What the hell is Joe Gebbia doing in D.C.?
When I recently asked the Airbnb co-founder if he ever expected to be living and working in the capital, he told me in so many words: No.
The exact words were: “You could have made me a bet a long time ago that I’d end up here—and won a lot of money.”
We spoke over FaceTime, him from his office at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, just off Pennsylvania Avenue—where, in the fall of last year, he set up the National Design Studio (NDS), per one of President Donald Trump’s many executive orders. Under his leadership, the NDS has since made waves by overhauling government websites about everything from the food pyramid (“We are ending the war on protein,” one section of the landing page reads) to the federal retirement system. Gebbia has spearheaded new platforms, too, like TrumpRx, where Americans can download coupons for prescription drugs, or Tech Force, which the administration set up to recruit software engineers to “tackle the most complex and large-scale civic and defense challenges of our era.”
