Ollie co-founders Andrew and Chris Bledsoe share an unbreakable bond. Before they were business partners, they were each other’s first roommates, spending their days building Lego masterpieces from the comfort of their Star Wars bed tents.

By high school, Andrew had asserted his independence and commandeered the home office as his own room, while Chris headed off to college.

But the bond of first-roommates is not easily broken.

And, just five years later they were reunited - this time in The Big Apple, where they were briefly roommates once again, though Andrew quickly traded Chris’ couch for a 1-bedroom apartment in the Financial District. With the help of a pressurized wall system, he reconfigured the unit to accommodate two additional rooms and advertised on Craigslist. The responses poured in -- nearly 90 replies in two days. Either word had spread like wildfire that Andrew was a great roommate or a heck of a lot of people needed an entirely different way to live.

Nights and weekends in the years ahead were spent combing countless pages of zoning text and building code, gaining an informal education in real estate from industry mentors, and eventually meeting with the NYC Department of Buildings, whose formal clearance would pave the way for their next move.

So Ollie came to be - “all inclusive coliving” - providing efficiently designed studios and shared suites wrapped in a bundle of hotel-like services and communal living that promises to make life better -- more affordable, more convenient, and more fun -- than Craigslist and the pressurized walls of yesteryear.