For Chesky, that unhinged criticism was cutting. At the time he was obsessively following the story of the fantastically successful founders of the video-sharing site YouTube; he was spending hours on the site as well as watching Steve Jobs’s keynote presentations and the television film Pirates of Silicon Valley. This was a universe where new things really did change reality. “I got kind of obsessed,” he says. “I was living vicariously, escaping to a world where someone could build something and actually change something. I was not doing that. I was sitting in a dark office making stuff for
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