New York has a reliable way of greeting a young business: it sends a rent bill. In 2014, Matthew Harrigan helped arrange a different welcome. Grand Central Tech offered selected founders a year of office space without rent and without taking a slice of their companies for admission. The address was Midtown Manhattan. The wager concerned what might happen when capable people worked close enough to borrow more than a stapler.
Before it became part of a venture firm, the idea had the pleasing bluntness of an empty desk. Founders needed somewhere to build. Other founders could be useful company. An office could give them both. Harrigan’s career would eventually acquire the language of funds, investment stages and deal sourcing. Its central proposition remained easy to understand: arrange the room carefully, then let the people get to work.
A room before a fund
The early Grand Central Tech office occupied Facebook’s former New York headquarters at 335 Madison Avenue. Ahead of opening, Harrigan and co-founder Charlie Bonello were making wooden workbenches. The furniture came with an informal engineering specification: it could withstand an Irish jig. Harrigan’s verdict was economical. “They are durable as hell.”
That is a useful detail to keep beside the later investment titles. Someone had to build the tables. The ambitious idea of a founder community still required surfaces, chairs and an internet connection. Its earliest expression involved making an actual workplace usable, a task that resists becoming entirely theoretical however sophisticated the presentation.
The launch arrangement also had limits. It supplied space and mentorship rather than an automatic cash investment. The property owner, Milstein Properties, provided the premises. Early descriptions linked the free year to the possibility of companies becoming paying tenants afterward. Those original terms belong to that period; the present residency describes entry separately from investment. The model developed as the organization did.
The business of making business possible
Harrigan graduated from Rice University in 2007. His early professional life took him to Booz Allen Hamilton and international economic development. The work examined the conditions that helped or hindered businesses, including policy and the wider economic environment. Rather than beginning with the question of which startup to back, he began with the surroundings in which businesses could operate.
There is a recognizable connection between that work and his later interest in a deliberately assembled workplace. Both concern what happens around an enterprise. Rules, access and infrastructure can consume a business owner’s attention before the product itself has much of a chance. Changing those conditions is a different job from running the business, but it can affect the work.
He then moved through Fahrenheit 212 and ESPN. At ESPN, his responsibilities included the college football app and mobile analytics. This placed him closer to the daily mechanics of a product: what people used, what the organization could measure and how a large operation understood its own mobile audience. His path to investing passed through both business environments and the work of shipping software.
An experiment with a school address
The New York roots reach back further than the office. Harrigan and Bonello knew each other as children and attended Regis High School on the Upper East Side. Their initial experiment brought technology companies into free space at their former school, connecting those businesses with student interns. It combined two practical needs: companies wanted somewhere to work, and students needed access to a field they might otherwise encounter at a distance.
Regis itself is tuition-free. The parallel with a later rent-free program is striking, although the school and the residency serve very different purposes. In both arrangements, removing an upfront charge changes who can consider entering. Selection still matters. The expense simply stops being the first conversation.
The experiment expanded into Grand Central Tech in 2014 with backing from the Milstein family. A small institutional connection became part of a larger city project. The student pathway survived the move. For Harrigan, building a startup environment also meant finding a way for people outside its established circles to walk through the door.
A landlord with a longer horizon
The property partnership made the offer possible. Free office space does not become free to provide merely because the people using it are inventive. Someone has to carry the cost. The Milstein family owned the building and could consider the longer relationship between an emerging business and its eventual space needs.
In the founders’ 2015 explanation of the model, the family extended rent-free space to Grand Central Tech, which extended it to participants. They described a community that could accumulate over successive years. A company might outgrow its first desks without leaving the building or losing its neighbors. The address could retain the relationships after the introductory program ended.
The partners around the program included established corporations such as Google, Microsoft, IBM and JPMorgan Chase. That combination gave the experiment a distinctly New York setting: young companies close to organizations that could become customers, partners or employers. The office was a place to meet peers, but it also sat inside a city already crowded with businesses worth understanding.
There is no automatic proof of success in a crowded building. The useful test is what its occupants can do because they are there. Can they reach a customer? Find a hire? Learn something specific? A community earns its keep in those ordinary exchanges, long before a funding announcement supplies a more convenient headline.
Admission and investment are separate decisions. A residency place does not promise a funding check.
Three questions, one building
In his 2021 account of the organization’s development, Harrigan described a sequence of questions. With founders gathered together, could the group widen opportunity in technology? Could it create a different kind of real estate offering? Could it establish a fund that benefited from knowing companies at their earliest stages?
Each question added a layer. The first concerned participation and student internships. The second led to integration with Milstein Properties and the launch of Company and the Company Building. The third led to Company Ventures and a $34 million first fund. The fund followed the environment rather than providing the original reason for assembling it.
That order helps explain the firm’s approach. Bringing people together creates the opportunity to observe how they work. Investment can follow when a relationship and a company’s needs line up. The residency supplies a longer encounter than a pitch meeting. It gives an investor a chance to know the work between presentations, and a founder a chance to know the investor between requests for money.
Community first. A funding decision when the relationship fits.
The sequence behind Company Ventures
What a founder gets on Tuesday
The practical detail matters because “community” is a word that can travel remarkably far without picking up a clear meaning. A membership list is easy to count. Help is harder. The firm’s account of its founder services emphasizes shared space, focused programming, introductions and advice that connects a founder’s plans with a fundraising strategy.
Peers have a particular role in this arrangement. They can ask questions from the position of people currently doing similar work, rather than from the distance of someone advising it. An introduction offered by a neighbor carries a different history from a name sent after a single meeting. Both can be useful; repeated contact gives the first relationship time to grow.
The promise is also about continuity. A year offers room for plans to change, products to develop and teams to discover which questions they should have asked earlier. The resident company remains responsible for its decisions. The environment is there to make access to people and support less cumbersome. That modest distinction is part of what makes the offer legible.
Time, upside, purpose
Harrigan’s 2021 essay, Modern Founder, expands the argument beyond office space. He organized his approach around time, upside and purpose. His concern was that founders sought more from their work than a single valuation target, including opportunities to support peers and build businesses in line with broader commitments.
Read alongside the residency, the framework adds another dimension to the free year. Time matters because attention is limited. Upside matters because founders are building something they hope will become valuable. Purpose matters because the choices inside a company shape what it will become. These objectives can coexist, though writing them down does not remove the decisions they require.
The essay places responsibility with the people making those choices. A supportive organization can provide resources, but founders must decide what deserves their hours, what they want to own and how they want to operate. Harrigan’s answer is to make the surrounding environment more deliberate. Even a pleasant office has to serve the work.
The next desk, the next fund
The experiment has continued into a period when founders have more software tools and ways to work at a distance. In July 2025, Company Ventures invited applications from teams working on AI-enabled applications and AI/data infrastructure. The technological interests had moved with the market. The invitation still centered on building alongside other people.
More recently, Harrigan’s public activity described Company Ventures as investing from its third fund and recruiting for two investment-team roles. One focused on AI and sourcing; another included running the residency and engaging founder talent. Those responsibilities put the investment work and the daily work of maintaining the community beside each other.
The current company website reports 208 alumni residency companies and more than $5 billion raised by alumni. Those are community figures, rather than a statement of Harrigan’s personal investment returns. They describe the scale of the group around the original proposition. A funding total can tell one part of its story. The quieter part remains what happens when somebody turns to the next desk.
Harrigan is still based in Brooklyn. His firm biography includes morning walks in Prospect Park with Lucy, his giant schnoodle. It is an agreeably local detail for a career concerned with getting people into the same place. The building near Grand Central and the park in Brooklyn belong to the same city he has chosen to keep working on. The original offer survives: come in, take a desk, see what you can build.