San Francisco – May 28, 2026

By Maulde Cuérel, AI & Tech Foresight Program Manager, Swissnex in San Francisco

Intro / History

Once associated with sleep-deprived twenty-somethings coding through the night in overcrowded apartments, the hacker house has matured into a sophisticated model of co-living, co-building, and community-driven venture development while keeping its authenticity. There’s no single model; they range from completely grassroots to more VC-backed incubators, some emerging around themes such as AI, longevity or gender equity like FoundHer house. What unites them is less a format than a philosophy: that proximity accelerates everything, and that the best ideas don’t just emerge from code, but from the friction and serendipity of living alongside people who are equally obsessed.

I’ve been thinking about this since I moved to San Francisco in 2024. A few years earlier, much of my academic focus was on exactly this question: the environment you build in turns out to be just as interesting as what you build. My paper on coworking spaces as microclusters of innovation, explored the idea that physical proximity, the right kind of ambient friction, and a shared sense of mission produce something very special.

And so, when I arrived in Silicon Valley and started to find myself in places where everybody lived together, stepping into communal kitchens littered with new monitor receipts and half-finished pitch decks, while someone else was sitting on the couch debugging a model at midnight, I felt, oddly, like I had come home to my research from a few years earlier.

When we think about how ecosystems support entrepreneurs, we tend to default to a familiar trilogy: Knowledge (accelerators like Y Combinator), Money (venture capital), and Talent (university pipelines). These are the visible pillars of the Silicon Valley legend.

But there is a fourth pillar, less institutionalized, that often does more for a founder than the other three combined: the Village. The network of human relationships, the person who introduces you to your first key hire, the housemate with whom you can share your anxiety when your lead investor goes cold, the dinner table conversation that accidentally becomes your pivot. This is what the “hacker house” provides.

Research shows that the best ideas rarely happen at your desk. They happen in the shower, on a bike ride commuting back home, when you are desperately trying to sleep, in the margin of a conversation that was officially about something else. The hacker house is an infrastructure designed entirely around those moments. It bets on serendipity.

The spirit behind the Bay Area hacker houses didn’t emerge from nowhere. Some of its roots reach back to the communes of the 1960s, when members of that generation of Americans, disillusioned with institutional politics, retreated into intentional micro-communities, betting that a better society could be built from the inside out.

As historian Fred Turner argues, these “New Communalists” believed the micro-world was the political act: build a better commune, and you model a better world. What’s interesting is how seamlessly that logic migrated into Silicon Valley. The Homebrew Computer Club, the Whole Earth Catalog, the early hacker collectives, all carried the commune’s DNA: shared tools, shared knowledge, and the conviction that proximity to the right people could change everything. The hacker house might be less utopian in rhetoric, perhaps, but structurally similar in ambition: a bet that dense, intentional co-living accelerates something that traditional office buildings and Zoom calls cannot.

3 Houses, 3 Models

To understand what the hacker house has become, I visited three of them and talked to their owner. They couldn’t be more different, and that difference, I think, is exactly the point.

AGI House: From Living Room to VC Fund

AGI House is, depending on who you ask, one of the most famous hacker houses in Silicon Valley. Founded during the pandemic by Rocky Yu, a serial entrepreneur with over a decade in AI, it started the way many of them do: with a personal network, a house, and a question. “Everyone’s trying to figure out what they want to do with their life,” Rocky told me. “And same for me. I’ve been a founder for a decade. So I just asked my friends, a lot of whom are founders in the AI space, researchers, what’s our goal of working on AI? And the answer was: building AGI. So, half-joking at the time, we thought: why don’t we invite our friends to live together, host a lot of events, and bring all the best people in AI together?”

He took over a house, invited ten people to move in, six of them Stanford PhDs, hardcore AI researchers, and started hosting weekly dinners and weekend hackathons for 100 to 150 people. “Most of the people involved were our friends,” Rocky said. “And they happened to be the people who really knew what a large language model was. They trained the foundation models. There were very few people in the world doing that at the time.” Looking at the photos on the wall of the house you can see that the guest list reads like a who’s who of the AI world: Sergey Brin, Andrej Karpathy, Iliia Polosukhin, Eric Schmidt.

When I visited the Hillsborough mansion recently, there were no longer residents in the house, or rather, the only people living there were Rocky and his colleagues. “We are now much more than a hacker house,” he told me. “It’s a community gathering place. Not just about a place.” The transition was deliberate. As AGI House grew in reputation and ambition, the logistics of managing co-living increasingly competed with its mission of pushing the frontier of AI. “Running a place with people who live here, there should be different houses to do those things,” Rocky explained. “We now focus on the things that are important to our mission.” In classic Silicon Valley style, projects and businesses are fluid, they evolve, they pivot and that’s positive.

That mission has since crystallized into distinct activities: an applied AI lab with a selective research fellowship, they also also organise events, and have a VC fund that was launched at the end of 2024. The day I visited Rocky happened to coincide with a portfolio company exit, EigenAI acquired by Nebulous for $643m cash-and-stock deal. Five portfolio unicorns already. The dense networks, the trust built over dinner conversations, the early access to people working on things before the rest of the world understood them, had been converted into a formidable investment thesis.

Today, AGI House positions itself, in Rocky’s words, as “the spiritual head of all AI communities.” Its public format is the hackathon. Its private format, the one he seems to enjoy, is the curated dinner: twenty people, unicorn founders, frontier lab leaders. “Everything is curated,” he told me. “Small, but the right people.”

Fountaine Founders: Grassroots by Design

A few days later, I sat down with Mathieu Metral, one of the founders of Fountaine Founders, a very different kind of house. Eight residents, all French entrepreneurs between 22 and 26, mostly from the HEC Paris network, living together in San Francisco for a three-month batch. No VC fund. No institutional backing. Just a deliberate bet on immersion. I first met Mathieu and his housemate a few months earlier over a weekend-long Hackathon they organized at the house on longevity and OpenClaw.

The origin story is deeply personal. “I wanted to create an environment for myself,” Mathieu told me. “I wanted to live with people who inspire me, ambitious people who want to go far, and an environment where we could also welcome people.” The selection criteria were stripped to two: ambition and capacity to execute. “We called the residents ‘Resident Builders,'” he added.

The typical week had structure where it mattered and chaos where it helped. Monday mornings starts with a group goals meeting; there were two organized events per week, workshops, a running club, occasional hackathons, and, crucially, every single night ended with a team dinner together. “A coworking space, you work during the day and it closes in the evening,” Mathieu added. “With us, we were working until 2, 2:30 in the morning. All while motivating each other, to go to the gym early in the morning. And you really have a small community spirit when the eight of you are training together, pushing each other to go further.”

One of the highlights he described was an OpenClaw workshop organized by the residents: the Resident Builders hosting the broader ecosystem, teaching, deploying, and building together. “We didn’t want to just do networking drinks,” Mathieu told me. “We wanted to deliver value every time.” People stayed four or five hours and left with something concrete.

Fountaine Founders has now completed its first batch and is ready for what’s next. What’s clear is what for now they don’t want to be: a VC fund, or a platform, or anything that drifts away from founders actually being in the room together. “There are several models,” Mathieu reflected. “Some focus on real estate, some on investment. For us, it is about the events and community side. I want to be an entrepreneur, not a fund manager.”

The Bridge: The Founder Residency as a Model

We are also seeing a hybrid category emerge, what you might call the residency-accelerator blend. These are programs that marry the structure of an accelerator cohort (selection, mentorship, programming, a fixed duration) with the lived intensity of a hacker house (everyone sleeping under the same roof, eating together, building side by side around the clock). The boundaries between “we live here” and “we’re building together” dissolve.

The Bridge, the residential program run by Entrepreneurs First (EF), an accelerator with fourteen years behind it, backed by some of the most prestigious names in Silicon Valley such as Eric Schmidt, Demis Hassabis, and Reid Hoffman, is now running a program in what feels like a hacker house.

When I visited, 55 founders, the vast majority sourced from across Europe discovered through an eight-month talent scouting process, were living together in a massive mansion in the Mission district, building their startups alongside advisors assigned to each of them.

The format itself was tested first in 2025 in a castle in Germany, where the results convinced EF to double down and pursue this format. “When people actually live together, there’s an intensity that’s created,” Violette Beaume, head of the Bridge Program, told me. “In a shorter amount of time, we had companies that got traction super fast, some of our best companies came out of that castle.” A telling proof point: some residents had been accepted to the well known accelerator Y Combinator, instead and chose The Bridge, drawn precisely by that density of co-living that no coaching-only program can replicate.

Similarly, Hf0 located on the gorgeous Alamo Square Park (kitty-corner from the famous “Painted Ladies”), in one of the most beautiful houses I have been to in San Francisco. The ultra select residency has even been cited as the most competitive ‘hacker house,’ by the San Francisco Standard and the results of its participants are more than promising.

The Full Spectrum

What I found the most interesting about these visits was not how different they were, but how that very difference shows something important. When people say “hacker house,” they tend to picture a single archetype, probably the scrappy, overcrowded version from a decade ago. The reality in San Francisco today is a spectrum.

All are legitimate. All are valuable. All are evolving, which is perhaps the most honest thing you can say about the format right now. The model was always a means, not an end.

What Switzerland Can Learn

The hacker house is a signal of how innovation ecosystems often self-organize. San Francisco’s current hacker house scene; diverse, themed, increasingly institutionalized, is one of the clearest windows available into what the next generation of innovation infrastructure could look like.

Switzerland’s startup ecosystem has matured significantly over the past decade. Swiss cities such as Zürich, Geneva, and Lausanne have developed credible accelerator programs, strong university spin-off pipelines from ETH and EPFL, and an increasingly active early-stage investment community. The knowledge and capital layers of the innovation stack are largely in place. What remains comparatively underdeveloped is precisely the village layer: the dense, ambient, trust-based network that the hacker house model is designed to create.

An interesting example that took place in early 2026: Pluto House, a collective of founders, operators, and investors spanning Paris, Zürich, and Munich, partnered with Mimic Robotics, a Zürich-based robotics company, to run a concentrated batch residency. This one lasted one week; some of their residencies lasted one month. The concept was purposely ambitious: bring together 16 builders and create the highest density of physical AI and robotics talent in one place. It’s a model that borrows directly from the Silicon Valley playbook: curated cohorts, proximity as a forcing function, an obsessive focus on building, but planted firmly in the Swiss innovation ecosystem.

Mathieu, from Fountaine Founders, was direct about the preconditions: “In San Francisco, the hacker house concept is democratized, adopted. People get it. In France, you say ‘Hacker House’ and people are like, ‘Wait, what?’ The concept needs that critical mass.” He thought it could work in Paris or London, “maybe, scaled differently” but was cautious about assuming the same dynamics would transplant.

Rocky, at AGI House, made a similar point from a different angle: the proximity to the people you need matters enormously. “If you want Jeff Dean to come talk about the latest TPU, he’s twenty minutes away. In Zürich, maybe it’s harder.” Though he was quick to note that Zürich’s AI research density, thousands of researchers across Google, ETH, and affiliated labs, is absolutely worth taking seriously.

The idea for Switzerland is not that it needs to replicate Silicon Valley. But the village layer, the places where ambitious people live together, eat together, and build together in conditions of deliberate intensity is buildable anywhere with the right community, the right conviction, the critical mass. Pluto House seems to be a successful evidence of that. The question is whether anyone in Switzerland will want to invest in that infrastructure as seriously as it invests in the more traditional layers of accelerators and capital.