by Stephanie Wu
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore, and said I was moving out. I crashed with a bunch of friends who had a spare room in a massive house with six people. They let me live there rent-free for a few weeks, while my boyfriend stayed in our house.
At the time, I worked at a bar, which paid really badly—it was minimum wage, but you were allowed to pay yourself in alcohol while you were working, which is so not legal. There was a tradition at the bar where if you worked on a Friday or Saturday, you took a shot an hour. The bar staff took turns choosing what spirit you took a shot of, and it got messy. People were always trying to outdo each other by picking the most disgusting, old, dusty bottle from the back of the bar. One Friday, about three weeks after the breakup, I was working the most ridiculous shift, which started at six P.M. and finished up at three in the morning. The only good thing about it was that you got a free taxi ride home to be safe when the shift was over. So at three A.M., I was really merry and had had loads of shots. Since this was in the middle of a big breakup, I was drunk and emotional at the same time. I went outside, got in a taxi, and at that stage of the night, had forgotten I moved out of our house, so I gave the driver my old address. It was only when the taxi dropped me off that I realized that my boyfriend and I had broken up and I didn’t live there anymore. This was the saddest thing in the world at four in the morning, especially because it was wintertime and freezing. I was at a house that wasn’t my house, I didn’t have the keys, and I knew he was inside but I couldn’t go in.
So I sat in the garden like a creepy person until it got light, and all of the emotion of the breakup and the booze hit home. I sat in the garden and cried and felt sorry for myself until about seven in the morning. And the worst part was, when it was light out and I stood up to leave, I could see in the bedroom window because the curtain was open, and there was a girl there. So not only had I gone and slept in the garden of a house I didn’t live in, but I also found out my ex was seeing someone else a few weeks after we broke up. It was the first time I’d ever lived with a boy, and I had all these Disney ideas of how incredible it would be, that we’d play house and it would be amazing. But the reality is, it was doomed from the start.
—B, 29 (F)
THE CRAIGSLIST BEST FRIEND
AFTER LIVING IN TEXAS FOR A FEW YEARS, I decided I wanted to do something crazy and move somewhere far away for a new experience. I started looking for public relations jobs in San Francisco and Boston. A lot of my friends in advertising and PR had headed to New York, but I wasn’t looking for jobs there because I was a bit apprehensive about moving to such a big and expensive city.
I applied for a few different jobs, and one Boston company offered me a position in their New York office. The only time I’d been to New York before was when I was eleven, and I hated it because it was so hot in the middle of July—and I’m from Texas.
Once I got the job, they said I could start in three weeks. I had to find a new place to live quickly, even though I didn’t know any of the neighborhoods or anyone out there looking for a roommate. I got on Craigslist immediately. In Texas, finding a roommate on Craigslist is really sketchy. It’s not like in New York, where it’s very normal. If you tell Texans you’re doing that, they’ll look at you like you’re a serial killer. But I was desperate, and I knew other people who had found living situations that way.
I saw a bunch of weird ads on Craigslist before I saw Jamie’s. She and her roommate, Kevin, were living in Westchester and wanted to move into Manhattan. They were looking for a third roommate to make it more affordable. I saw a photo of them and thought they looked normal, so I sent them a note.
Meanwhile, Jamie was getting a ton of responses to her post and looking through them at work. Her coworker Matt was helping her go through the replies to weed out the bad ones, and he saw mine. “I think you should pick her,” he said. “She seems like the coolest one.”
Jamie, Kevin, and I agreed that they’d start looking for a place, and if they hadn’t found something by the time I arrived, we’d all look together. I went back on Craigslist to look for an apartment, and I found one on the Upper West Side that looked great and affordable. And it happened that Kevin had seen the same listing and liked it as well. The two of them went to see it and fell in love with it. “We want to take it off the market immediately,” they said. “Are you in?” It felt crazy to commit to a lease with people I’d never met before, but I knew I had to go with my instinct, and told them I was in.
I moved to New York a few days later and went to check out the apartment. The landlord was meeting me there so I could sign the lease and hand over a three-thousand-dollar deposit—even though I still hadn’t met my future roommates yet. I finally met Jamie later that night for drinks. Since we’d already signed the lease, I had my fingers crossed that we’d actually like each other.
When we met, I hinted that the whole Craigslist thing was pretty scary for me because I hadn’t done anything like it before. “Me either,” Jamie said. “I told my family you were Kevin’s friend of a friend, because I didn’t want them to know I was living with a total stranger.” That broke the ice a bit between us.
It only took days after we moved in together for Jamie and me to become close. We’re around the same age, and we both loved to take long walks and explore the city on the weekend. When it was nice out, we spent all day lying in Central Park. We were similar in many ways, and we were twenty-three and young and single then, so we went out all the time.
Jamie was constantly telling me about her coworkers, because they were really close. One day about a month after I moved to New York, they had all gone to the beach together and were at an apartment not far from ours, hanging out and drinking, and she told me to come and meet them. That’s the first time I met Matt—the guy who told her to pick me as a roommate. I thought he was funny, and definitely my type, but I didn’t want to be the annoying girl who hooks up with her friend’s coworkers. I hung out with them as a group a few times, and Matt and I made out once or twice but nothing happened beyond that. There were a few times when Jamie hinted that the two of us should date, but I didn’t take it seriously.
The next summer, I went to a party at his house, and as Jamie and I were leaving, she told me that she thought Matt liked me. After that night, we started texting, meeting up, and going on dates. It wasn’t until we were officially dating that Matt told me the story about how he was actually the one who picked me to live with Jamie.
Kevin moved out of our apartment six months later to move in with his girlfriend, but Jamie and I stayed for three more years. The first person to take over Kevin’s room was an acquaintance from college. She only lived with us for six months but was completely insane—she did a lot of drugs, brought guys home all the time, and was always having ridiculously loud sex. The second girl, who I found through my college’s alumni Web site, was cool but had her own stuff going on. It was apparent within a few months that she wanted to keep her distance, which was fine with us. We didn’t form that deep of a connection with her—it was never on the same level Jamie and I had.
At one point, we found a rat in our apartment, and it was the most traumatizing thing I’ve ever been through. I plugged my door with towels so it couldn’t get into my bedroom, but it was in our apartment for a week. The exterminator came and put poison around our kitchen, and Jamie came home one day and smelled it under the sink. She had to fish the rat out after it had eaten the poison and died. It was the bravest thing ever.
After we lived together for four years, Jamie recently moved out of the city. I miss her already. I owe everything to her—my first apartment, my first friend in New York, and of course, my boyfriend—who is now my new roommate.
—E, 27 (F)
THE BUSINESS PARTNERS
ON MY FIRST DAY OF COLLEGE AT GEORGETOWN, I met Nicolas Jammet, who lived next door to me in the dorms. We lived in Harbin Hall, which is famous because it’s where Bill Clinton lived—his room was actually on our floor. Nic’s family is
in the food business—they used to own La Caravelle in New York, which closed our freshman year. The two of us built a friendship off of our love for food. Once a month or so, in order to escape the terrible cafeteria food, we explored the city and found new restaurants. I also met Nathaniel Ru very early on freshman year. We were in the same Accounting 101 class, and became friends because we’re both from Los Angeles and bonded over that. The two of us love music and went to a lot of concerts together.
It wasn’t until junior year of college that Nate and I moved into an on-campus apartment together. Nic took over our apartment when the two of us went abroad, and when we moved back, the three of us stayed neighbors. During our senior year, Nate and I lived together in an apartment on Bank Street, and Nic lived around the corner. Our apartment became our first office and the place where we came up with our company. The idea for Sweetgreen, a salad restaurant with fast, healthy food, came about because we had a need for it. We wanted to eat healthily in a simple, affordable, hip way. The girls around us have inspired a lot of our best ideas—one of our girlfriends complained about not having great food in the area, and we felt the same way. So we found an incredible location on our street, which was only 550 square feet, for our first Sweetgreen store. The small space forced us to keep the concept boiled down: a seasonal kitchen selling salads, cold-pressed juices, and rice bowls, with ingredients from local farms. We might have been tempted to add sandwiches or other things early on, but we didn’t have the space.
The first store opened the summer after we graduated. All three of us were studying business, and we wrote a business plan, raised money, and built the store while we were still in school. We knew there was a need for a restaurant like Sweetgreen, so we were confident in the first store, but we didn’t realize how big it could be. We wanted to create a brand—the idea of a lifestyle we wanted to live and a brand we believed in really excited us. But I don’t think we ever thought that we’d have eighteen restaurants in the greater D.C. area alone, plus one in New York, one in Boston, and two in Philadelphia.
Becoming business partners has made us much closer. It’s a never-ending conversation we have. Our idea of the sweet life is where work and play are intertwined, and that is absolutely our life. We work all the time, but it doesn’t feel like we’re working, and that’s why we’re successful. It’s fun, and we’re doing it with people we truly love. We’ve learned to disagree and not let it affect our relationship. Usually the three of us can come to a consensus on big decisions, but when one person disagrees, we’re still able to go get dinner, have a drink, and move on.
Nate and I have lived together ever since, and Nic has always lived very close by. A few years ago, Nate and I bought a house from our entrepreneurship professor—who also happens to be one of our investors and mentors. And Nic and his twin brother bought a condo across the street, which I have the code to, so it’s almost like we live with Nic too.
We no longer work out of our apartment. We now have an office in D.C.’s Chinatown with ten or so employees. It’s a cool, creative space with an open floor plan and exposed brick that we call the Treehouse. We joke that we should probably have beds there, because we’re there more than we are at home.
Since we opened our New York store, we’ve been splitting our time between D.C. and New York, and the three of us also share an apartment in New York. We spend so much time together that we’ve developed an ESP of sorts—sometimes we’ll go to work separately and show up wearing the same outfit.
I do think about how lucky we are to have met one another—it’s all very Sliding Doors. The three of us really value one another’s friendship and opinions. We did a TED Talk last year on the idea of partnerships. If I told you Sweetgreen was a salad shop, you’d say, “Okay, cool.” But it’s much more than that—it’s a lifestyle that we want to live and share with other people. When you’re starting a company, it’s not about what you do, but why you do it and who you do it with.
—JONATHAN NEMAN, 29 (M), COFOUNDER AND CEO OF SWEETGREEN
YOUNG AT HEART
THE THREE-MONTH RV TRIP
WHILE I WAS LIVING IN LOS ANGELES, a childhood friend of mine, Beth, and her boyfriend, Pete, contacted me about a company they’d founded. The two of them had started teaching specialty fitness classes in New York, and were receiving a lot of interest from LA. They flew to the West Coast a few times for work and stayed with me, and eventually decided to bring me on as a brand ambassador.
I got more and more involved with the company by helping out at events and being an extra set of hands, and I officially joined when I moved back east during the summer. That spring, Beth and Pete had applied to be on Shark Tank, the reality TV show for start-up funding. After they were accepted onto the show, they went back to Los Angeles once more to film a fourteen-minute segment. You essentially have to pitch a bunch of “shark” investors and give them all the financial information about your company. Every single one of the investors made them an offer, which is rare. They accepted a six-figure offer from Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, for 30 percent of the company.
Mark encouraged us to think outside the box in terms of how to capitalize on the publicity of the show and reach people across the country, and that’s partially how we came up with the idea of the three-month road trip. There were four of us involved at the time: Pete, the CEO; Beth, the head trainer who developed the fitness program; Rick, who did operations and shipping; and me, handling marketing and the logistics of the tour. We decided to go on tour from mid-October to January and drive around the country in an RV with all our fitness equipment to teach classes, host trainer certifications at various gyms, and build brand awareness.
Our thirty-foot RV seemed like a good size, but those RVs are built for families with two or three kids under the age of ten. When you have three guys over six feet, it’s much less comfortable. We knew immediately that if we stayed in hotels every night, the costs would add up quickly. We all agreed to sleep in the RV during the trip, but there was only one full-size bed in it, which Beth and Pete shared. Rick took a five-foot-long couch, and I slept on a table that turned into a bench. Every night for three months, I curled up and slept on my side, because I was too tall for the bench. I actually developed lockjaw on the left side of my face. Beth and Pete also insisted on bringing their nine-month-old bulldog—a loud snorer—on the trip. It was a test not only of business relationships but of personal ones as well.
The trip started in Connecticut, and we were supposed to have a huge kickoff party in New York at Chelsea Piers, a nice gym off a park on the west side. We had celebrities scheduled to come, and then Hurricane Sandy hit. All our stops in the upper East Coast area had to be postponed or canceled. It was a rough start to our three-month tour.
We continued along our way, stopping at gyms every day, teaching classes, and trying to run our company from the RV at the same time. We were never in the same place for more than forty-eight hours, and someone had to be driving at all times. When we did park it was either next to a highway or on a busy lit street. If we slept for three hours, it was a good night. Five hours and we were feeling like royalty. We’d decided early on that we wouldn’t be using the RV’s bathroom, because if we did, we’d have to empty the sewage at an RV park. We figured we’d save money and time if we used the facilities at gyms and restaurants. It proved how strong our bladders could be. We spent many nights in Home Depot or Walmart parking lots, bringing our Dopp kits to the bathrooms to wash our faces, splash water under our arms, brush our teeth, and floss, while employees and customers came in and out.
The trip took us down the East Coast, and for one of our legs, we had to drive through the night from Atlanta to Miami. I was driving through a random part of north Florida at three thirty in the morning when all of a sudden there was a massive explosion on the left side of the RV. It lifted the whole left side up and slammed it down, which woke everyone up. They thought I had hit something, but actually both tires on the
left back side were rotted and had exploded simultaneously. We had to call Triple A and slowly drive our vehicle to the next exit so a guy could change the tires. We didn’t get back on the road until seven or eight, and by then I was exhausted and asked someone else to drive.
Pete picked up the driving, and all the guys were upset with me because they thought I hit something. And that’s when the exact same thing happened on the right side. Now we had four exploded tires, and no chance of making the television appearance and launch party we had scheduled in Miami.
Later, while we were driving through Texas to the West Coast, we found out there were mice in the RV. We saw droppings everywhere, and Beth saw them in the bedroom from time to time. The dealer we’d rented from said that it was possible that mice could have come in from outside, and offered to get us an exterminator, but there wasn’t much we could do.
The only good thing was that the stops themselves were going well—we were getting great responses from the trainers, which was keeping us afloat, because everything else on the trip was backfiring. We were looking forward to getting to the warm weather on the West Coast, but when we got to San Diego, we were exhausted and miserable. We were in the gym by six in the morning and staying until the evening, so we barely even saw daylight.
In LA, we were scheduled to do a Shark Tank follow-up with Mark Cuban. We had to pull ourselves together even though we looked like crap and hadn’t slept at all. They wanted to film the RV but there was no way we could show the inside, with blankets and dog food and toys everywhere.
