Hello all! A lot of depth is awaiting you in this cocktail... nothing else to say than: Enjoy the coliving slurp 😋
Global Coliving News
The World Economic Forum writes about coliving and its benefits 🌏 This article is not anything breaking-news style and doesn't have many new information. The interesting part is rather that large institutions like WEF start proposing this topic as a solution for urban living, which will just make it more mainstream.
Forbes wrote about insurance for coliving residents 💵 Two companies, Lemonade and Toggle, start to offer liability and renters insurance for coliving residents. I'm not sure how long these offers have come to be, but I'm sure that more insurance companies will follow the trend and that coliving operators will invest into getting insurances (maybe even on a mandatory basis) for their residents.
Coliving operator Starcity launched its newest report 📘 It explains how it pivoted during the pandemic, which processes it changed to tackle health concerns, and how it dealt with landlords. While it's nicely promoted content, the two sections that can be of interest to you are the new security measures and how it's been dealing with landlords across the pandemic.
The latest coliving PMS system is out 🔥 Our dear friend Mayank Pokharna, who is also head of marketing at Co-Liv and who founded a coliving marketplace prior, just launched a new product: JumboTiger! I'm actually not sure where the name is coming from, but the app brings a lot of features into one: communication between team mates (including decision-making), communication between operator and residents, property inspection tools and property visits (including scheduling), and much more. Check out the complete launch video for more info!
Human Dynamics in Coliving
We were sitting around a bonfire when the topic of discussion came up: what is community? Both my friend and I had been staying for two weeks in this coliving space, but our understanding of community was different. On my side, I said that we were a community, even if we might not stay together after this month is over. On his side, he felt that for us to be a community, something was missing. For him, community required the people to have a shared mission. The same way we tend to identify ourselves with our struggles, so would communities define themselves with their common cause. In my response, I said that our common struggle was to live and grow together, but that wasn’t enough for him. He needed the cause to be something that drives us individually and that brings us together, collectively. So the question becomes: when is a community truly a community? 🧐 Here were a few thoughts on how to get the best out of both family and community frameworks: 1. The difference between family and community is that community is about alignment: you choose to be part of a community because you share an identity with these people. If there is no more alignment, then you would leave the community freely. Family is not about alignment: in fact, you can feel that your family is not your community - and yet, even if that’s the case, there will be a stronger sense of innate responsibility and willingness to sacrifice within a family than a community. Imagine that you have a grave accident tomorrow and wake up with a 50,000 dollar bill - guess who will step in, your community or your family? The question therefore becomes: how can we create the sense of responsibility for other members within communities? As this would mean the best of both worlds. 2. Communities and personal relationships are freely chosen because people believe that being in a relationship is a net sum positive outcome - which is often is, but sometimes it's a trap or an illusion, such as in abusive relationships. Once people realize that the relationship is actually more destructive than enhancing, people break the ties. Those two statements gave me clarify about the following statement:
"The health of a relationship will be the amount of alignment, while the strength of the relationship will be the amount of responsibility".
I'm curious what resonates with you - do you agree? 🧐
Join the Coliving Apps survey
Our friends at Conscious Coliving, with whom I co-authored the Community Facilitation handbook, are doing a survey around "tech platforms and mobile apps" for coliving residents. We've been talking about this a bit already. It's a big mess - no one knows what to use. This is why we want to crate the "bible of coliving apps" - and would need your input! Take part in this survey (2min) and contribute to identifying the apps that work for coliving 👇
Carlos wrote a great post on "verticals within coliving" ↕️ Vertical means creating coliving spaces for people with similar interests. His argument can be summarized in these lines: "Because targeting passion will guarantee that you have a robust like-minded community that will have your logo tattooed and then build your real estate empire on top of it—not the other way around." I'm been myself hesitant to propose that model and thought that having shared values and/or behavior would be enough. But with time, I came to realize that there should be both: similar values, to ensure that people focus on the same behavioral principles, and similar (or complementary) interests, to ensure that people interact on a day-to-day around what lightens them up. Which leads me to a similar article I wrote a few years back, asking the one and simple question: why isn’t there a Zumba of coliving? It's amazing to see whenever coliving spaces turn into lifestyle brands, because they truly have the potential to be so. But in order to get there, they must truly align with the residents - and just interests or just values won't be enough. PS: Are you vetting for similar interests? If yes, why?
An evaluation form to understand the strength of communities 💏 In our Telegram channel, one of our members shared how he used the questionnaire to understand what is going right and wrong in his community. The 6 categories that the form suggests are flourishing individuals, good relationships, proficient leadership, healthy practices, satisfying community, and strong mission. If you do this with your community, would love to read your results!
A deep understanding of the power of communal living 🏡 One of my fellow coliving brothers, Alex Olshonsky, or rather called Olo, interviewed me recently on his podcast and wrote in his newsletter about the coliving phenomena. Quick background about him: Olo is one of the most loving, sincere and growth-oriented people I know. During a long journey in the startup scene with senior positions at Twitter, Salesforce, Copper, and now VentureBeat, Olo overcame one of his funamental issues: addiction. He's taken a radical life change, now becoming an ayuasca apprentice, masterming yoga to new levels (I've never had a better yoga teacher than him!) and truly focussing on how to live purely in interaction with our complex world. When he wrote about coliving, I first recognized the alignment (or influence) of my own words on his philosophy: "As Perdrix explains, coliving can be so much more than just a real estate endeavor—it should be an extension and optimization of the fundamental question: why do we even live in the first place? Humans sharing the same space should be a byproduct of their intention—and not the other way around. Coliving primarily should be about helping people fulfill their needs, however big or small." But the most interesting part is his comparison between coliving and polygamy, which is the practice of having multiple partners. "I’m particularly excited about coliving on two fronts. For one, I find coliving offers many personal growth similarities that my dabbles into the world of polyamory offered: honesty, open communication, and clear boundaries. Coliving, like polyamory, is only transformative when everyone involved is willing to participate and get their hands dirty. Polyamory offers a wealth of philosophy that would benefit any type of relationship, monogamous or not. In that same way, even if you just bought a single family home with no intention of ever coliving, you could benefit from learning about the art of coliving. A coliving conversation about personal covid protocols and boundaries might not be as triggering as a hearing about your partner’s latest sexual adventures, but the same principles apply." Finally, he also made the bridge between his topic of fighting addition and how coliving can help build the bridge: "Lastly, coliving has massive potential to help combat addiction. Addiction, at its root, is a disconnection from the Self, which leads to detachment from other humans. There’s a reason Sober Living houses, rehabs, and other programs offer closed containers. Yet, statistically, these halfway houses are not effective. Can a new approach to coliving, combined with Experiential Design, help solve this problem?" Please go and check out his newsletter, it's worth every read: olo.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-coliving 🙌
Some Personal Updates
It's been my 3rd week as a resident of the Experience House, a temporary coliving retreat in Guatemala with incredible humans from around the world. On a professional front, I put a lot of efforts into building out Co-Liv and working on our upcoming Co-Liv Summit: you can already save the date for May 5/6th of this year! 🥳 At the same time, I continued finalizing the last version of my upcoming book and found the perfect words around what coliving means to me:
"Coliving is about discovering oneself through the interaction and presence of others." - quoting myself (why not 😂)
Finally, I also spent a lot of time being with my current community. One of them was our recent weekend trip, where we hiked on top of a volcano, played trumped, danced and DJed until the night took us away 🌋 This is another key advantage of living in community: creating memories of a life-time from experiences that you could not have pulled off by yourself.
Wishing you all a beautiful weekend,
Hugs, Gui
PS: If you have any thoughts on what you just read, please share them with me. And if someone forwarded you this email, you can subscribe to my newsletter here.
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