Read the following passage about the rise of Airbnb and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions
[I] In 2007, design graduates, Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky were struggling to pay the rent for their San Francisco apartment. [II] Hearing that a conference was coming to town with no available hotel rooms, they created the website airbed and breakfast.com, advertising three airbeds in their home at $80 each a night, breakfast included. [III] Within six days, they had three guests sleeping on their floor, realizing this was the start of something big. [IV]
Being budding entrepreneurs, they decided to take their idea further. They enlisted Gebbia's former flatmate, Nathan Blecharczyk, a computer science graduate, to help develop the website. Their aim was to target conferences and festivals across the USA, getting locals to list their rooms and travellers to book them. The new website was launched just in time for the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, where Barack Obama was set to speak in front of 80,000 attendees. Within a week, they had 800 listings, which, while impressive, did not resolve their financial issues since the site was not yet profitable.
To address this, the team began to manage payment for bookings, charging three percent to hosts and between six and twelve percent to travellers based on booking prices. As interest from investors grew, they moved the company from their flat to a new office and hired additional staff by April 2009, when larger investments began to flow in.
Since then, Airbnb has flourished, now boasting over 1.5 million listings in 34,000 cities across 190 countries, and is rumored to be valued at around $20 billion.
