Launch House is taking off 🚀🏠

Reposted from my Medium post: https://medium.com/flybridge/launch-house-is-taking-off-2621482e2df5

I am obsessed with community. From my entrepreneurial days, my six years on the founding team of WeWork (where I co-founded WeWork Labs), and my last six years as a general partner at Flybridge Capital (where I back early stage community-led companies), I have seen over and over again the power of community as a competitive advantage. That’s why when I had the chance to lead the seed round in Launch House, I jumped at it in the summer of 2021.The history of Launch House starts not too dissimilarly from how many successful startups start — through a cheeky tweet from one of the co-founders. A few friends got together in Tulum and rented a place for entrepreneurs to come and build during the pandemic.

It was from that tweet that Jacob, one of the founders of another leading community startup we backed, Commsor (we had co-led their pre-seed), and I reconnected and talked about what “the new Silicon Valley” could look like. It was a combination of fellowships, a digital community, media, IRL cohorts, and investments, all surrounding the next generation of creators and founders. They’d focus on a residency of top tier people building interesting things in the creator economy and web3 and would figure it out from there. Their first real location was going to be in Los Angeles. And they found the perfect spot, Paris Hilton’s mansion.

It’s been wild to see the team grow and execute since we closed the seed less than a year ago. They embodied everything we believe leads to outsized outcomes while building a community-driven platform. It feels like an eternity but Brett, Jacob, and Houck have launched their second city, New York, built an incredible team of over 15 people across the country, launched a metaverse location, and their first venture fund (which we also had the chance to back). So many talented and driven founders have gone through the residency and have raised from some pretty impressive institutions such as a16z, Sequoia, Paradigm, and more (and are collectively worth over $1B in under a year). Today we’re excited to announce the close of Launch House’s Series A led by a16z’s Andrew Chen!

The team is just getting started but when it comes to community building, they the best of the best. The connections that the members feel as they go through the residency, graduate, join future programs, and come back to support others feels so much like the room that we started WeWork Labs in with 47 people. I can’t imagine what another year will bring with hundreds of new community members, dozens of product and company launches, and so much more excitement for the platform as they execute on their vision of being, “the physical and digital center of gravity for the new Silicon Valley.”

We, at Flybridge, are excited to participate as mentors across all of the programs (it’s been a bit since I visited LA), support the team, and invest in incredible founders coming through the residency and the university. If you’re building something interesting in the creator economy or the world of web3, I’d highly recommend you apply to one of Launch House’s upcoming programs. If the story and the vision of Launch House resonates with you and you’d like to help to build it, they’re hiring.