Airbnb was initially called AirBed&Breakfast. It was a marketplace for crashing at a local's apartment on a blow-up air mattress.
"We couldn't wrap our heads around air mattresses on the living room floors as the next hotel room and did not chase the deal," legendary investor Fred Wilson now says regretfully. His team passed on Airbnb's early financing round.
But the founders persisted. They thought the web could be a powerful booking tool. And when investors like Wilson weren't eager to give them funding, they turned to their own devices...
The founders bought a bunch of boxes of Cheerios and designed new cereal boxes around the McCain-Obama election. They stuffed the boxes with the cereal and sold them, and used the cash to seed Airbnb.
Airbnb's founders noticed a competitor, CouchSurfing, was taking off. They felt their air mattress rental business could tap into the same market.
*Note this Obama O's slide is not in the founders' initial pitch deck, but it's a big part of their founding story.