Sean Ahrens, a 29-year-old Californian with a surfer tan, is holding court about the three startup companies he’s co-founded. His friends just want to joke about the homemade pendant Sean is wearing, which looks like a 1970s medallion studded with electronics. Sean says it measures the affection you receive from other people, but he’s not willing to explain how, as he’s worried someone might steal his idea. “I am imbuing it with a lot of utility and functions,” says Sean. And that’s all he’ll say.
It’s a competitive world, after all, when you’re trying to make your mark as a tech entrepreneur. Sean, along with friends Ben Greenberg and Andrew Ward, lives in a “hacker hostel”, one of the techie communes that have sprung up in San Francisco and nearby Silicon Valley to house the region’s influx of wannabe Zuckerbergs. These fraternity-houses-for-geeks aren’t just cheaper places to live, but also places to foster professional relationships and creative opportunities: an IRL social networking experiment in the historical home of the hippie. Call it co-operative living 2.0.
Their comic potential as hotbeds of social awkwardness, rampant geekery and earnest ideals has been brilliantly realised in the new sitcom Silicon Valley, currently airing on Sky Atlantic. Its creator, Mike Judge, drew on his own career as a programmer and experiences of working for a startup to create its premise. Richard, played by Thomas Middleditch, is just another nerdy nobody young until he comes up with an algorithm that the big software companies want to get their hands on. In his corner are the motley collection of dorks, brainiacs and pure weirdos living alongside him in the hostel, who make The IT Crowd look like social dynamite.
And as spending any time in the communal kitchen of 20Mission in San Francisco’s Mission district proves, it’s not that far from the truth. Gathered round a large metal work bench that serves as a table, Sean and the other men trade failure stories. “We got one customer,” he says of his first startup. “And within five hours he’d emailed and asked for his money back.” Ben, bearded, 25 and from Indiana, dropped out of university to come here with a dream and a fledgling internet company. That too imploded. He’s now working as a software engineer at someone else’s startup. But as a side project he runs a website that aggregates the best glow-in-the-dark products from online stores. It’s called glowyshit.com and may or may not result in GlowCon, an event he is planning to bring glowy-thing enthusiasts together.
Ben: “Your very first startup is just, like, always so bad.”
Andrew: “It’s like your first kiss.”
Ben: “Yeah, it’s like: ‘I’ve seen a kiss like this in a movie’ or something.”
Sean: “Because literally the only thing up until that point you have heard about it is, like: ‘Oh you start a company.’ That is all you know.”
Before 20Mission was a “startup co-living community”, it was a derelict hotel-turned-crack house. Entry is through an unmarked front door next to a Guatemalan money-wire service. Bike racks and a set of stairs give way to a landing brimming with Amazon packages and a set of pigeon holes embossed with residents’ names – quaint for the digital generation. Four hall-of-residence-style corridors, surrounding a sunny courtyard, are all named after alternative, digital currencies: Bitcoin Boulevard, Dogecoin Drive. The front door is controlled by a phone app (keys are so yesterday) and the residents rely on a messaging app to organise their affairs, whether that’s finding someone to demo a product to, seeking a specific computer lead, offering to cook, or announcing Game of Thrones is about to start.
The demographic is mostly men in their late 20s or early 30s – entrepreneurs at various stages of pursuing their Zuckerbergian dreams, software engineers and website designers. They share the kitchen, a common room, an enormous television, shelves of computer games and two mixed-sex bathrooms. And they speak in an obscure lingo: bootstrapping1, aquihire2, arduino3, Paul Graham4. “This place is a primordial soup of new ideas,” explains Adonis Gaitatzis, a Canadian entrepreneur with a handlebar moustache. “We are the architects of the future!” 5
The reality is that three out of every four startups fail and many never attract funding beyond the initial stage. “It’s a slaughterhouse,” says Ben. But thanks to demand, hacker hostels are increasingly overrun with applicants. In the more out-of-town Sunflower Hacker House, for instance, young hopefuls not much beyond their teenage years sleep in mixed-sex Ikea bunk beds crammed six to a room. It is full to capacity. The 41 private rooms at 20Mission currently rent for double the price – $1,800 a month – and there is no shortage of takers. Like many hostels, applicants are screened with an eye to a “good fit” for the community.
The man with the final say at 20Mission is landlord Jered Kenna. The 32-year-old is a former US marine and contractor in Afghanistan, whose early enthusiasm for Bitcoin made him a millionaire. He leased these premises two years ago after he and a group of friends were evicted from their warehouse. Just like shovels and jeans during California’s Gold Rush days, a place to house eager young entrepreneurs seemed a sure bet. And you can, of course, pay your rent in Bitcoin.
He styles the place as a libertarian Neverland. Rules are few and residents decorate their rooms like overactive teenagers: Sean’s is tropically themed with a hammock and a tiki bar, Ben’s is styled with his “glowy shit”. Adonis has set his up as a hookah lounge and sleeps in the closet to free up more living space. There’s a weekly yoga session on the roof at which the teacher quotes mantras she has tried to tailor to Silicon Valley survival (“It is better to follow your own life purpose poorly than to do another’s perfectly”; “You are safe from harm when you follow your own unique path”). Not all of Kenna’s ideas are winners, however. When he installed a chicken coop on the roof, he ended up having to pay for retrospective architectural plans and dismantle the structure anyway, having eaten only one egg. “I ended up losing $10,000,” he says.“It was an expensive egg.”
Jered himself comes as a bonus. He no longer lives at 20Mission and he has a live-in manager to deal with its day-to-day running. But he has the status of honorary housemate and clearly enjoys hanging out with the residents – he launched his latest project, a Bitcoin TV venture, with one of them, and spends his days developing it in a studio in 20Mission’s separate co-working space downstairs. “I don’t want it to be an awesome community that I can’t be a part of,” he says.
If everyone is equal, some are more equal than others. Allan Grant, the most successful of the housemates, raised almost $18m in funding for his startup. He is revered for his connections and has the only en suite bathroom in the house, although the only sign of him is a mug in the kitchen with his company logo on. Meanwhile, Stephanie Pakrul, who goes by the online handle StephTheGeek, sometimes struggles to pay rent and survives on the “eat me” drawer in the fridge. She holds a masters from the University of California, Berkeley, and runs an adult site that takes payment in Bitcoin for photos and videos of herself. (Her startup ambition is to help women create their own porn websites.) “Last month I paid my rent and the last $4 of it was in laundry quarters,” she says. “People say move somewhere else – back to Canada – but they just don’t know what being here is.”
One Saturday, 20Mission hosts one of the parties that have become its trademark. There’s a DJ, a lighting rig, face painting and an “earth” theme. Jered stalks the corridors in a cape decorated with leaves, worrying that not enough guests will show up, but by the end of the night, nearly 800 guests – Pinterest employees, Stanford University postdocs, Facebook interns proudly wearing corporate hoodies – have thronged the astroturf-lined courtyard and thick-with-marijuana-smoke corridors. Sean’s pendant is in action, lights flashing, and proving a hit. Andrew invites people back to his room for shots of cinnamon whisky.
A few days later, there’s an informal debrief with Jered. The three friends – Ben, Sean and Andrew – take chief responsibility for party logistics and run crowdfunding campaigns to cover costs. Ben seems convinced that his role helping so many people have a good time could be helpful training for his next company. “I basically organise the parties like a startup… I try to be the node that connects people to each other.” On his laptop, he has kept a spreadsheet of the 25 jobs that needed action ahead of the party. (Next to it is a personal document of “life milestones”.)
There were lots of people at the party – too many, even – but an aching lack of girls. Maybe they could engage in some social engineering: priority entry, perhaps? “It’s not what you might be thinking,” says Andrew. It probably is. Gender ratios at 20Mission are one of the wrinkles still to be ironed out in their utopia. Just three of the rooms are currently let to women. Only a handful of the residents have girlfriends.
As alternative living arrangements go, it’s well-suited to its occupants, however. Living in the hostel “kind of feels like the whole startup scene in its microcosm,” says Sean, because of its “lack of top-down management”. He hated his only “proper” job – cinema usher – and likes the entrepreneurial life because he can be his own boss even if it means sleeping in his car when funding dries up and using the coffee shops of San Francisco as his office.
And, of course, the people here speak his language. In the kitchen, Sean explains how he finally got some funding for his current and most successful startup – a company called Crohnology, supporting patients with Crohn’s disease. But he’s regretting taking the money, worried he won’t be able to keep his investors happy and make the world a better place. “I took something that was of strong identity and value to myself and put it in a contraption that has locked it away from me and created complexities to my ability to control and take it on the path that feels most right to myself 6.”
“A lot of people wouldn’t admit that,” replies Ben.
Footnotes
1 A bootstrapped company shuns outside investors
2 When a large company buys a small one for its employees
3 A programmable electronics kit and computer language Sean has used to produce his pendant
4 A legendary startup investor and mentor
5 If that future is a meditation headset that can detect your brainwaves, which is what Adonis’s company makes apps for
6 No idea