The cereal box that got Airbnb into Y Combinator
When seven VCs said no, Brian Chesky grabbed a hot glue gun and made election cereal.
By October 2008, Airbnb had been rejected by seven venture capital firms and Brian Chesky had roughly $20,000 in credit-card debt. The product was live; nobody was booking. So Chesky and co-founder Joe Gebbia — both designers by training — did something no MBA program would have recommended: they made cereal.
They bought bulk cereal, designed two limited-edition election boxes by hand — Obama O's: The Breakfast of Change and Cap'n McCain's: A Maverick in Every Bowl — and hot-glued a thousand of them shut in their apartment. They sold them for $40 each. The stunt cleared roughly $30,000: enough to keep the company alive long enough to apply to Y Combinator.
When they walked into the YC interview and slid a box across the table, Paul Graham paused. His response: "If you can convince people to pay $40 for a $4 box of cereal, maybe you can convince strangers to live with each other." Airbnb got in.
The cereal didn't save Airbnb because it solved the product problem. It signaled something about the founders — specifically, that they were the kind of people who invent their way out of corners rather than wait for permission. That's the thing most pitch decks can't show.