starts at the smallest nugget

and works its way up this chain to becoming an international story in a matter of three or so weeks. Amazing. You know, I have to give credit to Seth Godin because I remember during Crip Buns, I read his book, All Marketers Are Liars. And I remember something that he says in there,

which I never forgot, which is to make something people want to talk about. It's like Purple Cow. It's like make something that's distinct enough that people want to talk about it right? It's like purple cow. It's like make something that's distinct enough that people want to talk about it. That's differentiated enough. And I feel like that concept was imbued into like the early days of the company, certainly into Crip Buns and to Ecolect and definitely into Airbender Breakfast at the time. And certainly if I watched it happen in front of me, making something that people want to talk about, go from a local Denver blogger story to international press.

So is it safe to say, would you consider that the first or one of the first major successful milestones for Airbed and Breakfast? Yes, because we had a few hundred people staying on the site that weekend, including us. We got to go to Denver. So Nate was busy. Nate was really busy. So we had to divide responsibilities. There's just three of us. Nate's doing all the coding. Brian's handling all the press and I'm handling all the design

and the customer service. So let me hit pause and let me ask you, would it make sense? And we can, we can certainly decide on the fly here, but we've got about probably close to three hours. Would it make sense to have this be part one and then follow up with a part two? What do you think of that?

We don't have to, but we could. What are your thoughts? I'm open to it. And record it another time? Yeah, I'm just thinking this is... We could totally... I think this is a good cliffhanger. I'm just thinking like this is... We could totally... Yeah. Let's leave people on the cliffhanger. I think this is a good cliffhanger. Okay.

So then I'll say... Yeah. Okay. Go. No, no, no, no, no. Go for it. Yeah. I mean, because this deserves a round too.

So we had a few hundred people actually using the service. Brian and I split up responsibilities. Nate doing his coding. Brian's doing all the press. I'm doing all the customer service from my cell phone. And we have this incredible weekend where our marketplace is working. But you won't imagine what happens next.

Ooh, dot, dot, dot. Okay, amazing. No, this is perfect. This is absolutely perfect. So to be continued, in the meantime, as sort of a temporary tie-up of part one, is there anything that you would like people

to take from this first chronology that we've walked people through? Any ask of the audience, recommendation, suggestion that you would like? Parting words of any type. I think anytime that you introduce a new idea into the world, there's bound to be somebody or many people who reject it. So I think rejection is inevitable anytime you're trying something new. In fact, I'd say if you're not getting rejected, you're probably not trying anything new. Like you're probably not even pushing hard enough on something new. And my advice would be look at rejection in a different way. That equation for me was just a way to reframe rejection as an opportunity to keep going, move on.

And so my advice for everybody watching right now is that the gift of an entrepreneur is to reframe things. And anytime there's a rejection that you face, turn it into an invitation. Turn it into an invitation to keep going. And you can say yes or no. You don't have to. But you at least create this opportunity to persevere, to continue going forward. And for me, all the stories I've shared so far,

from the senior prank with the intercom system through to Crip Buns, through to the beginnings of Airbnb, are reframing every no into a, cool, that person didn't like it. I'm going to keep going until I find somebody that does. And also something at least that I see from the outside looking in when you're sharing all of these stories and experiences is that you're also over time by exposing yourself to rejection and reframing, learning to in some ways seek out discomfort as opposed to avoid discomfort. And that's one thing that also

comes up for me. And on top of that, the fact that, and why I'm so excited that we were able to get together to talk about some of these, many of these stories, which is of course just a portion of your many life experiences, is that people are already familiar at this point with Airbnb, in all caps, right? Magazine covers. One of the most successful startups in the world. One of the fastest growing startups of all time, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I think it's easy because as humans, we want to take shortcuts and create stories that are easily graspable to think of that as idea, execute, success, right? Like it just came out of the blue and was this overnight success. But there's so much contributing to that

and so many diverse experiences that, yes, you had, but in some ways you also helped to engineer. And I think that's inspiring, right? To know that it wasn't the byproduct of this immaculate master plan that required you to be Elon Musk times 10, that you executed over a two week period and then you have an empire. No, that's not, that's not how it unfolds at all. If people think we woke up and Airbnb was just

created out of thin air, that couldn't be further from the truth. And I hope if any, there's any takeaway from the stories that we've talked about today is that there's just a long lineage of trying things, bumping into walls, getting rejected, like failing, reframing that failure into learning and trying to continue forward. And so by the time Airbnb came around, it was like, I'd been in the gym of entrepreneurship for many years. So it's like, you don't wake up and just run a marathon all of a sudden that nobody does that you train for it. And so by the So it's like, you don't wake up and just run a marathon all of a sudden that nobody does that. You train for it. And so by the time it's ready for race day, your body's conditioned for

it and your muscles and your system, your nervous, like everything's ready for you to go run 26 plus miles. And I think entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship is the exact same way. And I think it's a misconception when people look at the magazine covers and they read the stories of a successful company, they think, wow, like the people started that. It just, they built it and everybody came. That couldn't be further from the truth. And like, I think Feel the Dreams is probably the worst move to ever happen to entrepreneurship because it created this idea like, oh wow, if you build it, they will come. I can tell you if you build it, they don't come. And it takes this incredible perseverance and sometimes irrational belief in yourself

to bring something to life in the face of a lot of adversity and a lot of people saying it can't happen. And so I hope if there's any takeaway from the stories that I shared today, it's that the simple act of spotting an opportunity, coming up with the original solution, and then taking that third but hardest step of putting something into the world, of

trying something, of putting your idea into practice. It doesn't have to be the big idea. It's just about being in the gym and doing a rep. The gym of entrepreneurship, you're doing like curls or something like, it's just getting in the habit of those three things. You spot an opportunity, you come up with the original solution and you put your idea into the world. And the more you can do that, the better you are at spotting the next opportunity. And Airbnb just happened to be a part of the lineage of all the things I've told you that happened before it. So can you lay out the equation one more time and what each letter stands for? Absolutely.

SW squared plus WC equals MO. And what this stands for is that when you introduce a new idea to the world, some will love it, some won't, plus who caresals move on. Keep going until you find the people that do love your idea. All right, Joe. Amazing. Where can people say hi to you online? Find you? Where can they learn more about the company and anything else you might

want to mention i'd say go to airbnb.com and if you want to connect with me you can follow along at on instagram at joe gebs joe get on twitter at j gebbia and certainly crituns is out there, too. And for everybody who's watching, listening, we will have links to CritBuns, Joe Gebs, and all affiliated links, resources, and so on for everything we talked about in the show notes, as per usual, at tim.blog.com. Thank you, everybody, for listening. And Joe, thanks for hanging, man. So much fun. Super fun, Tim.blog forward slash podcast. Thank you everybody for listening. And Joe, thanks for hanging, man.

So much fun. Super fun, Tim. Thanks for having me. Dot, dot, dot. To be continued. To be continued. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off.

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