Business bookshelf: 'The Airbnb Story'

Leigh Gallagher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 236 pages, $28. Airbnb founder Brian Chesky has a claim on entrepreneurial genius, anchored by a much-retold story about his company's origins. Airbnb got its start when penniless industrial-design students began offering lodgers air mattresses in their apartment to pay for their rent. Early on, the company struggled. Short on cash, the students used their design skills to produce cereal boxes featuring caricatured faces of the 2008 presidential candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain. Chesky is a CEO motivated as much by a mission as by money. Its mission: Bring the world together via shared experiences and cheap lodgings. Airbnb headquarters is papered with exhortatory distillations of company culture, such as "Belong everywhere" and "Airbnb love." The company held yearly pow wows — elaborately staged with A-list entertainment — for all of its hosts, while Chesky evangelized to the converted in revival-tent style. Silicon Valley doesn't attract nearly enough serious, long-form reporting. Leigh Gallagher, an assistant managing editor at Fortune, offers that much-needed perspective in "The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions … and Created Plenty of Controversy." The tale is told in linear fashion from creation to success — a Horatio Alger fable, but with smartphones. But what Gallagher lacks in snark she makes up for in business perspective, including a long competitive analysis with thoughts from industry leaders that assesses how Air­bnb fits into the conventional hostelry business.