He rents you a bedroom and throws in the furniture, the roommates, and - if it works the way he drew it up - the friends.
CEO & Co-founder, Bungalow / Tulsa → Princeton → Wharton → San Francisco
The man who decided a spare bedroom was an unsolved market.
Andrew Collins runs Bungalow, the largest co-living network in the United States, from an office in Miami's Wynwood district. The product is deceptively plain: he leases houses, furnishes them, and rents the bedrooms one at a time, for roughly 30% less than a nearby studio. What he is actually selling is harder to put on a lease - a way to land in a strange city and not eat dinner alone.
The idea did not arrive as a spreadsheet. It arrived as a problem he lived. After Wharton he moved from Philadelphia to San Francisco, and discovered the two things nobody warns you about a new city: the rent is brutal, and the loneliness is quiet. His co-founder Justin McCarty had the same complaint. "We thought, it can't just be us that have these problems," McCarty has said. They were right, and Bungalow is the receipt.
Most founders romanticize the leap. Collins did the opposite - he stalled on purpose. He spent the better part of a decade collecting skills the way other people collect frequent-flyer miles, then cashed them in all at once. The bet underneath the whole company is almost old-fashioned: that housing should be cheaper, and people should be less alone, and that both can be true on the same lease.
He grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, inside a family of serial entrepreneurs whose ventures ran through oil, gas, and trucking. Dinner-table talk was deal talk. By the age he should have been worrying about cartoons, he had already decided he would run something of his own. That conviction never wavered. What changed was his sense of how unprepared he was to act on it.
At Princeton he set out to study economics and got ambushed by sociology. A 101 course rearranged his head: here was a discipline obsessed with how groups behave, why people cluster, what makes a community hold together or fall apart. He graduated with honors in both subjects. Years later, when he built a company whose entire premise is putting strangers under one roof and hoping they become friends, the choice looked less like a detour and more like research.
Then came the patience. Collins has been candid that he delayed founding anything because he could list, precisely, the things he did not yet know how to do - finance, accounting, quantitative marketing, leading a large team. So he went and learned them on someone else's payroll. He treated his twenties as a syllabus.
Medallia was first. He joined the customer-experience software firm around fifty employees and rode it past a thousand, building out its retail vertical and watching, up close, how a small company becomes a real one. Wharton followed, for the finance and accounting he'd flagged as gaps. Facebook came next, chosen deliberately at the ten-thousand-employee stage so he could see how community gets engineered at planetary scale.
The final stop was Atomic, the startup studio, where he served as an Entrepreneur in Residence alongside operators like Jack Abraham and Andrew Dudum. Atomic is where founders go to test ideas with a net underneath them. It is where Bungalow stopped being a complaint about San Francisco rent and started becoming a business.
Bungalow leases whole homes, furnishes them, handles maintenance and utilities, then rents the bedrooms individually. The renter gets a room and a built-in household.
The average room runs about 30% below the cost of a nearby studio. Splitting a house turns out to be the oldest hack in the book - Collins just made it bookable online.
Beyond rent, the company programs community - events, introductions, the social scaffolding a transplant usually has to build alone over years.
On the supply side, Bungalow gives homeowners a way to earn income from their properties without becoming full-time landlords.
Collins talks strategy in football terms: "running plays" for grinding operational efficiency, "passing plays" for the step-function bets that change the game.
A data-and-qualitative habit borrowed from his Medallia years and Carol Dweck's growth mindset: never stop measuring, never stop iterating.
Talk to people who describe Collins and the same words keep surfacing: deliberate, curious, allergic to ego. He is not the founder who insists he willed a company into being through sheer charisma. He is the one who admits he wasn't ready, went and got ready, and only then jumped. There is something almost engineering-minded about it - identify the missing parts, source them, assemble.
He is also unromantic about the grind. In Bungalow's first months he was the leasing agent and the maintenance guy, not because it scaled but because it was the fastest way to feel the customer's problem in his own hands. Founders love to say they'll do whatever it takes. Collins actually unclogged the drains.
His reading list reads like a management seminar - Carol Dweck on growth mindset, "Good to Great," "Tribal Leadership," Andy Rachleff on startup culture. He credits Dweck specifically for the company's refusal to treat any process as finished. And he is open that he prefers teams to solo glory: his recurring advice is to surround yourself with operators smarter than you, then get out of their way.
The sociology degree was not a youthful indulgence. Bungalow is, at bottom, a controlled experiment in group dynamics - take strangers, give them a kitchen, and see whether community can be designed rather than left to chance. He picked a business that turns his college obsession into a P&L.