Brian Chesky is the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, the global home-sharing and travel marketplace operating in 220+ countries. A Rhode Island School of Design-trained industrial designer, Chesky built Airbnb from a $80/night air mattress rental in his San Francisco apartment into a company that went public in December 2020 at an ~$86.5 billion market cap — just nine months after losing 80% of its business to COVID-19. In 2024, his hands-on leadership philosophy sparked a viral debate in Silicon Valley under the term 'founder mode,' coined by Y Combinator's Paul Graham after a Chesky talk. As of 2025, he is steering Airbnb's boldest pivot yet: from a home-rental platform to a full-service travel ecosystem.
Eoghan McCabe is an Irish technology entrepreneur born in Dublin in 1984, best known as the co-founder and CEO of Intercom — the AI-first customer service platform he founded in 2011 alongside Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee, and David Barrett. After building Intercom into a $1.3B+ unicorn over its first decade, McCabe stepped down as CEO in 2020 due to a neurological autoimmune disorder, then dramatically returned in October 2022, just weeks before ChatGPT launched. Within six weeks he had a prototype of Fin, Intercom's AI agent, and proceeded to cut roughly 40% of staff and redirect the entire company toward AI — a bet that paid off: Intercom hit an estimated $343M in revenue in 2024 (+25% YoY), raised $125M from Kleiner Perkins and $250M in debt from Hercules Capital (March 2026), and recorded its largest-ever quarter by net new ARR in Q1 FY2026.
Paul Graham is a programmer, essayist, and co-founder of Y Combinator, the seed accelerator that launched Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Reddit, and OpenAI. He sold his first startup Viaweb to Yahoo for $49.6 million in 1998, then used that platform to build one of the most influential idea-factories in tech history. His essays at paulgraham.com have become the de facto canon of startup culture, read by millions of founders seeking clarity on how to build, think, and live.