Brad Hargreaves - Co-founder of General Assembly, Common Living, and Thesis Driven

Building distribution first with a synergistic approach

In this episode of the Idea maze, I sit down with Brad Hargreaves. Brad has started multiple companies, most notably the professional education business General Assembly and Common, a community-driven residential real estate business. He is currently working on his next endeavor, beginning with his newsletter focused on the commercial real estate industry called “Thesis Driven”

Three things really stuck with me from this interview.

First, Brad’s approach to Thesis driven harkens back to the way General Assembly was initially built as opposed to the more conventional approach he took with Common. When building Common, Brad was able to leverage prior success to pursue the path of a typical VC-backed repeat founder: identify a real problem/market need, conceive of a product to address this need, raise venture capital to execute on the opportunity and scale from there. With both Thesis Driven and General Assembly, Brad started more opportunistically and with a distribution first orientation. He talks about how building distribution through General Assembly’s early life as a meeting hub for the NY tech community enabled them to establish a reach and brand that fueled what General Assembly eventually became.

Second, an important theme that clearly weaves through Brad’s thinking is around synergy.  Similar to how General Assembly’s brand, members, participants, and supporters reinforced one another and eventually fueled their core business model, his current goal is to launch several products related to the subscriber base of his newsletter that each reinforce one another. I thought that this synergistic approach was a very interesting way to think about expanding from a single, narrow initiative and establishing more strength and defensibility around one’s business.

And finally, I really enjoyed Brad’s answer to my new and improved final question. I asked him “if you were to return to be a commencement speaker at your high school or college, what advice would you give or what story would you be sure to share?”  His response was to consider risk and careers from a much broader time horizon. From the context of a 30+ year career, becoming an entrepreneur isn’t that great of a risk. Viewing entrepreneurship as a vocation and pursuing that craft over decades will probably yield less risk and certainly less fragility than pursuing a more conventional career path. It was a great reminder that the work of an entrepreneur and the risk he/she takes isn’t isolated to one venture but an entire life’s work of creation and innovation.

There was so much more from the episode, so I do hope that you will give it a listen. Brad is such a fantastically clear thinker and communicator, and I think you’ll really enjoy listening to what he has to share.