Most coworking spaces promise community and deliver isolation.

You walk in. You sit down. You put your headphones on. You don't talk to anyone. You leave. The community everyone says they want never actually happens.

Harvard's Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban put sensors on around fifty employees and found that knocking down the walls of an office actually reduced face-to-face interaction by roughly 70 percent. People put their headphones on louder. Email and IM went up. The problem was never open space. It was thoughtfully designed space.

The spaces themselves? Sanitized. Corporate. Sterile. Fine for grinding through email, useless for the kind of spontaneous collisions that spark new ideas, new companies, and new friendships.

SF and NYC have startup houses where founders live and work together, feeding off each other's energy. Charlotte has had nothing like that. Until now.

A small, curated space for founders who want more than a desk.

We're taking a historic house in Charlotte and turning it into a place where people whiteboard on walls and jam on ideas together, where happy little accidents happen in the kitchen over coffee, where panel discussions happen in a living room instead of a conference center, and where you're surrounded by people who understand what you're building.

It's the same design principle that produced the transistor at Bell Labs, nine Nobel laureates at MIT's Building 20, and every Pixar movie since Toy Story. Private space for deep work. Shared space for collision. A kitchen where different people end up at the same time. It sounds simple because it is. The hard part is being intentional about it.

This is not another WeWork. It's intimate. It's curated. It's a home base for the people actually building the future of Charlotte.

We're not building an incubator. We're not running a program. We're building the room, and inviting the right people to fill it. Drew Burdick · Founder

on Cleveland Ave since 1900

The House

Built in 1900. Reborn in 2026.

1717 Cleveland Avenue was BraveWorks before it was the house. Michele and Eric Dudley, who own the building, ran a nonprofit there that employed women rebuilding from abuse, making jewelry and other goods sold on-site. When they heard about the vision for a startup house in Charlotte, they said "we want to figure out how to do this." The house already had purpose. We're keeping that going.

Read the full house history

3,265

Square feet

1900

Year built

Floors + porch

Who This Is For

You might be a fit if you...

We're not for everyone. The people who thrive here share a few things in common.

Are building something

A real product, a real service, a real venture. Not a side hustle. Not a someday-maybe. Something with stakes.

Crave real community, not networking theater

Real conversations over coffee, not LinkedIn-style elevator pitches. Generosity with time and introductions.

Want to move fast in the AI era

You see the leverage AI offers and want to be in a room with people who use it. Members get an exclusive AI workshop.

Value spontaneous collaboration over scheduled meetings

The kitchen, not the calendar. The kind of work where the best ideas come at 3:14 PM on a Tuesday.

Are tired of working alone or in sterile corporate spaces

You've done your time at the chain coffee shop, the home office, the WeWork floor. You want something better.

Want to be part of something bigger than your own company

Charlotte's startup ecosystem is at an inflection point. You want to help shape it, not just benefit from it.

Charlotte just hit an inflection point.

Charlotte just cracked the national top-20 tech cities. Over 50,000 tech workers and growing fast. More than a billion dollars of venture capital flowed into Charlotte startups across hundreds of deals over five years. 90 percent of Charlotte founders plan to stay. The social capital built here stays here.

AI is accelerating everything except authentic relationships. The CLT Startup House is here to solve that.

The ingredients are all here. The infrastructure isn't. Yet.

It's not a real estate play.

The CLT Startup House isn't a real estate play. It's not a coworking arbitrage. It's community and collisions that the Charlotte startup community deserves.

A place where founders collide with other founders. Where ideas get pressure-tested over coffee. Where the next great Charlotte company might get started because two people happened to be in the same room at the same time.

SF has Y Combinator houses. NYC has founder lofts. Charlotte has 1717 Cleveland Avenue.

Drew Burdick

Founder, StealthX & CLT Startup House

"I looked for a space like this in Charlotte. It didn't exist. So I'm building it."

I'm the founder of StealthX, where we help companies build products and experiences people actually love. We move fast, stay lean, and let AI do the heavy lifting.

I host a podcast and write a weekly newsletter on building great experiences with strategy, design and AI.

Most of my work is with Charlotte-area companies, and I've seen firsthand what's missing: a space where founders can collide, collaborate, and build together. Not another coworking space. A startup house. That's what we're building.

Follow Drew

For the builders.