Add Category
Over the weekend, Dan Brockwell and some of his friends went looking for a share house in Wollongong, or maybe four.
The goal is to create a series of homes that host young, smart and ambitious people who live and work together, posting snippets from their lives on social media.
To that extent, it resembles US influencer houses, a living arrangement made famous by the Hype House that launched the careers of several TikTok megastars and was featured in a Netflix show this year. But rather than emphasising interpersonal drama, beautiful people and viral videos, the Wollongong project is a local outpost of another overseas phenomenon: start-up houses that cater to people in the technology sector building new companies.
Earlywork founders (l-r) Dan Brockwell, Jono Herman and Marina Wu have gone full time, putting in the hours at a WeWork in central Sydney.Credit:Rhett Wyman
It is called Earlyhome. James Tynan, a principal at venture capital firm Square Peg, sees a younger version of himself living there to surround himself with people who reinforce each other’s ambitions. “In a minute,” Tynan says. “Like I would absolutely.”
The houses, for which applications closed on Friday, will be one of the first such experiments in Australia in relatively public shared living. Two friends, Adam Miller, 23, and Sachin Shah, 22, who are into start-up investing, have also decided to make their Darlinghurst share house the focus of what they hope will be a growing media brand centred on the interview podcast they co-host.
Loading
The fact these experimental projects are going ahead is a testament to how large Australia’s start-up scene has grown, and how quickly. In 2021, the amount of money invested in Australian start-ups trebled from the year before, to more than $10 billion. In some ways, Earlyhome is a physical manifestation of Earlywork, its parent company, which has been a beneficiary and driver of the burgeoning start-up scene.
Last week, its founders Brockwell, Jono Herman, and Marina Wu, all 24, told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age they had received $707,500 from a collection of venture funds, the most prominent of which is Tynan’s employer Square Peg, and individual investors.
The purpose of it is not to fund the houses, which are in the language of start-ups, a “side hustle” and will be paid for by the rent of people who live there. It is to let Brockwell, Herman and Wu work start working full-time on their primary ambition: the creation of big, friendly communities of people in cities around the world that help their members get jobs in technology.