A 2015 study by professors at the University of California in San Francisco and UC Berkeley revealed that 72% of entrepreneurs struggle with their mental health, compared to 48% of the general population. Furthermore, the recent losses of prominent entrepreneurs to mental health battles make the need to promote founders’ holistic health ever more evident.

As founders themselves, Launch House’s Brett Goldstein, Michael Houck, and Jacob Peters recognized this need right from the start. And that’s why Goldstein says they’ve always been “a community for startup founders to do two things: achieve your business goals, career goals, and all that stuff. But living better is about mental and physical health. It’s about personal fulfillment.” And the key to that piece of the wellness equation seems to lie in the very idea of community.

Belonging as a Path to Mental Health

Goldstein noted early on in his Launch House journey: “The need to belong, the sense of belonging, is deeply tied to physical health and longevity. It’s also tied to mental health.” There are so many mental challenges that can be addressed by building a “community connection,” he said. Taken in this context, he explained that one could extrapolate that “Physical health, mental health, both of those come down to the sense of belonging and community.”

At the same time, he points out, “Community is also a driver of success. You are the sum of the people around you. So the common denominator is community; it is belonging.” And that’s what the Launch House model has been about from the very beginning in 2020.

From Co-Living to Global Connectivity

At the time of its founding, Launch House brought a group of entrepreneurs together to live and work in one physical home in Mexico. Since then, the community has evolved to include digital cohorts and a home base housed on Discord, a digital social platform.

Still, the early lessons learned by the Launch House founders continue to resonate in 2023. Goldstein said, “What we found in doing these physical residency programs is that living with people is the fastest way to build community and a sense of belonging, especially when you curate it like we do.”

Today, the cohorts are just as curated, although the founders themselves can live anywhere while they build these connections. Yet, since “the focus on mental and physical health is a product of how we started this co-living physical thing,” explained Goldstein, Launch House is still determined to remain both “a social community [and] a professional community.”

To that end, he says, they applaud their members “who are really succeeding and killing it, but we do value other aspects of life. We do value that mental, physical health. So you do see people in the community who are founders of really successful startups, taking time to hang out with friends and do other stuff like that.”

For Goldstein, this balance is something that will be critical to maintain as the Launch House community continues to evolve. “When we were thinking about, ‘OK, are we going to keep building Launch House?’” he reflects, “we saw that it was just changing people’s lives. It’s really affecting people in a deep way. People point to their Launch House experience as a pivot point in their lives.”

Of course, that’s not surprising, since many Launch House members go on to fund and roll out incredibly successful startups. But while this is certainly a point of pride for the community founders, their true pleasure comes from hearing about Launch House’s effects on founders’ mental wellness. As Goldstein says, he’s had members tell him, “‘My therapist told me Launch House was one of the best things I’ve ever done.’ And they’re saying that it’s fundamentally changed their trajectories in a spectacular way. That’s incredibly fulfilling.” After all, he says, “There’s not many things you can do in your life where you can have that impact so predictably and at such a scale — this is hundreds of people, it’s not like a dozen people or something. So I think that’s what I’m excited about.”