An Exclusive Look At Airbnb's First Foray Into Urban Planning

Airbnb announces a brand-new innovation lab called Samara, whose first project is a novel community center in Japan.

Two years ago, the founders of Airbnb were asking themselves what the company could become, now that its vision of becoming the world's largest home-share community had come true beyond their wildest expectations. That's when they happened across a list of the top 10 tech companies of the 1990s. They were stunned—and scared. Nine of those once-hot companies were now floundering or dead, and they had all done everything right. But by simply focusing on their core businesses, each of those startups had allowed competitors to copy them. Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk realized that if they weren't thinking of what else their business might become, Airbnb would eventually become a dowdy has-been.

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