Joe Gebbia

Joseph Gebbia Jr. (born August 21, 1981) is an American billionaire designer and a co-founder of Airbnb. Gebbia is the 286th richest person in the world according to Forbes, with a net worth of $7.9 billion, mostly due to his ownership of 53 million shares of Airbnb. Early life and education Gebbia was born August 21, 1981, in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of Eileen, an independent health food sales representative, and Joe Gebbia of Italian ancestry. He grew up in Lawrenceville, Georgia and has one sister, Kimberly. As a child, Gebbia was passionate about aesthetic and design, music, and athletics, crediting his parents for their support. He was a ball boy for the Atlanta Hawks. Gebbia was known as the "art guy" in grade school when he started his first business selling illustrations of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to his classmates. Gebbia attended Brookwood High School in Snellville, Georgia, where he took classes in ceramics, photography, and jewelry metalsmithing. He also took classes in figure drawing and painting at the Atlanta College of Art on weekends. In high school, he also was a member of the Governor’s Honor’s Program, where he spent a summer taking college-level art courses. There, one of his professors encouraged him to go to Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and he spent the following summer taking courses on the campus. In one of his first courses at RISD, Gebbia took a 3D foundations class with a semester-long project aiming to produce 12-inch scale works of a famous artist or designer. Gebbia decided he wanted to create life-size models so he could use them afterwards, but his professor dismissed the idea and told to stick to the achievable. Gebbia set out to prove his professor wrong and produced sixteen full-sized chairs for his final project. He refers to this anecdote as one of several examples that allowed him to transcend beliefs of what was possible. Around this time, Gebbia also became inspired by the work of Charles and Ray Eames and switched his studies from painting to industrial design. One of his first design-business ventures was CritBuns—soft, foamy cushions to keep art students’ pants clean during their hours-long critique sessions, known as "crits". He developed the idea at RISD and the design was selected as the senior gift for his graduating class of 800 students. After two years developing his sales pitch and story, the product was featured in I.D. and was sold by many retailers.