Identify What Works Then Tune Out Everything Else

Brad Hargreaves has built his career and several businesses on learning how to act on feedback about what’s working while tuning out everything else. The lessons that helped him make thousands of dollars at a time selling furniture as part of a side hustle when he was an undergrad at Yale also helped him build a company that eventually sold for $412 million. 

There have been big losses along the way too. Entrepreneurship is a rollercoaster. If it looks like Brad is having fun, and it definitely does, it may be because he’s learned to not lose his head during any of the twists and turns.

The transcript has been edited for clarity.

Lionel Foster: Brad, welcome to Catalyst. Thanks for joining.

Brad Hargreaves: Of course. Thanks so much for having me on.

Lionel Foster: In this post-pandemic world, so much happens over Zoom—or in this case, Riverside. So much interaction is intermediated. I’ve had the privilege of meeting you in person at a conference or two, but where you really show up is LinkedIn. You’re prolific. You’ve beaten the algorithm, at least for my feed. You always have a lot to share, so I’m glad to share some of it here.

Brad Hargreaves: Thanks, man. Look, you never really beat the algorithm. It’s a constant back-and-forth. But it’s a fun game, and I’m enjoying playing it.

Lionel Foster: What comes through clearly is that you’re a problem solver—an optimizer. Your brain is always working, which is a great trait for an entrepreneur. You’re also a serial entrepreneur. How did you get started, and why do you keep founding businesses?

Brad Hargreaves: I’ve been an entrepreneur my entire life, so I’ve never really known anything different. I partly paid for college by buying and selling antique furniture.

I realized Yale University, where I went, was liquidating old card catalogs—these huge, four-hundred-pound wooden pieces from the days of the Dewey Decimal system. This was around 2004. My buddy Matt Brimer, who later became a Co-Founder of General Assembly, suggested we buy two: one for our dorm and one to sell on eBay.

We bought them for $50 each. Somehow we schlepped them back, and the one we sold on eBay went for $3,000.

At that point we asked, “How many more do they have?” The answer was: a lot. A few months later, we had warehouse space in East Haven, Connecticut. Every Friday we skipped class, rented a U-Haul, showed up with a pile of cash, and bought whatever surplus furniture Yale was liquidating—card catalogs, desks, tables, chairs, shelving.

We sold everything on eBay. Eventually we spun up our own brand called Aloysius Properties. The name didn’t mean anything—we just thought it sounded old and official. Instead of calling ourselves CEO and COO, we made ourselves “Director of Procurement” and “Director of Authenticity.” We signed certificates of authenticity for every piece we sold.

It was the most fun I’ve ever had running a business.

About a year later, we ran out of high-quality wooden furniture, and everything left was mid-century modern—fabric and metal. At the time, nobody wanted that stuff. Ironically, today it would be incredibly valuable.

From there, it’s been one thing after another. 

Lionel Foster: Aloysius Properties is still one of the best names I’ve ever heard. That alone feels like a win.

Brad Hargreaves: It really was. We spelled it A-L-O-Y-S-I-U-S—an old, early-twentieth-century WASP-y name nobody uses anymore. It was perfect.

Lionel Foster: You were doing this as an undergrad?

Brad Hargreaves: Yes.

Lionel Foster: Yale is about as establishment as it gets. Did you feel tension between the traditional path and entrepreneurship?

Brad Hargreaves: I grew up in the rural South, went to public school, didn’t grow up wealthy. My dad was a forester. That whole Northeastern prep-school world was totally alien to me.

It didn’t bother me, but things like investment banking and private equity weren’t obvious paths. It felt much more natural to build things and take advantage of opportunities in front of me than to attend recruiting events my friends on financial aid weren’t going to.

Lionel Foster: Let’s talk about General Assembly. What was it, and how did you get involved?

Brad Hargreaves: I graduated into the global financial crisis. At the time, I was running a game development studio, which got crushed in 2009 when advertising revenue collapsed.

I reconnected with Matt Brimer, Adam Pritzker, and Jake Schwartz. We saw a gap in the market: on one side, people who were overeducated and underemployed; on the other, companies hiring for very specific skills—web development, UX, data science, digital marketing—that almost nobody was teaching.

Back then, the only way to learn those skills was to teach yourself. Even computer science programs were mostly theoretical. So we started teaching practical skills in 2010, opening a brick-and-mortar campus.

A year later, President Obama said everyone should learn to code, and demand exploded. Within three or four years, we were doing nine figures in revenue, operating in 20 US cities and six countries. It was a lot more stressful than Aloysius Properties but still a lot of fun.

Lionel Foster: That was a major exit, right?

Brad Hargreaves: Yes. We sold General Assembly to Adecco in 2018 for $412 million. Adecco is a public staffing firm focused on digital skills. I don’t have an ongoing role, but the brand continues today.

Lionel Foster: You seem wired to identify gaps. Is that something you consciously recognize?

Brad Hargreaves: I don’t think it’s a special skill so much as being willing to iterate quickly toward real need. General Assembly’s first campus was mostly co-working space. It worked fine, but it wasn’t scalable. Eighteen months later, our second campus was all classrooms.

It wasn’t about getting it right on day one. It was about finding signal and pulling on it.

Lionel Foster: Let’s talk about Common. What was the idea there?

Brad Hargreaves: Common came out of a real need we saw at General Assembly. People coming to expensive cities weren’t looking for apartments—they were looking for rooms. That meant Craigslist and a lot of bad roommate situations.

We decided to build apartments designed for roommates—what people now call co-living. Three- to five-bedroom apartments, private bathrooms, shared kitchens and common areas. We started in 2015, expanded quickly, and raised over $100 million.

There was huge investor interest, especially as WeWork was scaling. When the pandemic hit and rates rose, the model became very difficult. We sold the business in late 2022. Common later went bankrupt in 2024.

Lionel Foster: How do you feel about co-living now?

Brad Hargreaves: I think it can be a great consumer product. I don’t think it works well as a scalable property-management business. Property management is already hard. Add a niche asset class across many cities, and scale becomes extremely difficult.

Lionel Foster: What was it like being at the center of so much investor attention?

Brad Hargreaves: Honestly, it made it very hard to make good decisions. When you’re getting constant inbound interest, it’s hard not to optimize for that signal instead of shutting out the noise and focusing on sustainable economics.

When the music stopped in 2020, shifting out of a land-grab mindset was extremely hard.

Lionel Foster: That’s incredibly instructive.

Brad Hargreaves: Once you take venture capital, you’re playing to win a market. You can’t play not to lose. That’s just the reality.

Lionel Foster: And venture capital really is jet fuel.

Brad Hargreaves: Exactly. It’s explosive. Sometimes you blow up.

Lionel Foster: Let’s talk about Thesis Driven. Why did you start it?

Brad Hargreaves: After leaving Common, I started writing about real estate, capital markets, and innovation. I launched a Substack, put a paywall up early, and it started throwing off real cash.

From there, I developed the thesis: build an audience in real estate, then build products for that audience. We’ve launched data products, courses, and capital-markets tools. We’re fully self-funded and just crossed $2 million in ARR.

Lionel Foster: The transparency is striking.

Brad Hargreaves: I believe in building in public. We’re not raising capital or positioning for sale. We owe our community honesty.

Lionel Foster: The freedom of being self-funded: It looks good on you.

Brad Hargreaves: I’m fortunate I can do it. And I’m having fun again.

Lionel Foster: Brad, this has been fantastic. Thank you.

Brad Hargreaves: Thank you. This was great.