Okay so Friday I walked into CLT Startup House and immediately wanted to call my dad.
I come from entrepreneurs. That fire — the what if we just built it fire — was the soundtrack of my childhood. So when I tell you that Charlotte now has its first startup house, a 100-year-old home on Cleveland Ave retrofitted for founders who’d rather collide with each other than coexist with cubicle dwellers — yeah. I had feelings.
Their whole thesis is something I’ve quietly believed for years and now they’ve gone and built it: proximity creates collisions, and collisions are where the good stuff happens. Not formal programs. Not networking events with name tags and a cash bar. Lunches. Porch conversations. The person across the table working on something adjacent to your thing who asks the question that reroutes your whole quarter.
This is the part where I admit something. Building is lonely. Even when you’re surrounded by people. Especially when you’re surrounded by people who don’t quite get what you’re trying to do. So the antidote — the actual, research-backed, eighty-years-of-data antidote — is the room. Just being in the room with other people who are also building.
The room is what’s been missing in Charlotte.
And now we have one.
A few things I love about what Drew Burdick and team are doing:
- It’s small and curated on purpose. You’ll know everyone’s name. You’ll know what they’re stuck on.
- It’s a home, not an office. Hardwood floors, deep couches, a wraparound porch. The kind of space where you actually exhale.
- It’s a four-tier model — resident rooms, dedicated desks, members, day passes coming — so it meets people where they are.
If you’re building something in Charlotte, or thinking about building something, or just curious about the founder ecosystem here — go take a tour. The porch is, in their words, always open.
1717 Cleveland Ave. Between South End and Dilworth.
Proud of this city for finally having a room like this. Even prouder of the people who built it.
xo, Carla V
P.S. — If the proximity-creates-breakthroughs idea is making your brain tingle, that’s exactly the soil 5683 Work Well grows in. The founders I work with don’t need another framework. They need a room and a few real conversations. Turns out, so does everyone else.