He’s a billionaire, but Nathan Blecharczyk still likes to host on Airbnb. He has a guest there right now, he says, though the guest doesn’t know who his host is. He is waking in Blecharczyk’s San Francisco home, unaware that the pleasant quarters with separate entrance and electronic locks belong to one of the three co-founders of Airbnb itself. Hopeful visitors, however, will struggle to discover Blecharczyk’s listing. “You’re not going to find me on the website very easily,” he warns. “For obvious reasons, I don’t want people to know where I live.”

What, because some stalker might seek him out?

“Yeah, you never know. You just never know.”

His admission is surprising, because the premise of Airbnb is that you do always know, and that there are no nasty surprises. But sometimes there are. This week, a group of Airbnb renters staying in Palaiseau, France, were walking the grounds when they found a decomposing body. The details were gory. The woman had been covered with branches. She was “hunched in a dug-out area, her head against the ground”.

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Blecharczyk – pronounced Bletch-are-zik – is Airbnb’s chief technology officer. He had just arrived in London when he picked up the email, and was headed for the company’s Clerkenwell office: a sort of live-in kitchen with jar upon jar of cereal, tea and too many pot plants. Dead bodies in hotel rooms are a trope of crime fiction, but a body in an Airbnb seems particularly horrifying. The business is built on good faith, persuading renters and landlords alike that it is safe to trust themselves to the goodness of strangers in a shared domestic space. And now there’s an Airbnb corpse ...

“Well, it doesn’t seem to have much to do with our guests. It’s our understanding that they stumbled upon it,” Blecharczyk laughs. He laughs often – not always to convey mirth, and this throaty snicker sounds like a frustrated note to self. “I think, er, ‘Body discovered in Airbnb garden’ is a very sensational headline and not exactly representative about what I understand the story to be. This was a large property with woods in the back, and somewhere in the woods was a body that the guests stumbled upon. So, you know, unusual and, of course, a tragedy. But it’s also not specific to the Airbnb. It wasn’t as if it was in the front yard.”

He has a mind given to categorisation. Later, a news report suggests that the body was found in a publicly accessible wood at the bottom of the garden, rather than in the garden itself. It isn’t clear whether or not the woods were part of the property. Either way, a body is a body, surely? And it raises the question of how far Airbnb can ever guarantee the safety of its users, and where – in that triangulated relationship between guest, host and platform – responsibility lies.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Airbnb’s San Francisco HQ. Photograph: Airbnb

“The responsibility is between guest and host, ultimately,” Blecharczyk says. What Airbnb has, in place of responsibility, is an investment. “If trust is compromised, our brand gets hit, trust in homeshare gets hit. And so we have a vested interest to make sure such things don’t happen. And if they do, to take care of it.”

Back in 2011, he and his co-founders, Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, had what he calls “a difficult moment” after “an apartment was vandalised”. Cash and heirlooms were stolen, possessions withered to ashes in the fireplace, the labels snipped off pillowcases. Airbnb responded by introducing 24/7 customer support, a trust and safety team, a hosts’ guarantee with up to $1m of compensation for damage and, more recently, personal liability insurance.

If this were to happen in a hotel, you wouldn’t stop going to hotels. But there are a lot of bodies in hotels. Nathan Blecharczyk

Now, Blecharczyk says, awful happenings and the decomposing body “don’t really call into question the legitimacy of the concept. I think, in the early days, that was a big question. Every night I have a million guests staying in other people’s homes. I think we’ve proven that 99.99% of the time you can have a fabulous experience on Airbnb. If this were to happen in a hotel, you wouldn’t stop going to hotels. But, you know what, there are a lot of bodies in hotels.” Airbnb says that 17 million people used the service last summer, and only 300 calls to the trust and safety team were considered urgent.

Has Blecharczyk had any bad hosting experiences? “No terrible guests!” he says cheerfully. He racks his brain and taps the table but no wonderful ones come to mind either; the “one regret” of his busy schedule is that he spends little time with them.

Blecharczyk met his co-founders by chance after seeing an apartment on Craigslist, which turned out to be Gebbia’s. “Funnily enough, Joe rejected me in favour of somebody else. But then that person backed out,” he says, smiling. He smiles even while he speaks, a fresh-faced look that only the decomposing body briefly dislodges. Blecharczyk and Gebbia – who already knew Chesky from Rhode Island School of Design – became flatmates, then friends. As is the way of friends who are aspiring entrepreneurs, they developed a “mutual respect for one another’s work ethic”. When they got home from work, they worked on their own projects. Then they worked all weekend. What time did Blecharczyk go to bed? He looks puzzled. “I mean, all we did was work.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Airbnb’s San Francisco HQ. Photograph: Airbnb

He works less now, only 55 or 60 hours a week – still more than his father, who was largely home by 6pm. “I’m married. I have a daughter, so I put aside time in the day to spend with them,” he says. Note that the putting aside of time is the primary action in this sentence, rather than relaxing with family – organisation is the lens through which life is filtered. “It’s all about having a pattern to follow, so it’s not a bunch of wild decisions, and mapping out the personal side,” he says. “My wife and I try to have a date night once a week. We schedule them all in advance.” She, Elizabeth, is a doctor at Stanford Children’s Health Centre. Two or three times a week he goes to the gym, which helps to explain why he looks far healthier than this lifestyle would appear to permit.

Work goals are the most important thing. Nathan Blecharczyk

It is a highly structured approach to life and the thought of a baby – she’s a year and a half now – bursting wailing into this construct seems anarchic. After all, babies do not always fit a schedule. “Well, actually they do,” Blecharczyk says. “At least, mine was particularly predictable. When they wake up, when they go to bed, when they’re hungry. I mean, all that is like clockwork. Of course, it’s a big time commitment, but as long as you prioritise, the most important things still get done.”

And what are the most important things?

“Just the internal work goals,” he says.

Mapping, scheduling, even a “clockwork” baby … There doesn’t seem much room for accident or spontaneity. “I don’t feel like my life happens to me. I feel like I happen to my life,” he says. “I feel that I’m in the driver’s seat. I choose to have these two worlds. I think I blend them together pretty seamlessly. I’m a structured person, structured thinker. I like that kind of formality. I put boundaries so that there’s structure.” I assume he is thinking of his date nights – one such boundary – but they are beginning to sound unromantic. “Because otherwise I could work endlessly,” he says, suddenly wistful. Would he like that? “I want to, yes. I really want to.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Joe Gebbia, Nathan Blecharczyk (centre) with co-founders Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky. Photograph: Airbnb

It is tempting to wonder what he does when he has nothing to do, but Blecharczyk looks mystified. “It has never happened before.” In an effort to sound more human, he tries to think of something. “Well, if I did have some discretionary time, I like to cycle, so that’s what I’d do.” He sounds half-hearted, as if this very exercise is a waste of time because he will never have this sort of time and sitting here thinking about it is just wasting the time he does have. Does he ever sit quietly and do nothing? “No, I don’t think I’ve ever done that, to be honest. I hate … it’s not fair to call it ‘wasting time’, but I always feel a sense of urgency with my time. There’s so much I could be doing. That might be a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t know.”

Blecharczyk grew up in an upper-middle class household in Boston, Massachusetts. He discovered work before he was a teenager. When he was 12, off school sick and feeling bored, he rooted around his dad’s bookshelf and alighted on a computer manual. He devoured it. For Christmas, he asked for a book on programming. “A nice, 500-page book that most people would find a chore to read. I read it top to bottom.” Then he bought another and another.

Before long, he had learned to code. His father was an electrical engineer; there was a computer at home. At first, coding allowed Blecharczyk to operate computer games better, and it was this archetypal activity of a misspent youth that proved his route into workaholism. He began to create programs – small things, one for note-taking, another for encryption – and put them on the internet. “If you liked it, you could pay me five bucks,” he says. “But no one ever paid me five bucks.”

One day, the phone rang with a commission. “I was pretty excited. I told my dad: ‘Someone from the internet wants to pay me $1,000!’ He said, laughing: ‘Son, nobody from the internet is going to give you $1,000.’” Blecharczyk, by now 14, said: “That’s fine, I’ll do it anyway, just for fun.” He delivered the work and the man, displaying the trustworthiness of strangers on which Airbnb would later depend, paid in full. The transaction and “the confidence it created in myself”, triggered in Blecharczyk a “lifetime pursuit of entrepreneurship”. Within two years, his business – which he ran “alone down in the basement” – was worth nearly $1m. He also studied, eventually graduating top of his class at Boston Latin Academy, and he was an athlete. Fitting everything in was easy until the running season ended. “I got a lot less disciplined. I was actually better when I had those three things, because then there’s actually no flexibility, it’s always just run, run, run,” he says, hitting the words out on his hand.

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Blecharczyk saved his money. “It felt a little silly,” he says. “It was kind of unreal. I didn’t spend any of it.” At 14, he became financially independent. It is intriguing to imagine that conversation, whether his parents stopped his pocket money once he began to earn, but Blecharczyk says there was no conversation. “I just felt like it was understood. I don’t like asking people for things, so if I can do it myself, that’s the mindset I have. My dad is very much a do-it-yourself kind of person, so I had a strong sense of independence.” Blecharczyk spent his savings on his Harvard education; he graduated in computer science.

Even three years after Airbnb’s 2008 launch, Mr Blecharczyk Sr continued to ask his son questions. “Like, ‘How much longer do you think you’re going to do this?’ It wasn’t until we raised $100m and had a billion-dollar valuation that my dad had a moment of realisation – that, wow, this is something really big.” Now Airbnb is in 191 countries and is valued at $24bn.

Blecharczyk himself has a net worth of $3.3bn, according to Forbes, making him, at 32, one of the world’s youngest billionaires. How does it feel to be so wealthy so young? “I haven’t thought about it, to be honest. My focus is on the business and now on my family. And those two things don’t require a lot of money. I don’t really have time to spend a lot of money on anything, so I don’t.”

Of the three founders, Blecharczyk is the quiet one. And the buttoned-up one – sporting proper shoes while the others are in sneakers, and resolutely choosing smart shirts over T-shirts. He says he is not “particularly private”, but this is doubtful. His online footprint is faint. He has tweeted only 110 times in six years, mostly about Airbnb. His exact date of birth is unpublished. He certainly isn’t about to post an open letter to his daughter on Facebook, as Mark Zuckerberg did. In fact, he declines to reveal his daughter’s name: “Once you share something, you can’t unwind it.”

“Some people want to be famous. I certainly don’t,” he says. What he really wants is to be left alone to work.

• This article was amended on 4 March to reflect reports that the body was found in woods accessible from the property