Airbnb. It’s everywhere. I’ve used it, you’ve used it. Our parents use it. But what is it?

Airbnb was the brainchild of a broke couple of young adults in 2007 who had a place to stay but not enough income. Taking advantage of a local conference they decided to rent out a couple mattresses to the attendees who could not find a hotel and thus an idea was born.

Airbnb was an overnight sensation because it not only gave people a place to stay that was different then hotels but also because it offered an experience within the local community. It was different from vacation homes because it wasn’t far off places and exotic destinations that was the goal nor was it the hotels that take you out of a vacation for a more stagnated “hotel” experience. It hit upon that niche of people who wish to immerse themselves in the homes and lives to the people they visit. For example, the main emphasis was urban living. Urban living presupposes communal life. People would rent a space out in an apartment or house and they would share that space together as a way of building up community. The business eventually became an easy way to rent a place without being disturbed for a short amount of time but the original intent was for the owners to remain on the property as well.

Airbnb has been recognized as a real alternative to hotels but both the company and hotels in general have taken the differences in stride, being open to what each type of accommodation does and also applying the strengths of each to one another. Some hotel companies for example, have done their best to reach out and be more personal and connected to the local community. Likewise, Airbnb has been working on extended accommodation, organizing trips around the area and delivery service options.

I think this is a great example of sharing ideas and not necessarily competing at every turn. Of course, not every big hotel company is going to love what Airbnb is doing to their business nor does Airbnb plan on ceding their hard-earned ground, but the point stands. Idea generation doesn’t need to be combative and in fact, if we cooperate, we can realize a better future for all.

One of the best ways to find a problem is just by looking at improving an old and outdated method.

That’s just what Jake Loosaraian did when he went on a tour of a nuclear power plant in his college years here at Grove City College. While on this tour he found out that this particular plant had frequent shutdowns due to maintenance precautions, especially on the boilers. He found out that this type of shutdown was very common in the field and in other industries that used similar boilers. He was even more shocked when he learned that to check for possible breaches, the companies had personnel repel down with notepads and inspect that way. An hour of this slow inspection downtime costs the individual plants over $1 million.

So, he decided to do something about it. Loosarain, with the help of a couple of other classmates, designed and made a robot that could analyze the facilities and collect the data safely without decreasing the company’s bottom line so much. This was tested in the one plant he visited in college and ended up saving them $10-20 million. So, he decided to scale up and see if any other companies would be interested in this approach. And they did. Eventually, Gecko Robotics would have four different types of inspection robots with different types of applications but all with the same goal in mind; preserve human life and save the bottom line.

Even though it is one of the primary methods of innovation, replacing something is often overlooked because of how commonplace our age-old methods are. Loosaraian saw a problem that seems obvious today and created a 0-1 product out of it. This gave them total control of the market and some great financial backing relatively quickly. Gecko Robotics now has multiple big-name sponsors and even more competition. The company is doing well for itself today but to keep control of the market they will have to make some last-mover innovations that keep them ahead of the pack.

In 2007, Palmer Luckey had a passion for collecting old tech and tinkering with it. The 15-year-old future business mogul had a love for video-game technology and so started collecting VR headsets of the 80s and 90s. As any true gamer would attest, the dream of true virtual reality was a fascinating phenomenon but for many years it remained just that, a dream. The head-mounted devices of the time where all abject failures. No one had been able to figure out just how to get them to work, and any that did work had debilitating flaws. They were too expensive, were not true VR or the computers were just not powerful enough.

Palmer fell in love with these old defunct machines and stated that at one point he probably had the largest private collection in the world. Luckey was part of a few forums on VR headsets on the Web and collected ideas and shared his own on them. So, soon enough, in tinkering with them, he discovered that he could assemble them in ways that no one else could. Excited by this idea and looking to share his work, he turned to the net and displayed them. Then, by the nature of things, Palmer crossed paths digitally (and eventually literally) with the co-founder of id-Software John Cormack, who was part of some of those same forums.

The idea took off. The gaming giant that was John Cormack was very interested in the possibility of true virtual reality and invited Luckey and his tech to his E3 2012 demonstration in early June 2012. Now everybody was talking about it and the time had come to officially do something. On August 1 2012, Luckey started OculusVR and launched a Kickstarter campaign.

Kickstarter

In the early days of considering Kickstarter, Palmer felt like he could sell 100 headsets and maybe break even and have enough to buy a pizza at the end of it. Later when the company launched with fame and big names backing him, he must have realized that he could have not been more wrong. He had set a modest goal on August 1; $250,000. In three days the idea had $1 million invested and when it closed on the first of September it had amassed almost $2.5 million.

Palmer Luck has since sold Oculus to Meta for $2 Billion and now runs a military tech company.

I believe it is important to reflect on that all of this snowballed from a simple 15-year-old boy with a dream of achieving virtual reality. In 4 short years Luckey became the biggest name in gaming because he had the original network to connect to. He had ideas and he had people to bounce them off of.