Airbnb Co-Founder Joe Gebbia Is Betting on a New Wave of Design-Led Startups

The former chief product officer of Airbnb helps set the vision for Veeraj Chugh’s high-end webcam startup, Opal Camera.

- KEVIN J. RYAN

Veeraj Chugh was fed up with webcams. A head of product operations at Uber with a flair for design, Chugh couldn't stand the quality of the images produced by his computer's built-in camera. So in 2020, he set out to build a better one.

Within a matter of months, he'd quit his job and co-founded San Franciscobased Opal Camera, just as millions of workers were getting used to daily Zoom meetings. Opal's first product, the C1, was a sleek webcam that delivered 4K video and cut out background noise.

Chugh landed early investors such as Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley.

The thinking behind Opal's $300 camera was that people would be willing to pay a premium for a well-designed product they'd use every day. Still, launching a startup in the consumer electronics industry was a risky proposition.

"When you're doing hardware, you have to be pretty good at predicting the future, because you're building products that won't come out for nine months at the earliest," says Chugh, 28. "One wrong decision can lead you astray." Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, also an Opal investor, shares Chugh's passion for thoughtful design. The former chief product officer of Airbnb and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) graduate is quick to point out that, whether you're working in hardware or software, the principles of industrial design are the same.

"You start with a problem that you're solving," says Gebbia, 42, "and you work backward from that to create an ideal customer experience." To help address another problem-the U.S. housing shortage-Gebbia recently co-founded the Airbnb spinout Samara, which builds small, prefabricated houses known as accessory dwelling units.