Meet Brad Hargreaves, CEO Of Common
By: Chloe Leb
Tags: English, Entrepreneurship, Rencontre, Daily Post, Startup

Brad Hargreaves is an american serial entrepreneur. He met us between two meetings in a cafe in New York.

Brad built his first company while studying at Yale University. This entrepreneurial experience is his first of many.

At the end of his studies in 2006, Brad joined New York to directly jump into the entrepreneurial adventure. He closed his first business then to launch a second one. This time, he founded a game development studio with four of his friends from college.

Together, they raised money in 2007 and they did a couple of successful games. Unfortunately, they never figured out how to make money from it and they run out of money 3 years later.

I would never launch a business which only depends on raising more and more money. At some point, we realized there was no way to generate revenue. It was a tough lesson. I pushed out for a few months before admitting that it was better to close the business.

At this time, twenty people worked for the company. Five of them were co founders. With hindsight, he realizes that the launch of this business was a really bad timing and that none of them in the team had enough business experience. Shutting down this business was the toughest decision he has never made.

For a year then, Brad worked for a small venture firm. It took him time to overcome the situation, but slowly he started to think creatively again.

In 2010, he came back in the game and he decided to launch his third company with one of his friend. That is when General Assembly started!

Brad and his friend gathered a community of entrepreneurs who are very driven by the needs of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial communities. This community provided education and training on various topics related to entrepreneurship, such as web development, digital marketing, user experience design, data science, etc.

General Assembly’s mission is to close the gap between university skills and the skills needed in the work force.

This company is still incredibly successful. They are currently in 16 cities in the world and they have around 25.000 people following their program this year.

This statement is outstanding knowing that they started as a co working space. They profited of a grant from the NYC Economic Development Corporation and they recruited practitioners instead of teachers.

It seemed to us more relevant to recruit people who were already coding, or doing design at a professional level and to trained them how to teach, than to teach to teachers how to make their courses practical.

This program of tech business and design skills quickly became a success. Today, 88% of their graduate students find a job less than 6 months after finishing the program.

One year ago though, Brad left General Assembly to take on a new challenge.

He launched a co living company named Common.

Indeed, his experience at General Assembly showed him that housing in NYC is a major pain for most people. It’s expensive, plus living with people isn’t an easy thing.

Common is community driven and the service propose accommodation where people can live in community. Common’s building provide cleaning, bathroom supplies and a community of people where everyone in the building know each other.

This time, Brad is the only founder of the startup. He wanted to hit the ground and running. So he decided to take on this project by himself. He raised 7 millions of dollars last summer and he recruited talented people to start the business.

Actually Common has two buildings in New York and a third one is opening in Brooklyn.

When we asked to Brad if he can share with us some tips to launch a successful business, he answered :

When I started General Assembly or Common I asked myself: Why am I the best person to run this business?

It is important to think about your uncompetitive advantage and to develop the story about it. This story will help you to hire the best people then and together, you’ll be able to make it happen.

We also wondered if raising money becomes easier. Brad explained that he get use to it.

With time and experience, you know the process and people treat you better. The only thing that changes is the expectations.

The first round of capital is the hardest: VC are looking at the founder and the team and they want to be sure you’re fighting on the right course. After several rounds, they are looking for financial metrics, sustainability, scalability, etc.

As Brad directly jumped into the entrepreneurial adventure after his studies, he told us that being an entrepreneur is the only thing he knows how to do. But founding a startup implies to face difficulties:

Knowing how to listen advices and how to keep going without paying attention,

Maintaining determination in face of negative feedbacks,

Knowing where and when you’re spending your time,

Managing people and keeping them aligned around a vision.

One essential thing is to forming your company’s culture. It means setting expectations, recruiting the right people, setting the right goals and make sure People are building process and systems that help them do their job better.

As an entrepreneur, you also do the same thing over and over. You talk about your business to people every single day. You repeat your words over and over again.

I don’t believe that entrepreneurship is a native thing you born into. I feel like you have to work on it . Anyone can do it, you just have to experiment!

One thing is clear, Brad seems to born into it.