#80 Launch House: Building the Y Combinator of the Future with Hack and Launch Houses | Brett Goldstein, Co-Founder

**Daniel Scrivner** (0:07)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Infinite Games, where each week we sit down with a founder, operator or investor working at the edge of what's next. I'm Daniel Scrivner, and on the show today, I sit down with Brett Goldstein, co-founder of Launch House, which is building a new launch pad or accelerator for founders and engineers, both around the world and in the metaverse. Launch House started as a crazy experiment where the founders rented a mansion in Tulum, Mexico for one month and invited a bunch of founders and engineers they knew to come and stay with them. What they found was surprising. By focusing on human connection and having everyone live in the same house together for a month, everyone in the program wasn't just making incredible progress on what they were building, they were making incredible friends. As you'll hear, Launch House quickly seized on that opportunity and today they run Launch Houses for founders and Hack Houses for engineers in Los Angeles, New York and the metaverse. And they're just getting started. Early Launch House alumni have already gone on to raise venture capital funding from top tier firms like Sequoia, A16Z and first Round Capital. In this episode, Brett and I explore the incredible origin story of Launch House, what they learned from that first house and how they're scaling Launch and Hack Houses around the world, what Brett learned as a PM at Google and ClearBit that's helped him shape Launch House, why Launch House is focused on building Silicon Valley as a service for founders and engineers around the world, and what they've learned from their first metaverse house. You can find the full show notes for this episode at outlieracademy.com/80, including links to everything we discuss. For more from Brett, you can follow him on Twitter at thatguybg. You can also learn more about Launch House at launchhouse.co or at launch underscore house on Twitter. With that, please enjoy my conversation with Brett Goldstein of Launch House. Brett, thank you so much for joining me on Infinite Games. I'm so excited to have you.

**Brett Goldstein** (1:59)
Thanks for having me.

**Daniel Scrivner** (2:00)
So to start, I mean, we're gonna spend the vast majority of our time today talking about Launch House, which is something that you and your co-founder and your team launched last year in 2020 But I want to start with just a little bit about your background. Just to get people up to speed, can you just share a quick sketch of the things that you did professionally before launching Launch House?

**Brett Goldstein** (2:19)
Yeah, it would start in college. I thought I was going to go get a PhD in computational cognitive science, which is a nerdy boomer way to say machine learning without the fun stuff.
And I decided that machine learning, AI thing probably wasn't going to be very important. first big mistake. And I got a job at Accenture in the research and development group, which is kind of the best of both worlds. I got to do some management consulting, but I also got to learn about emerging technologies, build proofs of concept like a product manager, but not quite. That's where I got to go and visit the Coinbase headquarters in 2013 Got to see Stripe very early as well, all those big companies now. Actually, still at Accenture, I helped start this team that is now Accenture Ventures, which is the Venture Fund. And then obviously that naturally led me to Google, where I joined the M&A team, where initially it was my job to look at the M&A team itself and say, how can we do better? How are we doing? Turns out there are billions of dollars of acquisitions that are not actually very good acquisitions.

**Daniel Scrivner** (3:24)
You don't say.

**Brett Goldstein** (3:26)
Yeah, you don't say. So I, as a early 20-year-old, 20-something-year-old, it was my job basically to go and write up some reports for the executives and tell them why their acquisitions were not that great. And that was cool. But then I got an even more interesting role, where I was looking outwardly at the ecosystem. And it was my job to look at emerging startups, looking at different trends and produce these reports every month that were consumed by the CEO and the other executives. So this was on chatbots back in the day. This was on the sharing economy back in the day. This was on AR. And so I got to present one actually directly to the CEO, which was really cool for 20 something. And then realized I wanted to be an actual builder. I wanted to actually make stuff. So I switched over to product management at Google, where I was working on some early AR stuff in the comms org, which is infamously known for all the messaging apps they like to launch. That was really cool, but got a little bit burnt out on big company culture and decided to take my obligatory Eat, Pray, Love trip around the world, where I kind of inadvertently visited a bunch of religious sites. I was producing music on the side because I've been doing that for a long time. I taught music in some refugee camps, went to the World Cup. It was cinematic, to say the least. And I came back and was trying to figure out what I wanted to do.