The Failure Guy

Ivan Clow for Forbes

Forbes sat down with General Assembly cofounder and CEO Jake Schwartz in the original General Assembly classroom in New York City’s Flatiron neighborhood.

Ten years ago Jake Schwartz cofounded a co-working space, General Assembly, in downtown Manhattan with three friends: Matt Brimer, Brad Hargreaves and Adam Pritzker. Today, that “space” has spread to 32 campuses around the world, and they traded the “office space for entrepreneurs” business model for entrepreneur-expert-taught classes on workplace skills that range from JavaScript coding to building a personal brand. With 80,000 General Assembly graduates (from full- or part-time courses), 900-plus instructors and 32 campuses from Providence, Rhode Island, to Shanghai—they’re at the top of their class in the $224 billion-plus higher education market. In 2018, the company was acquired by Swiss staffing giant Adecco for $412.5 million.

Forbes sat down with Schwartz, who continues to serve as General Assembly’s CEO, to learn his story—and identified five leadership qualities that have helped to enable Schwartz’s success.

1. Strategic comfort with uncertainty 

When Schwartz graduated from Yale University, he engaged in multiple careers to make money, pursuing creativity on the side. He figured there was a way to marry passion and profit, and enrolled in a business school in an attempt to unify the two.

“I had this weird life—during the day I was putting on a suit and a tie—going and learning about discounted cash flow models and how to buy stocks. At night, I would take that off, put on hipster jeans and run sound for a band in this little space, hoping to sell beer, but that was not a life.

I went to business school with a very specific mission: to hit the reset button a little bit and get on some path that I could stop worrying about every day.

The interesting thing about business school is I found that everybody says that it’s about the network, not about the classes. I found it to be the exact opposite.”

2. Harness the power of the roundtable

Shortly after obtaining his from M.B.A. from the Wharton School, Schwartz pledged to work for himself. Setting this mandate, Schwartz allowed himself to take gigs purely for income while carving out the space to pursue routes to creativity—largely by talking with friends.

“I don’t care if I have to sleep in the gutter. I’m going to be an entrepreneur. I’m going to be the one dependent on my own success and failure. I managed to hustle my way into some consulting gigs with friends—that helped me pay my rent.

And I always left a day of the week for entrepreneurial activities. I met this kid named Matt Brimer who had been an entrepreneur at Yale. He had just graduated and he was like, ‘I want to start this space.’

And I was like, ‘I know a couple things about commercial real estate, you should be careful about signing a lease. Why don’t you come over and have some beers, and we’ll talk about it.’ That turned into this partnership.

We ended up meeting Brad Hargreaves from Yale, who joined the club. And then we met this other guy, Adam Pritzker, who was talking about doing something very similar. Before we knew it, this idea for a small little space for entrepreneurs turned into the 16,000-square-foot office in Flatiron with really sexy high ceilings—we were trying to build this beautiful aspirational space.”

3. Vision, but make it flexible

Within months the Flatiron General Assembly space fully sold out, serving as the home for then-freshly formed companies like SeatGeek, Artsy and Food52. Despite the early success, Schwartz felt uncomfortable building a co-working business.

“It felt very risky to scale the business by taking more and more leases,” says Schwartz. (Cue co-working goliath WeWork, which was similarly founded in 2010 in New York’s Soho, just a 35-minute walk from General Assembly.)

While they brainstormed how to capitalize on their existing presence scaling, they thought it fun for their entrepreneur tenants to skill-share—taking classes from each other—and opening student space up to the greater public. “Anybody could come and teach something as long as it seemed legit,” says Schwartz of the early educators. “All of the sudden we were selling out every class, morning, noon and night out of this little room.”

4. Acquisition doesn’t equal finality—it equals graduation

When General Assembly selected Adecco as their acquirer, they did so because it allowed them to continue to operate independently with a growth-focused parent, as Schwartz continues to serve as CEO.

“I actually thought about Adecco as an acquirer for a very long time, even though I hadn’t even spoken with them because I had this whole theory that while everybody called us an education company, we were really an employment company. If you look at it through that lens, it made sense that at some point we either were going to need to 1) get into recruiting and staffing, or 2) buy a recruiting or staffing company, or 3) get bought by one.

Adecco was the largest: They have the biggest global presence, the most brands. Most importantly for the company, they run like the holding company of all these different brands. And so we are going to be able to keep what makes GA GA, inside this much larger company that could have the financial wherewithal to know that we’re going to be around for the long term.”

5. Ceaseless learning

Schwartz deeply values his undergrad education in American Studies and studies in business. Moreover, he values the insights gleaned from the students of General Assembly.

“In the first two years, I would try to go to every one of our full-time classes for a lunch and do an ‘ask me anything’ with the students. Every time I came out of there I’d be hyped up for days because there’s something so amazing about all these people who believe in us—that we are actually affecting their lives. They were all in.

We didn’t have anything a few years ago. All of a sudden we had a curriculum, we had teachers and people doing their homework and hoping to graduate. It was amazing. To me, that was the most exciting part of the whole thing. And it still is, honestly.”

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.