On Hacker Houses Part II

2025.10.19

CXXII

[Moving to C House; Flowing Towards Community; Eggs & Dynamical Systems; Revenge of the Nerds; Quick 15 Minute Adventures; Los Alamos; Collective Bargaining; Finding Home]

Thesis: Even though I can be anywhere on Earth, I’ve selected the place that I believe has the best community for me.

[Moving to C House]

When Jack & I started BirdDog, I went home to live with my family to do a sort of Monk Mode, a period of intense focus to go from nothing to a real business. But, now that BirdDog is a real business that we’re iterating on and improving, I decided it would be a good time to switch things up.

So, about 4 weeks ago, I moved into C House (aka Harvard Street Commons) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And, even though it's been just over a month, I am so very happy and grateful that I did.

It's hard to explain how cool it is to live in such a vibrant community of other people who are all building something meaningful, but I'm going to try.

[Flowing Towards Community]

It's easier to appreciate the value of something when you didn't always have.

Stepping back, I think I can view my life like a gradual flow to a place like C House.

I was quite solitary when I was very young. As I moved into high school, I started finding community within my own school and then even outside of it as well.

Then, at the University of Michigan, the field was a lot larger and more dynamic, and I flowed towards other people who were intensely passionate about what they did.

The pull was so strong that I ended up at events like a founder summit that my friend Bobby throw in Austin, Texas, where I started meeting even more passionate people from outside U of M. It was there that I ultimately met Lucas Chu, which led me to C House last year (Lucas was one of C House’s Founders).

Recently, when BirdDog was starting to work and it was clear I would basically be able to live where ever I want, I had a completely unbound choice to make: where do I go?

I could fly off to Lisbon and sit in the sun and work, or maybe even Bali and basically live like a King. But, I had tried stuff like that before... and, without community, it is just nowhere near as fulfilling.

So, even though I'll have to deal with the Boston winter (light work to a Michigander, but still undesirable compared to sun year round), I decided to go to what might be the best place in the world for me right now: C House.

[Eggs & Dynamical Systems]

I feel like a broken record at this point, but living in the same space as smart and passionate people helps you gather valuable information so much faster, and is more enjoyable, too.

I'm still in build mode for BirdDog, meaning I am working a lot. Generally, that’s my default: work. If there is nothing else pressing, I won’t stop. (If I am not careful, I will go so far as to just act like I am working!)

One solve for this is existing in a co living space with brilliant people, where the barrier to interesting conversations rapidly approaches 0. Some examples:

• Spoke on economic equilibria while making eggs

• Learned about enterprise sales strats from someone who closed 7 & 8 figure deals while we were bouldering & lifting

• Talked about ergodicity & homotypes in financial markets over tea

• Spoke on grammars, ASTs, FSMs, and deterministic vs non deterministic AI in our co working space on a thursday night

• Got advice on copy writing viral content while waiting in line for coffee

• Deliberated on user retention strategies while walking to the movie theater

• Debated the best ways to learn in your 20s while on the roof of a tall building, staring up at the full moon

Note that many of these examples happened in what's otherwise this white space: waiting in lines, working out, cooking, sitting around, walking.

[Revenge of the Nerds]

A very important part about a place like C House is that everyone is doing something different. Some examples of the spread of ventures:

• Content driven college counseling scale up

• Liquid manufacturing hardware device

• Physical Digital Camera with a social network app

• Cybersecurity pen testing startup

• Attempt to make an illiquid market liquid (under nda, I can't say more)

• App connecting private event venues to customers

• B2B SaaS for sending ai videos to ecomm customers

• Translating cobol into java

• Online prayer space

• Systematizing a legacy staffing business with software & systems

While you might think that the unifying uncommon commonality is that we all are doing startups, I think it is actually that we're all quite passionate and intense people who are actively engaging with the real world.

When I think of the word nerd, I think of someone who is intensely passionate about a small set of things. The catch is, with a lot of nerds, that set of things exist in a vacuum and is not so meaningful outside of that vacuum.

With my fellow nerds at C House, we've either picked something to be passionate about that is already meaningful out there in the real world, or we’re tirelessly working to show the world that the thing we’re passionate about is meaningful.

[Quick 15 Minute Adventures]

Another commonality among the kind of person who comes to C House is a certain openness to new experiences. This should be unsurprising, as

• I think that openness is a general founder trait and

• We all voluntarily chose to live in a co living space

Either way, a story emphasizes this openness quite well -

Last Saturday morning, I was sitting in our co working space, and myself and Elise were talking about food and fasting. In passing, I half jokingly said we should do a two day house fast and then go to Fogo De Chão.*

Elise looked at me dead in the eye and said, "Let's do it." I could tell she was not joking.

So, this Wednesday, 7 of us were at Fogo De Chao, breaking a fast. In total, 7 residents did not eat for at least 36 hours, and I think the longest was 60 hours.

This is pretty crazy--almost half the population of our house didn't eat for a day and a half... basically on a whim.** 

*Fogo De Chão is an all you can eat Brazilian steak house, and one of my favorite places on the planet. As you sit, employees zip around with skewers of steak and slice it onto your plate; this goes on until they force you out of the restaurant or, more likely, you voluntarily leave because you have the meat sweats.

**I think we could've pulled off a similar hit rate at my senior year house in college, but we were pretty out there, too.

[Los Alamos]

Being in Cambridge, Massachusetts, C House has a very good location in general. It meets a lot of the criteria I discussed as being attractive, and is great aesthetically for walks.

On top of that, we're one block away from Harvard and a mile from MIT. And zooming out, we're in Boston, which has 36 universities and may be the highest density of intelligent 20-30 year olds in the country (world?).

Sure, you have San Francisco, but I think that tends to be more of a mono culture. In my experience, if I was at a hacker house there, the list of ventures I listed above would be a lot more cluttered with people doing 'AI Agents', and there would be a lot less bootstrapping, too.

In short, we're in a city that goes at least pound for pound talent density wise against SF while maintaining a certain diversity of thought that is a little more lost there.

[Collective Bargaining]

All of this is without mentioning that a very cool benefit about having so many smart founders in one place is that resources start coming to you.

For one, smart people just show up. A couple weeks ago, a dude was crashing on a couch who had exited two companies and was raising for his third. This is pretty natural; a lot of the people here are friends with other people who resonate with a place like this.

Another really cool resource is that VC's pull up and buy dinner. (I like free dinner.) While myself & a few of the other people at the house do not plan on fundraising, there are many people here who are or will, so for them to have face time & otherwise direct access to VC’s is super powerful.

And, remember our location - since we're in such a talent dense spot, if the house throws a 30 person dinner or 50 person event, we will almost without fail have more awesome people who want to attend than we have spots for.

Also, to be clear, while hacker houses in general do have very cool guests across the board, there is definitely some marketing, sales, and logistical lift to actually unlock monetized relationships with VC’s & vendors; shout out to Henry, Shefali, and Elise for handling that.

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[Finding Home]

There is no place I would rather be right now than C House.

And that's saying a lot, because I could literally be anywhere, including a low cost tropical island. But, there are some things more important than living in a physical paradise.

Subjectively, the community here is very special to me for a lot of reasons; I think objectively, it's special, too.

I'm infinitely grateful that this community exists, and I’m infinitely grateful to be able to call it home.

Live Deeply,