Shea Brucker is fun, quick to laugh, easy-going and believes in doing his dishes. Who wouldn’t want him as a roommate?
Shea, right, with a friend at the beach
In spring 2013, Shea graduated from Cal Poly with a degree in business and administration. He’s now running HomeSlice, an app that lets people living together track whose turn it is to buy groceries, pay the bills and do chores.
Despite all these stellar recommendations, all has not gone swimmingly for Shea in the co-habitation sphere.
There was the guy who declared on move-in day that he didn’t do dishes. Like, ever.
“He said he ate off of paper plates. So the guy literally ordered the deal from Domino’s like, every Sunday—two medium-size pizzas with breadsticks,” Shea says. “And he’d make it last the whole week. Every night for dinner he’d have a couple bites of those pizzas.”
While we’re not crazy about the idea of a pepperoni-and-cheese-scented abode, a refusal to wash dishes isn’t the worst roomie behavior in the world. Know what is? A refusal to pay rent.
“I paid all the bills, so I floated him anywhere from 200 to 700 bucks a month,” Shea says. “Just so we could get our rent paid, or any bills for that matter. It wasn’t even my money, I was getting it from my parents. It was absolutely horrible.”
Shea says he’s not very confrontational, which made resolving the situation even more difficult. However, at least one good thing came out of it: HomeSlice.
“That’s where my passion to solve this problem really comes from,” Shea says.
He actually didn’t come up with the idea for the app; that credit goes to Jeremy Moyer, Shea’s former co-founder.
“I was in my senior project class for entrepreneurship,” Shea says. “They brought in all these students from other disciplines within Cal Poly, mechanical engineers, civil engineers, computer science majors, and they pitched ideas—either ideas they had or projects they had already started or little projects.”
Jeremy pitched an app he had created over the summer that allowed him and his roommates could keep track of whose turn it was to items for the house.
“The app had an internal list of the roommates, so if we were out of beer, say, and Jeremy had bought it last, it would send me a notification saying, ‘Hey, Shea, it’s your turn to buy beer,’” he says. “That’s all it did.”
Shea identified with the problem the app was solving and also saw the possibilities, eventually adding the chores and bills tracker, along with a “Whiteboard” that tracks everyone’s activity.
Currently, he works out of the San Luis Obispo HotHouse downtown, along with several other startups from Cal Poly. Shea is the only one left from the original founding team.
“The team that put together the senior project went through the HotHouse accelerator,” he says. “We were working together until March this year, and then the other guys all [went] for different reasons. They wanted to build a skill-set with more experienced developers, or just wanted more money in the bank… We didn’t leave on bad terms at all.”
Before Shea had access to a cool start-up space to work in, he went the traditional route: the library.
Shea with his mom
“I would go to the fourth floor. It was in between the social floor, the third floor, and then the super super oddly quiet fifth floor, so I’d always go to the fourth floor and find a quiet corner,” he says.
Shea also loves to surf, so he spent a lot of time at all of the region’s beaches.
“I think you have to get out of the town to see how beautiful the Central area is,” Shea says. “People stick around here because it’s so beautiful.”
And he says you cannot graduate without going to Big Sur.
“We’re an hour-and-a-half away from a place that people come from all over the world to see,” She says. “There’s absolutely no excuse not to go.”
Maybe we can go with our roommates.