Ben Pleat is the CEO and founder of Cobu (formerly Doorbell Communities), a platform powering genuine communities in apartment buildings.
During his time at Harvard, he found his interest in entrepreneurship through leading VentureWorks, Harvard Ventures’ incubator, and co-foundering & launching TAVtech, a global coding academy that send students to Tel Aviv to learn programming. He discovered his interest in real estate through his earlier work on the growth team at WeWork and later through the real estate private equity group at Goldman Sachs.
Through these professionals experiences, he learned that turnover was a major business problem facing residential real estate owners and managers. On average, apartment buildings would see around 50% churn in residents every year, leading to high churn costs and large time inefficiencies .
Through his personal experiences, Ben began to develop a thesis around a key contributor of this high turnover — the lack of ‘stickiness’ caused by a weak community. His mother moved from a suburb to her dream city of Manhattan but shortly after getting there, she realized that her apartment complex felt incredibly lonely even though it was quite occupied and had great ‘community’ common spaces like a roofdeck. She spent the majority of each day cooped up in her apartment but still hardly knew any of her neighbors. Such chronic loneliness, Ben found, faced around 47% of the population, according to Cigna. Coupling this phenomenon with apartment churn, Ben also learned that having a friend in your apartment increases lease renewal likelihood by upwards of 30%.
Realizing how widespread these challenges were, he decided to tackle both problems symbiotically through launching Cobu.
Cobu learned how to build authentic community at scale by getting residents in the same room and found the best way to do so was through shared interest groups, such as gatherings for poker nights or board games or special dinners with local area chefs and other vendor partners.
Residents had very positive feedback for these initial experiences and afterwards, started connecting with each other more frequently. In one apartment building, after connecting through Cobu hosted activities, a group of residents came together organically to organize a potluck dinner, which attracted dozens of residents from the community organically. For the Cobu team, this was an aha moment showing how impactful and scalable the platform could be in engaging residents in lasting ways.
Too frequently, companies take a technology-first or even technology-only approach to solving community based challenges. Ben emphasizes the importance of building trust first and prioritizing inspiring a genuine level of confidence in end users rather than solely focusing on leveraging technology to provide behavioral nudges.
Looking back on his time at Harvard, Ben emphasized the importance of the interdisciplinary courses he took that shaped his perspective on society and ability to think more creatively as a founder. He also highlighted the importance of community (through courses like Startup R&D and student groups like Harvard Ventures) and how these have inspired and powered his work at Cobu.
When asked about the relatively risk averse mentality of Harvard students, Ben notes that this environment actually prompted him to think more critically and intentionally about whether he wanted to be a founder. In the end, this heightened process of self reflection led him and other Harvard founders to make the decision for the right reasons: a genuine care for the mission rather than a mere following of traditional paths.
