My Journey to Airbnb: Peter Coles

Public school to PhD The story of Airbnb’s Head Economist for Policy and Director of Data Science involves geology, co-teaching with a Nobel Prize winner, and CSI. (No, not the hit TV franchise.) Peter Coles was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He studied math at Princeton, earned his PhD in economics at Stanford, and taught at Harvard Business School before joining eBay and becoming a Data Science leader at Airbnb. As you’ll see from his story, Peter has a deep interest in how marketplaces work. By transitioning from academia to the business world, he not only gets to study first-hand data about millions of guests and hosts, but also to influence product and policy decisions. And he still gets to hang out with academics. Check out all the research Peter and his team are doing  here . My fascination with marketplaces goes back a long time. Sometime around second grade in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (where I grew up), my friends and I had the great idea to run a rock stand. It was like