Nathan Blecharczyk

Nathan Blecharczyk is an American-born businessman, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Airbnb. Belcharczyk was Airbnb's first chief technology officer but now serves as the chief strategy officer and chairman of Airbnb China.

Born in 1983, Blecharczyk is a Polish-American that grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. Before university, he attended Boston Latin Academy for high school. While Blecharczyk was in high school, he began making money by developing his own software and web hosting business, which primarily provided services to spammers. His service was at one time listed on Spamhaus's Registry of Known Spam Operators.

After high school, Blecharczyk attended Harvard University, where he continued writing code while pursuing his Bachelor of Science degree in computer science. Blecharczyk was successful enough in his high school web hosting business and made enough money to cover the cost of tuition before attending Harvard, allowing him to focus on his studies and cease operation in 2002.

In 2008, Blecharczyk partnered with Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky to found Airbnb. He became the first chief technology officer at the company and developed the code for the original website using the framework Ruby on Rails.

After the company failed to raise funding, the founding trio developed limited-time political cereal boxes to sell at the Democratic National Convention, where they raised $30,000 and garnered the attention of Y Combinator. Airbnb went on to participate in the W09 Accelerator Batch and received seed funding.

On June 1, 2016, Blecharczky and his two co-founders joined Bill Gates's "The Giving Pledge," an organization of select billionaires committed to charitably give away the majority of their wealth.