Chip Conley of Airbnb Built a Successful Hotel Business. Then He Turned the Hospitality Industry Upside Down.

Most 26-year-olds are just getting started on their first real job.

When Chip Conley was 26, he was busy founding a boutique hotel company, Joie de Vivre Hospitality, that he grew over 24 years into the second-largest boutique hotel company in the world, with $240 million in annual revenues.

But for the past three years, what he's been doing is turning hotels completely upside down with Airbnb.

Back in 2013—after Conley sold Joie de Vivre—he took an invitation from Airbnb's founders to help transform their startup into one of the largest hospitality companies in the world.

Conley assumed the role of head of global hospitality and strategy, working with hundreds of thousands of customers and over a million hosts in close to 200 countries around the world. In the process, he changed how the world goes on vacation, transforming every spare room into a potential place to stay.

Conley will be talking about his transition from wildly successful entrepreneur to business mentor in his talk on the TechfestNW 2016 main stage: "How I Became Both a Tech Mentor and Intern in My Mid-50s: Lessons Learned on My Journey."

Conley is a New York Times best-selling author with four books to his name, including Emotional Equations: Simple Steps for Creating Happiness + Success in Business + Life and Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow, the basis of his 2010 TED Talk about creating a business model on the human need for meaning.

Conley currently sits on the boards of the Burning Man Project, the Esalen Institute, and NeueHouse. He also heads the Airbnb Open, Airbnb's annual hospitality conference that now brings thousands of hosts from over a hundred countries to destinations such as Paris and Los Angeles. For fun, Conley chronicles the 300 best festivals in the world with his project fest300.com.

Chip Conley: Measuring what makes life worthwhile, TED 2012

Join Chip Conley and our other excellent speakers at TechfestNW 2016: April 25-26 at the Armory in Portland's Pearl District. For more information or tickets to TFNW, visit techfestnw.com.

Willamette Week