Tech's New Center of Gravity
The best place to build a startup today isn't a city. It's Launch House.
Back in February, Gail, my cofounder for Garnet, sent me a text out of the blue:
Gail: Hey, someone told me about this thing called Launch House. I think I want to go do it, would you be interested?
Me: *checks out landing page* I’ll be honest, it doesn’t seem like my kind of thing. Seems pretty sketchy and I don’t really know if I could live with that many people in a house. I like my New York studio 😕
Gail: I think I’m still going to do it. My friend went through a cohort and vouches for it, and I think it could be really good.
I had looked at the website and I thought I saw a lot of red flags. They said they were recruiting for a 4th cohort, and that they were all about recording founders doing things in the house and posting them on social media. But their social media accounts were pretty empty.
There wasn’t a ton of other information, other than the house was in LA and was a $35M mansion that Paris Hilton used to live in. Plus, I was generally a bit depressed from going through COVID lockdowns in New York (can I say I’m a real New Yorker now?), and that just made me default to “no” a lot more.
That was a mistake I’d soon correct.
✈️ Getting to Launch House
So, Gail ended up flying out to Launch House a few weeks later. Within 4 days of her being there and us remoting across timezones, I knew I had made a mistake. She came to every conversation we had with new information she got from other founders in the house, kept telling me about the other cool companies people were working on, and seemed more energized than ever (plus, she always had a killer video chat background).
I decided I’d angle to get Gail to invite me to the house again during one of our video chats and see if there was a spot open for me to join late.
Me: It seems like you’re having a great time and getting a lot done there, almost wish I had gone.
Gail: I mean, I can ask if they have an open spot!
Me: You know what, sure let’s just ask and see…
Nailed it 😎
Turns out there was one spot opening up at the end of that week. A few hours later, I was on the phone with Michael Houck, one of the cofounders of Launch House. He walked me through the basics of LH, the COVID policy, and what kinds of events and such the house put on during the cohort. Houck was in selling mode, which he didn’t realize was unnecessary: I had already decided to get over there as soon as I could.
The next day, I took my required PCR test and waited for the results to post on the cohort slack channel for everyone to see. The day after that, I was on a flight to LA to join my cofounder. This was one of the most spontaneous things I’ve done.
I would later find out that I was not a special case. It turns out several founders have gone to the house without their cofounders, only to have those partners fly out later in the cohort. In fact, so far, 100% of those cofounders that are able to fly to LA have done so. I comforted myself on the trip to the house that if I didn’t like it, I could always escape to an Airbnb. By the end of my cohort, I found myself not wanting to leave at all (actually, I ended up extending into half of the next cohort).
My hope is that by the end of this story, you will understand why.
⚙️ Work Hard, 🥳 Play Hard
Arriving at the House
I planned to arrive at the house mid-day on a Friday. However, a de-icing truck rammed into my plane (seriously) rendering it unable to fly, forcing a 4 hour delay to secure another plane. So instead, I arrived at the house at around 10pm, right in the middle of a “fajita night” party one of the cohort members organized. Quite the entrance.
Side Note: Every cohort’s culture is different: My cohort, LH4, had a great mix of excellent founders and creators that worked incredibly hard throughout the week, but also knew how to have a good time on the weekend. And a good time we had. The very next cohort had a much more chill vibe to it: more quiet work, chill hang outs at night. As with any community, its culture is ultimately formed by the sum of the people in it.
I entered the house, took my rapid test, and then entered a whirlwind of introductions. The house is definitely big, and felt even bigger after staying in my NY studio for so long. The first thing you see when you enter the main area is the glowing Launch House sign. The juxtaposition of such a tech-y, SF office fixture in a mansion built for opulence gave me an impression that I was super into: it’s a hack somehow that we all get to live here.
I’m whisked up to my room, one that I’ll share with 4 other people in a bunk bed (another sign of a hack). It all has a sense of being organized, but not really — the feeling you get from an early stage startup that’s figuring it out. The bed is missing a sheet, so I grab one from the linen closet and drop it on the bed. I’ll figure that out later: time to meet some people fast and integrate 5 days late into the cohort.
Over the next few hours, I must have met close to 20 people, all working on interesting companies, brands, and social media. They’ve been hustling all week, but tonight they were all just friends hanging out, drinking, playing some cards, and even doing some DJ-ing. When I say there was a variety, I mean it in almost every dimension: ages ranged from just out of college to 40s, projects ranged from idea stage to Series A, one of the founders (a CEO in the midst of raising an A round) was literally in her second trimester of pregnancy!
I stayed up as long as I could, determined to adjust to the pacific timezone as quickly as possible. Eventually, I retired to my room, sneaking in the dark to find my bed as to not wake my new roommates up.
Waking Up to the Weekend
It felt surprisingly normal to be waking up in a bunk bed in a mansion roomed with several other people. I think it’s because unlike a college dorm or similar situation, everyone in the house was ultimately there to grind on what they were working on. There weren’t really the shenanigans you would expect like that “one drunk friend” that stumbles into the room at 4am and annoys everyone until they finally pass out.
Instead, everyone was careful to try and not disturb anyone still sleeping as they got ready for their day. There was one bathroom for each room of 5, but I never had any trouble with someone taking too long with their showers. None of us wanted to spend too long not doing something fun or productive, after all.
This next day was mostly quiet, recovering from the night before. I got to know more people and nerd out about startups and tech (I missed this so much). For this cohort, food was mostly figure it out on your own. You could order delivery or cook using the kitchen. That night though, there was catering from Chipotle for a special “Founders Circle” event.
I don’t really want to go into detail on what goes on in these “circles” — I think this tradition is best learned about when you join a cohort. Suffice to say though they are well regarded as one of the best parts of the Launch House experience, and are super helpful for getting closer to fellow cohort members, and learning from other’s experiences.
A Day of Rest
For the Sunday of that weekend, two groups planned outings. One group went surfing, while I went with another group to rent and go out on a boat. One of the founder teams in the cohort were Sampriti and Reo (of Navier, which just launched!). Reo has been a boater all his life and has some videos on Youtube adventuring on boats, so he was able to secure a rental on short notice.
It was a nice day, not much else to say here. The LA weather was agreeing with me (I like SF weather, and LA was having a weird moment where it was mimicking SF, so that worked for me). The people were great, we all had a good time. I had already heard what the work week was like from Gail, but I ended the day wondering what the actual balance was between work and play.
First Weekday
One of the biggest challenges Launch House has dealt with early on is a branding problem. Renting a celebrity mansion and advertising the place as kind of a “creator house for founders” has several advantages: it stands out, it helps with creator collaborations, for example. But it also gives people the impression that it’s a “party house” like all the other LA creator houses.
That could not be further from the truth. Starting from early in the morning, the house was alive with people hustling. Wherever you looked, someone was on a video call or writing code or collaborating on a whiteboard. The other thing people assume is that because we all generally worked in one main area (bedrooms are used for deep work and private meetings during the day), that there was no way we were really getting work done.
The thing is, founder work isn’t like most office work. For the most part, you’re not working down tickets or deeply looking at one thing for extended periods. There’s constant context switching and communicating. This kind of work is actually amplified when around the energy of other founders doing the exact same thing.
There was also an interesting balance of work/play given it was both a live space and a work space. You could get off a video call and decide to get in the hot tub for a bit with someone to hang out. You might talk about nothing, or maybe you end up talking about a problem you are tackling and getting great advice from them. Afterward, back to the next thing on your schedule. Ebbs and flows, constantly throughout the day, but never standing still.
🙏 Seek to Give Before You Take
Easily the most powerful aspect of Launch House is the high bandwidth and fidelity you get out of conversations with other founders and creators, who all have incredible skill sets that you probably don’t. The ability to just go over to someone and run a landing page idea by them, or ask them for feedback on a feature is amazing — and everyone wants to help. This is a community where you’re always looking for what skill you can share with the other founders to make their startup better.
Some founders might not even know what that skill is before joining the house, but they always leave having figured that out. People help with design, go to market strategies, prioritizing work, engineering, marketing, feature ideas, naming, getting better at social media, and the list goes on. In my cohort, there were people who were insanely good at fundraising, experts in making things go viral (I saw them do this several times while there), and maestros at building brands people talk about.
This is the kind of environment that welcomes people with strong opinions, weakly held. A lot of informal discussions happen all the time in the house about all sorts of topics in tech and everything else in life. I found it best to always bring an opinion to the table, contribute something to the conversation, but be ready to have your assumptions challenged. Because in this kind of place, there are always going to be people who know better than you about most topics, and that’s brilliant.
✋ Community Talks
In addition to the informal discussions that just naturally happen from throwing a bunch of driven founders in a house together, there are some more formal traditions that have emerged in LH culture in these early stages. Everyone that comes to the house is encouraged to share some knowledge that others find useful in a community talk around the fireplace.
Some of these topics have included “how to use twitter effectively” and “how to leverage media brands to build businesses.” I myself gave a talk on where I see the future of crypto in relation to Ethereum 2 during LH5. All of the residents in this house are there to learn and teach, in furtherance of launching something, so it’s an incredibly welcoming environment to share within.
It’s also become tradition to present your startup or project in what’s called a “teardown” session. The idea is you present what you are trying to launch, what your problems are, and solicit the advice of the entire house at once around the fireplace. These sessions have proven to be extremely valuable, often resulting in big, actionable ideas you can try out to help your product.
Speaking for Garnet, my cofounder and I got a lot of great feedback on our go to market strategy, and feedback on what kinds of users we should be targeting and how to approach them. We even got some leads for more potential customers to talk to during the session itself! Because they are so useful, these sessions are becoming more formalized in the Launch House curriculum.
Even Launch House itself did a teardown session at the house! LH as a startup likes to build in the open, so just as with Clubhouse, people in LH tend to talk about LH a lot in these early days. The founders — Jacob, Brett, and Houck — took advantage of that and facilitated discussions about Launch House itself, where it should go, and its place in the market.
Tip: There’s nothing better for figuring out a startup than literally living with your customers.
📣 Interesting Speakers
In addition to talks from the residents of the cohort, Launch House brought in some interesting experts and investors for intimate discussions about their area of expertise (all of whom had to go through rapid testing at the door, of course). During my time there, we heard from founders who just raised a Series C and their thoughts on secondaries and founder struggles, influencer agents on when and how to use influencer marketing for a product, and more informal talks from well known investors that just wanted to check out what the house was all about.
Launch House is a magnet for interesting people from all corners. It’s a place that seems interesting to be inside, therefore everyone wants to check it out. When they do that, they discover a critical mass of interesting people to learn from, and they want to stay (either in the house or in the community).
A black hole is formed when such a large amount of mass is concentrated in one spot, such that their gravity combined causes the mass to implode into itself and create a singularity that has immense gravitational pull. I saw signs of that effect at Launch House.
Fun Fact: During LH4, the cofounders of the house invited a designer they met on Twitter, Jackson, to come by the house and help them with a logo. A 1 hour meeting turned into 5 hours of riffing on the Launch House brand, and ended with him joining us on the house party bus a resident had organized that night. Now, he’s part of the LH team full-time.
I told him that night that he was going to end up moving in to the house and never wanting to leave. I was right.
👨👩👦👦 It’s the People, Stupid
Like I said before, at the house we ended up talking about LH itself a lot. What is its place in the market, what should it be in the future, how does it scale? We also talked about why this house felt different than the countless others that have tried similar things.
What I always came back to is the people. Because everyone’s cooped up during COVID, Launch House has been able to recruit people who probably wouldn’t have normally decided to move into a house with ~20 other people (me included), post-college. But, now that it has done so, it has established a beachhead of referrals to recruit more of those people, broadening the scope of the types of founders that can be brought into the house.
I think that the seed has been planted and as long as the founders grow it in the right direction, Launch House is going to become something big and special. Given its founders include Jacob Peters (who is an expert in communities), Brett Goldstein (an extremely deep thinker that’s excellent at reasoning about everything), and Michael Houck (an excellent recruiter of founders and people amplifier), I’m confident they’ll be able to pull it off.
🏠 Exit to Community
The last day of LH4 felt a lot like the night after college graduation. I was sad to see everyone start leaving, and wondered how many of them I’d be close to moving forward. A metric I came up with when I graduated college for how well I did at making friends was: how many of their weddings would I be invited to in the future.
Despite being a much shorter amount of time — just one month — I feel like the connections made at Launch House are life-long. Even after leaving the house, we’re all staying connected and helping each other. Each of their successes is my success too, because I know that they’ll have my back in the future when I need it.
In the LH community, we celebrate each other’s wins, help with each other’s launches, and support each other when we are having problems. We aren’t alumni, we didn’t graduate anything, we’re still a cohort. We just aren’t living under the same roof right now. Many residents are already making plans to meet up again in each other’s cities and in Airbnbs in the future to keep the momentum going and re-create that energy we got from the house.
Launch House is where founders go to launch now, and it’s not just a physical space, it’s everywhere.
If you want to check it out, 👉 apply today 👈.
PS. My cofounder wrote her own post about Launch House, you should check it out! 👇