One thing is clear: the Flatiron district of Manhattan is not Silicon Valley. Not downtown enough to be cool and not midtown enough to be opulent, the area still shows evidence of rising real-estate prices. Small stores and restaurants with generic logos line the streets, most of them looking like they opened last week. Their customers fall into two distinct groups: upward-gazing tourists and forward-leaning young people. If you stand between 20th and 21st Streets, you’ll notice that a good number of the latter stop at an unassuming doorway on 902 Broadway. And if you are looking for General Assembly, the hub of New York City’s burgeoning startup culture, you’ll get the feeling these kids know where they are going.

Take the elevator to the fourth floor and watch the last hint of unassumingness disappear. The space that opens up behind the glass doors of GA feels as new as the stores downstairs, but unlike them it exudes cool. Power cords crisscross over the hardwood floors; white walls, tall windows, and mellow lights frame the space. The pipes are exposed, some of them painted bright red. A long wooden table dominates the room—but there are also black futons and stools made from a material that can only be cork. The place feels like a hybrid of art gallery and coffee shop. Even the soap dispensers in the bathroom are sleek black sculptures, as if every object in the flat had been conceived on an Apple computer somewhere
in Scandinavia.

There must be 70 people in here, not one of them over 40 years old. They help themselves from a self-service espresso bar;  there’s also a small fridge dedicated exclusively to coconut water. I count 14 pairs of Converse sneakers and 32 silver Macbooks—many of them irradiating the Holy Light of Code: green text on a black background. Untucked button-downs and short skirts are the norm. Everyone seems to be having such a good time that it’s hard to believe they are actually working. The place looks nothing like an office, but an office it is. The fashionable, energetic kids who chat in small groups are entrepreneurs, programmers, and designers. They are here to start new companies.

***

Every startup begins with an idea, with the mythical T-shirted wizard shouting “eureka!” under an Ivy League moon. Whether or not it ever actually happens like that, the moment of epiphany seems to be central to the startup ethos. It’s the American Dream, version 2.0. It doesn’t matter where you begin—if you have a good enough idea, you can make a ton of money. You just have to solve a problem.
Sometime during the summer of 2009, three Yale graduates and a Columbia alumnus solved one such problem—namely, that it takes more than a good idea to start a business. The result is General Assembly. The company, which first opened its doors last January, defines itself on its website as “a campus for technology, design, and entrepreneurship.” It seeks to provide entrepreneurs with everything they need to succeed in the Age of the Internet. This includes a place to work, a broadband connection, courses in everything from programming to marketing, coconut water, and—perhaps most importantly—a community of fellow travelers. Because, for the founders, the lone T-shirted wizard
is a myth.

“People sometimes have this notion,” I am told by one of the company’s founders, Matt Brimer, JE ’09, “that if you have a great entrepreneurial idea, you should keep it to yourself. Otherwise, someone might steal it. But we’ve found the exact opposite is true—that talking to as many people as possible and getting their feedback and ideas is the best way to make things work, and make them work better.”
Such is GA’s idiosyncratic ethos: collaboration over competition, camaraderie over carnage. In the age of industrial espionage and encrypted databases, this is everything but business as usual.

***

Brimer arrived at Yale as the university was undergoing its own digital revolution. Sterling Memorial Library had just begun to replace its old card catalog with Orbis, the online service that allows users to browse the collection in milliseconds. Brimer heard that the library was selling the card cabinets for next to nothing, and a cartoon lightbulb went on above his head. He bought one of the massive pieces of furniture and enlisted his friends to drag the thing to his room on Old Campus. He built a convincing website and put his recent acquisition on sale as antique memorabilia. Within days he had a buyer, who paid thousands of dollars for his own piece of Ivy League nostalgia. Brimer used the profits to buy more cabinets, and suddenly he had himself a business.

“I guess I caught the entrepreneurial bug early,” he says from behind his round, thick-rimmed glasses.

After the card cabinets came GoCrossCampus, the online multi-player game that pit universities across the country in fierce battle for world domination. It was the lovechild of Facebook and World of Warcraft, and it was a big deal—it put the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute (and its founders, Brimer and Brad Hargreaves, TC ’08) on the business world’s very short list of
things to watch.

Brimer is thin, not particularly tall, and has longish, curly brown hair. He sports a carefully untrimmed beard, tight jeans, and beautiful oxford shoes. As he walks me around the flat, I notice people nodding at him. The company’s website lists him as “Founding partner” and describes his job as “running community and partnerships,” but it is clear that his actual role is much larger. Everyone seems to know Matt, everyone has talked to him extensively—his talents as brainstormer and conversationalist are nothing short of legendary. He takes me to the “Dedicated Space,” a large room with half a dozen tables crowded with oversized computer monitors and a museum-like collection of gadgets open only to a few handpicked companies, and I proceed to ask him about the adventure of summoning the
General Assembly.

“Rewind back to the summer of 2009,” he begins. “My cofounder Brad Hargreaves and myself were winding down GoCrossCampus. We’d run out of cash, and had to close down shop—it was tough, but it was a great learning experience. On the heels of that, I moved to New York City and started getting involved in the tech and startup community here. I was going to a lot of events, meeting a lot of interesting people, and having a lot of interesting conversations. And I was starting to see this crescendo of activity. New York already had such gravity and prominence in other industries like finance and advertising, but tech was something that was just starting to hit. But at the same time, there was no central hub for all the stuff that was going on. You’d meet a lot of people with interesting ideas and share some insights and whatnot, and then you’d have to wait for a month to run into them again.”

The lightbulb lit up again. Eureka.

“What if there was a place,” Brimer says, sounding visionary and a tad rehearsed, “where all those interactions, that sort of serendipitous learning could happen not just sporadically, but every single day?”

***

The General Assembly team soon decided to formalize that serendipitous learning, and began offering structured classes. The courses, which are open to everyone, are taught by working professionals as opposed to academics and are eminently practical. They range from one-session master classes on “Crafting Tablet Magazines” and “Viral Video 101” to weeks-long crash courses on basic programming. Individual classes cost between 30 and 40 dollars; full-scale courses go for about $3,000.

The educational component of GA’s services highlights an unusual word in the company’s self-description: campus. Despite its close association with college life, the startup culture is known for its spite for higher education. The prestigious Thiel Fellowship, for example, is awarded to young entrepreneurs on the condition that they drop out of college. In a time when rising tuition costs and high youth unemployment have sparked debates on the merits of a college degree, GA’s educational project is controversial. Yet Brimer, a Yale graduate after all, goes to great lengths to defend old-fashioned study at old-fashioned institutions.

“When people talk about how Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college,” he says with a note of exasperation in his voice, “they forget that they first had their ideas while in college. We don’t want to replace the liberal arts, but complement them. What we need to ask ourselves is: what does vocational education look like in the 21st century?”

Brimer appears to believe the often-heard mantra that most learning in college happens outside the classroom. GA attempts to recreate that atmosphere of intellectual exchange, minus the academic hierarchy. There is a lot of Yale in GA, from some eerie similarities between Bass Library and the organization of the flat to an obvious equivalence of our Master’s Teas with what they call “Fireside Chats.”

Despite his post-modern line of business, there is something old school in the way Brimer talks about GA. His emphasis on the importance of learning skills from the skilled makes me think of medieval guilds, of masters and apprentices. He talks about creativity in a way that seems more befitting to craftsmen than computer programmers. What makes such a comparison believable is that the digital age has made technical chops valuable again. No matter his or her line of work, anyone who wants to be successful needs to understand technology. Brimer, who seems to posses a bottomless well of pithy aphorisms, puts it eloquently:

“The Internet is the electricity of the 21st century. You can’t just ignore it.”

***

When I ask to meet some of GA’s clients, Brimer introduces me to Vivek Sharma. His company, Movable Ink, has developed a technology that allows people to write emails with content that can change based on the recipient’s location, occupation, etc. It is also one of the few startups that have full membership at GA. Wearing a slim suit jacket and a bow tie, the tall 36-year-old cuts an impressive figure. “Formal Fridays!” he exclaims when I ask him about his attire. “We need to make sure everyone has some gravitas. We also have Whiskey Wednesdays. By the way, would you like some scotch?”

Sharma, whose hair is beginning to gray, walks me to the table where his seven-person team has “dedicated space” and pours me a generous measure of 10-year-old Laphroaig. Movable Ink was born in October 2010, and for the first few months the company operated from a few lent desks at a consulting firm’s offices. Then, in what seems to be a recurring trope in the epic of New York startups, he ran into Matt Brimer at the Shake Shack on 23rd Street. Brimer told him about GA, which at that point was just an empty floor in a building. He walked Sharma around the flat, asking him to imagine what the place would eventually look like.

“With nothing there,” Sharma says, not without admiration, “he sold us on the idea.”

So what is it really like, working at GA? Is the founders’ talk of collaboration and community true, or just a marketing scheme? Sharma responds candidly:

“I’m going to be honest: having a startup is a roller coaster ride. I mean, in any given week you may feel like you are at the top of the world and then, suddenly, the ground has been pulled out from under your feet and you are about to fail catastrophically. When that happens, being surrounded by other people who are also risking it all makes you feel more normal. It’s a really weird set of people here, but you kind of feel like it’s socially acceptable to do something as crazy as starting your own company.”

Of course, Sharma is quick to add, it also helps that each of the companies working GA has its own niche market, so that there is no direct competition. On the whole, his experience at GA has been extremely positive. Then again, Sharma is one of the elite: His company was selected for the Assembly’s inner circle. What is it like for the little guys, those who don’t have the luxury of a reserved table? Sharma laughs at my question.

“You should talk to them!” he replies.

Alexis Rondeau, 33, sits alone in one of the stools by the coffee bar in the common room. When I approach him, he is happy to talk to me, and takes me to a quiet room with a crowd-sourced library and a huge blackboard wall covered in incomprehensible math. He has a slight beard, a black ponytail, and just the slightest hint of a German accent. He is one of the founders of PercentMobile, a small analytics firm that collects data from cell phones and tells companies what people do with their mobiles.

As Rondeau’s partners live elsewhere in the world, he works solo in New York. GA came as a blessing. “Beyond the networking, it’s nice to have company,” he says, smiling. “You see the same people every day. Everyone is working on his own thing, but everyone talks to you and shares ideas. I’ve become good friends with some of the guys here.”

The downside? Distraction. There’s a lot going on, and people always want to talk. In true entrepreneurial spirit, Rondeau devised a solution.
“Let me show you something that I’m working on,” he says, as he pulls out a small piece of wood from his pocket. One half of the square is painted green and the other, red. He then attaches the thing to the back of his Macbook’s screen. “There’s a magnet in the back,” he continues, as he flicks the wooden square around. “It works as a traffic light. If I’m busy, I put it in red and people leave me alone. If I’m not doing anything, I put it in green. It took me a while to learn how to paint wood, but now that I’ve got it figured it out, my partners and I are going to start selling them.”

I ask Rondeau to introduce me to some of his friends. I meet Grant Feek, 30, who is working on a system to order custom-made cars online. I’m also introduced to Julia Colavita, 27. She is a painter by night, but during the day she works for Artsy, “the Pandora of fine arts.” Everyone that I talk to seems to be happy at GA, though the complaints about distraction are common. I think of Rondeau’s magnetic square and the words “niche market,” and chuckle to myself.

***

When I return to the common room, the atmosphere has been transfixed from coffee shop to nightclub. The crowd has multiplied; the outfits have diversified. I approach a young man with a bleached-blond Mohawk, torn black jeans, and combat boots. His name is Taylor Stone, and he is the 26-year-old lead singer of industrial rock band Liquid Blond. Stone is here to bartend GA’s first anniversary party. He got the job from his friend Jordan Jubela, the 23-year-old logistics manager at GA.

Jubela, whom I meet shortly afterwards, has a flowing mane of black curly hair and a pierced left ear. He tells me that his job is to make everything work or, as he puts it, “Make sure that we go from A to B.” From my encounter with Stone, I gather that he is also responsible for keeping the company cool. A great deal of what makes GA work is the vibe, the fact that the place looks and feels attractive. A lot of work must go into curating the space, into making sure it stays the place where everyone wants to be seen. Appearances are central to the company’s project.

As I ask Stone for a beer, I notice a birthday cake embossed with the company’s logo and stuck with a single candle. Jubela lights the candle, calls for people’s attention, and asks the crowd to sing happy birthday. Everyone obediently stops what they are doing, and in an act that seems completely out of tune with their impeccable clothes, proceed to intone a dissonant rendition of the song. Happy birthday to us / Happy birthday to us / Happy birthday, General Assembly / Happy birthday to us! The company’s name doesn’t fit the meter of the song, but the ease with which people use the first person plural betrays a palpable sense of community.

***

Jake Schwartz, BK ’00, the company’s CEO, is sitting with his girlfriend, Jenny, at a table at the end of the room. He leans back in his chair, wearing loose jeans, sneakers, and a green button-down.

“The Herald?” he asks. “Yeah, I remember the Herald. Not gonna lie, it kind of sucked back in my day.”

Unlike Brimer, who apparently was born a startup wizard, Schwartz’s time at Yale had nothing entrepreneurial about it. He majored in American Studies, wrote his thesis on Woody Guthrie, and played in a band called “Guitar-Playing Jews.” After graduation, he went on to manage a couple of small-time music acts.

“You remember Tiffany?” he says, not without irony. “She was big in, like, 1990.”

After it became evident that Tiffany wasn’t making a comeback anytime soon, Schwartz switched fields. He enrolled at Wharton, the University of Pennsylvania’s school of business, and graduated with honors. Then, like so many others in this story, he talked to Brimer. The rest is history.
Schwartz has mixed feelings about his experience at Yale. His ambivalence, however, seems to have been a productive force: It sparked reflections that became central to GA’s project.

“It was sad,” he tells me, shaking his head. “You think that any opportunity you want is open to you just because you went to Yale. Then you realize the world is swarmed with motivated and interesting people, and that it takes more than just that to be successful. For the longest time I was angry with Yale for not telling me—but now I’m kind of glad they didn’t tell me.”

That state of blissful ignorance allowed Schwartz to learn how to think. Later, however, he had to learn how to do.

“That’s the tension we are trying to balance here,” he says. “We want to be able to take someone like me, who had no real marketable skills upon graduation, and in the course of 12 weeks, set them upon a career that will be very engaging, interesting, and dynamic.”

Despite Schwartz’s lofty-sounding intentions, GA remains a for-profit company. With the problematic referent of institutions like the University of Phoenix and Kaplan, any kind of lucrative educational venture is bound to provoke skepticism. Schwartz’s reply is that the kind of vocational training that GA provides does not suffer from being subject to the laws of the market.

“GA has a very specific goal in mind for the kind of things we want to teach people,” he says. “If we are not creating positive outcomes with our programs, people won’t come to us. Ultimately, our students hold us accountable. You have to remember that ‘for profit’ and ‘not-for-profit’ are really just tax-statuses.”

All this talk of profits and non-profits brings me to the question that I’ve been meaning to ask all day. Besides Schwartz’s company and the one at the United Nations, I can think of a third General Assembly: the one at Occupy Wall Street. People at GA throw around words like “grassroots” to describe what they are doing, which makes me wonder whether they have a political project.

“I don’t think we have a political project,” he qualifies, but then continues, “other than advocating for a generation of people who feel like they cannot fulfill their potential. Quote me on this one: I hate the large, impersonal corporation. There’s so much about the way we view work, especially in offices, that is a product of another age. And it’s such a tragedy, because it really crushes people. We spend so many of society’s resources educating people, only to put them in these little boxes and make them perform monotonous tasks for eight hours a day. That needs to change, and I think we are seeing something of that change happen here.”

From Occupy Wall Street, Schwartz moves seamlessly to Occupy Yale.

“A lot of Yalies go into finance and consulting just because those industries provide them with a defined path of what they should do after college. One thing that GA can be is a place that provides that kind of structure. I’m not anti-finance, but I do think it’s sad so many people feel financial institutions are the only way to have a remunerative career.”

Jenny looks impatient, and Schwartz asks me to wrap things up. I ask him if he has any final comments.

“Yeah!” he says. “If you like solving problems, and want to solve problems of external reality as opposed to internal ones, business is a really fun place to be. It took me 10 years out of Yale to realize that, but it’s true.”

***

As I shiver into the Broadway night, I think again of the startup wizard. After all, if the lightbulb stays off, it doesn’t matter where you are—you are still in the dark. For all the founders’ emphasis on the need for structure, GA, too, was once an idea. The brilliance lies in the fact that the company is a meta-startup: The insight that spawned it was a eureka moment about the insufficiency of eureka moments in themselves. It sounds almost like a Zen koan: in a flash, the kid realizes that he is not a wizard—and only then can he become one. General Assembly began as the symptom of a changing culture. Now, it’s well on its way to becoming the engine of that change.