Since MMM's only big partnership story is a nightmare one, and I've generally heard nothing but negative experiences about them in the RE&LL forum, etc, I'm curious if there are any counterpoints other than mine.
I co-founded a 3-member LLC around the time I found MMM (~15 months now) and so far things have gone well. Partners were not friends beforehand. I just happened to get into an email conversation with a friend of a friend (really, several mutual friends) about financial matters and it turned out our goals were similar; over a few weeks we went from comparing notes to writing bylaws and filing papers. He and his brother (out of town) had been looking to get into real estate but knew nothing beyond some reading online. I had a few years of landlord experience and wanted to be a Realtor, so they agreed to split my license costs 3 ways and we threw some money together. We started with 10k each and committed to another 10k over 30 months (20k total) with another 30 months to de-leverage before taking distributions.
I've learned a shit-ton from this endeavor so far, and I like that my stake is small enough that I'd still FIRE in my early 40s if the whole thing took a shit, but big enough to possibly snowball into a real source of income. Having other people's money at stake has also made things more serious and helped me professionalize my approach. Being the agent for the partnership and collecting a check every time we buy something is just icing on the cake.
So anyway - the jury's obviously still out on whether this ends up being a good experiment, and I've already identified plenty of things I'd do differently with bylaws and expectation management in the beginning, but I'm still leaning heavily toward the positive side. Anyone else care to share a story?