Sitting on the leather sofa of a medieval-looking stone house in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Logan Reinke tells me about the biggest argument he has had while living full time with his work colleagues. It is surprisingly underwhelming.
“It was about the temperature in the house,” he says, pointing to two of his colleagues, Harry Cao and Shaniqua Dawes. “I’m used to the cold in Milwaukee, but they blast the heat really high.”
The unease the three of them feel around this minor confrontation is palpable – perhaps due to the fact that, tomorrow, they will wake up and shower in the same house, walk across the hall to work together in the same room for eight hours, before finally retreating at the end of the day to the same quarters to eat and sleep.
This is Fiveable, an education technology startup that moved to Milwaukee at the start of the pandemic, and where five of its employees live, eat, and sleep in the same house, 24/7. The chief executive, Amanda DoAmaral, says she needed to cut costs and offer something different, and co-living seemed like the way forward. Employees who choose to live in the house live rent-free for a year, and enjoy a full salary and benefits. They also have their moving costs to Milwaukee paid for.
We are talking in the living room, with the members of the household huddled up on the sofa together – Reinke wearing the basketball shorts he now regularly dons due to the house temperature situation, DoAmaral in sweats and a Kamala Harris T-shirt. This is perhaps the least exquisite room in the house. Next door is a gym, home to a Peloton bike, a treadmill, weights and an acupuncture ball. On the kitchen counter rests, in a line, a De’Longhi coffee machine, a drip coffee maker, an air fryer, a portable protein-shake maker, and several soda streams. No one goes hungry or thirsty here. Tan Ho, the chief operating officer, regularly rustles up family meals in here – the one that I am privy to (which they insist is the norm) features a three-course meal including a charcuterie board, two home-made cheesecakes and lots of laughter and chatting.
On the weekends, DoAmaral and her colleagues will party together; after tough days at work, they will commiserate together; and on special occasions, they will celebrate … yep, together. In the past year, they have spent every major holiday, and birthdays, as a group.
Cao distinctly recalls how uncomfortable he felt when he first moved into the house. When his bosses would invite the entire household for film nights and drinks to their section of the house (they live across the hall), he didn’t know how to behave. He wondered if he was being assessed the whole time, and couldn’t relax.
“I wanted to impress them. So I was a little bit nervous. I didn’t really know what I should say or what I should do,” he explains. Then, when the bosses got together to throw him a birthday party in their apartment, a few months after he arrived, he threw up in front of everybody after doing one Tequila shot too many.
“I tried to control it because I was in front of a lot of people … But it just got worse and worse,” he laughs. He looks back on it now as an ice-breaker moment – because it helped him realize his performance at work wasn’t going to be scrutinized based on how he acted out of hours.
This is one of the many trials and tribulations of living with your co-workers: everything is intensified. A dirty dish in the sink is no longer just that; it can easily become a statement about your work ethic; going back for seconds at the dinner table may indicate your team spirit; how long you take in the shower a reflection of your entitlement.
“Tan and I, we know we set examples,” says DoAmaral, the chief executive. “So if we’re going to have a night where everybody’s drinking, then we’re drinking, too. I’m not gonna fire Harry for getting sick. He’s just having fun,” she explains.
But there is a line.
“If there was a fight between people and really awful things were being said … racist, sexist or homophobic things – if some true colors were coming out, that would be really concerning,” she says.
The worst has happened before; DoAmaral has had to fire employees in the past. She once had to fire someone who relocated a few days after him arriving – it just wasn’t a good match. Another time, she had to fire a friend who had been with the company since its fruition.
“Firing anyone sucks. But when you live together, you have to evict them also,” DoAmaral explains. She and other employees have had to sneak time away on walks to discuss the issues they were having with their new live-in colleagues.
“We couldn’t communicate, and it was making everyone uncomfortable. Most things you can work through, like, clean your dishes or turn the heat down – you find compromise, you figure it out. But with some people you just can’t.”
“Any conflict we have usually has to be resolved very quickly. Because we don’t want that to affect what we are doing,” explains Ho.
Ho and DoAmaral have been here since the beginning, and have survived the canned-food eating stages, the accelerators phase (the fixed-term part common to startups, which provides mentorship, coaching and which finances are usually dependent on) – and, for Amanda, living with her mom back in Maine to get the company off the ground. Now they have $3.2m worth of funding, more than 850,000 students using their platforms, and they manage the company mostly from the comfort of their own bedrooms, in their shared house.
But sometimes, even for them, it can be too much.
“Even if I’m hanging out watching TV, I can see my computer,” DoAmaral says. She jokes about the idea of ever having a romantic partner. I can see what the problem might be: as I interview her, we are both sitting in her bedroom, she on the bed, me on the sofa, and her work computer – which is never switched off – is looking ominously on both of us.
Dawes, Cao, Reinke, DoAmaral and Ho all describe themselves as workaholics. Asked whether they ever find it impossible to leave work, seeing as they live there, the answers aren’t incredibly convincing. “I can see how someone else might feel that way,” says Reinke. “My work has become a hobby for me. But I have never felt obligated to [stay after hours].”
Then there is the small matter of weekends. “We try not to work Saturdays. And Sundays are sort of like a halfsies day,” says DoAmaral, in an attempt to convince me that they are all addressing their work life balances.
You can see how, in the wrong hands, such a living arrangement could quickly become a dystopian nightmare. A culture of creeping surveillance at work – of companies monitoring their employees’ hours, their web usage, and even using software to monitor their employees at work – has only gotten worse during the pandemic. Can you imagine what that might be like if you lived with your boss? If your boss saw how you spent your free time, your money, your lunch hour?
While big corporations might frame these living situations in terms of a “greater sense of community”, it feels like the logical endpoint is to create workspaces that so cater to your every need, you never have to leave work – a lucrative move for a company’s bottom line.
So you can see the inherent risk associated with such a business model. Reinke laughs that he wouldn’t apply to a Walmart scheme to live with your colleagues rent free for a year as a developer (“Yeah, absolutely fucking not. Not a chance”) but he says Fiveable avoids the pitfalls. They encourage staff to take holidays, give them a mental health stipend every month, offer them a free gym, and take them on group vacations together to blow off steam.
Ho takes the pressure a little differently. “There’s always cheeks flapping in the LGBTQ corner of the Fiveable HQ!” he jokes. He is sitting next to the mini bar when he tells me this – which seems like it was once well stocked, but its contents are clearly waning. A few 1.5l bottles of rum, vodka, bourbon and whiskey are basically out from all the parties they’ve been managing to have in their pandemic bubble.
For most of them, having the company has been a huge benefit in the pandemic. “Before I moved here, I didn’t have too many interactions with other people, which made me kind of lonely. I’m a people person. I want to talk with other people in person,” explains Cao. To him, that seems a good enough sacrifice for the awkward moments – like the heating situation (they came to a compromise – Reinke wearing basketball shorts around the house all day), or the time Reinke and Dawes told him off for leaving a burned pan on the stove top for too long.
Reinke addressed walking around in just his underpants quickly (“I didn’t mean to be weird or anything, but previously, I had lived only with like, fraternity brothers, so that wasn’t exactly strange to me”) but says outside of that he has had no issues. He brings dates home (yes, people in the house have a sex life), he has sufficient downtime, and he enjoys the new friends he has made.
“You develop your own jargon in a sense, and it becomes really easy just to strike up a conversation. If I wasn’t living with them, I wouldn’t be seeing anybody because we can’t go out anywhere,” he says.
“I’ve been blown away by the humanity of it all,” he adds.
DoAmaral thinks the increased intimacy is important.
“You get to understand people. If someone is very shy, or really has a deep interest in something you never even knew they cared about – those things can really help you understand how this person works, how they think, where they’re coming from, maybe the language that they need, the way that they need to be supported. The benefit of living together is you get to those things faster,” she says.
How do she feel about the prospect that one day she won’t live with her employees?
“It’s scary. I think about living alone. I’m like, sounds kind of nice – I could just walk around my house and cook when I want to. Or be naked!”
Then she pauses. “But then there’s other times where I’ll be lonely. Here, there’s always people around.”
