Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia is going after the ADU market with new startup

At Samara’s global headquarters in Redwood City, California, co-founder Joe Gebbia wants everyone to imagine life inside of a backyard.

The facility serves as a showroom, where potential customers can step inside of a model of a small backyard home — known widely as an accessory dwelling (ADUs) — that is not only designed and constructed by Samara, but permitted and fully installed as well.

For Gebbia, the Georgia native who also co-founded Airbnb in San Francisco in 2008, simplicity and efficiency — whether in design or in processes— are key.

Gebbia said he was trained at the Rhode Island School of Design to “really care about every detail,” and that’s why stepping into one of Samara’s ADUs, so-called “Backyard” units — which range from 420 square feet to 690 square feet — feels like living large.

Why Samara? Why now? Samara is a company that is focused on how people live and on designing how people are going to live in the future. And the first way that we’re helping to address that is through additional dwelling units or ADUs. This is the fastest-growing category within housing.

What are some of the barriers to building ADUs that Samara aims to remove? The costs incurred through permitting fees. Some of the regulations around requirements for parking spots. And other small things that when you kind of add it all up, makes it very prohibitive for a homeowner to add an ADU into their backyard. So it is really slashing some of the costs and forgiving some of the requirements.

How does it work? Our value proposition is that we do everything. So a customer goes to samara.com and configures their unit— it’a very similar to purchasing a Tesla online. We take the order and we handle everything from that point on. We basically become the project manager on behalf of the customer. We handle the heavy lifting ... everything, from the factory construction to the delivery to the installation, to the site prep, utility hookups, the permitting, from soup to nuts.

What’s a lesson you learned starting a company like Airbnb? Having great co-founders is paramount. I had two amazing co-founders at Airbnb, and we often admit that none of us could have done it by ourselves — it required that team, and we were all highly complimentary of each other. I knew that with this next venture I would need to find that same, highly complementary, highly capable co-founder. Mike McNamara is that person: he’s my co-founder and the CEO of Samara, what he brings to the table is 25 years at a company called Flex, which is the largest contract manufacturer on the planet. Mike brings an expertise in supply chain manufacturing.

Read more: Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia credits his hometown of Atlanta for putting him on a path to success

What do you bring to the relationship? An understanding of how to create consumer brands, design delightful user experiences, and take something very complicated and make it very simple for a customer.

My background is in both graphic design and industrial design, I was trained to really care about every detail. The Backyard product has been incredibly thoughtfully curated and designed, from the 10-foot plus high, cathedral ceilings inside to the placement and sizes of the windows that provide natural light. Sure, it’s 500 square feet, but it’s the kind of space that you’d actually want to live inside.

How has the pandemic impacted Samara’s ADU design? Covid-19 did change a lot of things, including how people value the use of their home in two specific ways: The first is that 58% of Americans still spend at least two days a week working from home. The home is still an office. And the other incredible stat is that one out of every five homes in the United States has more than one adult generation living together. Multi-generational living has been a trend for a while now. It’s been increasing and Covid-19 just really accelerated this idea.

How would you describe the culture at Samara? It’s the early days at Samara, we are a small team, but we’re taking the same steps as we did at Airbnb to design a culture around creativity, hustle and simplification, to make things really simple for the customer. Whether that’s in the physical products, whether it’s in our website, whether it’s in the decision making process. That’s one thing I’m definitely bringing over from Airbnb.

How do you think employees would describe you as a leader? I think people would say that I creatively challenge them. I love seeing people do the best work of their lives. I tell people, “Okay, when you guys come back to me on whatever the brief is, there needs to be at least one or two ideas in there that you say to yourself — Joe is going to think we’re crazy. Unless you have that kind of reaction to your ideas, don’t come back to me, because we’re not there.”

What motivated you in the early days of Airbnb, and how has that changed? One of the things I learned from Airbnb was the joy of economically empowering people and seeing how bringing a few $100 or a few $1,000 every month can radically change somebody’s life. It gives them a chance to not just get their head above water, but actually start to get ahead in life. I’ve had so many hosts over the years share this with me. And for me, the joy of Airbnb is the economic empowerment on the host side.

What’s the best Airbnbs you ever stayed in? I stayed on an antique 1912 tugboat in Sausalito once. It was all totally restored by the host. I think the most remarkable one was with a Japanese monk at his temple in southern Japan, in the middle of nowhere. This guy rented out a tatami mat for $40 a night, and it was the best $40 I ever spent.

About Joe Gebbia

About Samara