You mean to tell me that you don’t live with your co-workers? How do you get anything done?!?
In 2008 when we were starting Next Big Sound, David, Samir, and I would have moved to Timbuktu to get it off the ground. Our first stop was Champaign, IL that first summer to be near investors who had just put in $25k for 10% of the business as part of iVentures10. We lived in a four-bedroom house that we rented all summer for $900 TOTAL. That came out to a few dollars per person per day.
The following summer we got into Techstars and moved to Boulder, Colorado. Other than my aunt who had recently moved there, David, Samir, and I had no real connection to the town. Like the summer before, we moved into a four bedroom house. This time on College Ave.
Both summers we got in a great routine of grilling and eating dinner together almost every night. We were able to share stories, catch up on all parts of the business, and check in daily with each other. After Techstars, but before we closed our Seed financing, we moved in with my aunt Caren and her now-husband Rod for a few months until we closed our round and hired our first employee. Eric Czech was a recent Brown graduate and left his job at Bridgewater and moved across the country to join us in Boulder on our mission to transform the music industry through data. He didn’t know anyone in Colorado and so the four of us found a four-bedroom place and moved in together.
We hired a fifth employee who moved to Boulder from Michigan and didn’t know anyone. He took my bedroom and I moved back in with my aunt. We hired a sixth employee who moved to Boulder and wanted to live with us so we got a six bedroom house that the three co-founders and first three employees of Next Big Sound lived in for ~2 years. Not a lot of work-life balance when you live with the people you work with! This was well before The Social Network came out so we were doing it because it was right for us. We were seven days a week in those years and couldn’t have been happier at that stage in our lives and that point in the business.