I Spent a Week in a Hacker House

Imagine sharing a house with 20 other people who all want to build the next big technology company. That is exactly what life is like in a 'hacker house,' a type of shared home popular among young tech founders in San Francisco, California. A reporter recently spent a full week living in one of these houses to find out what it is really like.

On a Friday in April, the reporter joined two tech founders on a very unusual shopping trip. Elliot Roth, 32, and William Joy, 19, went to a fish market to buy lobsters — not for dinner, but for a science experiment. They planned to perform a kind of brain surgery on the lobsters and then connect them to an AI program to control their movements.

Roth is what some people call a 'biohacker,' someone who experiments with the human body to change how it works. He has a magnet implanted in his left ring finger, and his nerves have grown around it, giving him the ability to feel nearby microwaves and radio towers. Joy planned to use a kit normally used to remote-control cockroaches and fit it onto the lobsters to steer them with electrical signals.

Both Roth and Joy live in Biopunk House, one of many hacker houses across San Francisco. A hacker house is a shared home where young entrepreneurs live together to save money and support each other. San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities in the country, and sharing a home is often the only way young founders can afford to stay.

Hacker houses are not a new idea — Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his early team famously lived in one back in the 2000s. But during the current boom in artificial intelligence, or AI, these shared homes have become more popular than ever. College dropouts and young inventors are filling them up, all hoping to build the next big company.

The reporter stayed at a house called Accelr8, a slightly worn Victorian home a few blocks from San Francisco's famous 'Painted Ladies.' The house had two floors with bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, a shared workspace, and a living room full of couches and plants. Every room had an air freshener, though the communal fridge still had a faint sour smell.

One housemate, Michael Adams, was a former rocket engineer who quit his job to build CivLab, a website that maps local news and police reports across San Francisco. Kai Song Eer and Jay Yen Lim were building an AI tool to handle sales calls, and Alan VanToai was coding an AI meditation app. The residents came from very different backgrounds but shared the same drive to build something new.

Daniel Morgan, 30, co-founded Accelr8 with Patrick Santiago in 2024, and the house runs almost like a small business itself. Each room costs about $3,000 a month, just enough to cover the lease and other costs. Morgan also runs a 'hacker hotel' nearby with lower prices for those who need a cheaper option.

Not all hacker houses are the same. Down the street, HF0 is a mansion that has raised $100 million to invest in its residents' start-ups. The Biopunk House is part of a network called the Residency, which has a 3 percent acceptance rate and handles all chores so founders can focus entirely on their work. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is listed as an adviser to the Residency.

Every Sunday, Accelr8 holds a demo dinner where founders share their latest projects with the group. During hot-pot night, residents pitched ideas ranging from an AI media assistant to a new kind of text-based video game. One AI app even started secretly listening through the reporter's phone during a live demo, until the reporter quickly shut off the microphone.

There is a tension running through hacker house life that is hard to ignore. Many residents worry about AI taking jobs or making people too dependent on technology, yet they are all building AI products themselves. As one former resident put it, he got into start-ups 'for the heart' but now has to 'navigate short-term market realities to keep the heart alive.'

The lobster experiment, meanwhile, did not go as planned. Both lobsters died before any surgery could take place, likely because the water's salt level was wrong. Joy said he went through an 'ethical crisis' about the whole idea, and nobody ended up eating the lobsters. The empty tank sat quietly in the corner — a small reminder that in the world of hacker houses, not every big dream works out.