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Join our hacker house for new YC companies

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44 pointsthejash37 comments

I'll vouch hugely for Josh "thejash". Josh is ultra hardworking, super smart, and the least flakey dude that I know. He's also managed a shared housing situation for years, so he's really the ideal dude to be doing this.

Disclosure: Josh and I founded/sold a company together and overall have been good friends for many years.

Having just gone through the winter batch, the closer you are to YC, the easier it is going to be.

Between dinners and office hours you wind up going there frequently. Traffic is a big pain when trying to get to the dinners on anything other than surface streets.

Other YC alumni that I spoke with felt the same way, which is a big part of why the final location will probably be in or near Mountain View.

It's not so bad if you are near any Caltrain or light rail stop, since both stop very close to YC.

List of potential craigslist houses I found, mostly in palo alto or within minutes from..

Thanks for the links!

It's tough to find huge places, so if you (or anyone) knows of suitable places (>=6br), especially those NOT listed on craigslist/etc, please comment or send me an email.

This is a fantastic idea. I signed up for Ycombinator and since I'm moving from Ohio, wasn't sure where I would be able to find housing. This solves that problem. Im not sure how competitive it will be able to get into the "house", but hopefully not that competitive.

If it ends up being really competitive (and we have more people than can fit comfortably in one house), then we can do two or more. I have a number of places that I'm looking at already, so I'm pretty sure we won't end up with a situation where people can't live in any of the available houses*

*excluding rounding (like if there are 8 people and only 7 slots in one house)

Awesome, well I plan on bringing a car if I'm accepted so whomever lives with me will have transportation when I'm available. Good idea on getting more than one, I think this can be profitable for you (if you are looking for that ) as well as being a good deal for the people moving there.

I'm not looking for profit in this--it's a horrible business idea :) I'll be happy if I get to meet some interesting people and don't lose all that much money.

The meeting people part makes up for any lost money anytime!

This is a great idea. Might as well make the experience social since most YC alumni regret not getting to know the other companies during the 3 month period. Might be cool to have weekly pitch events/gatherings at the location.

The "regret not getting to know each other" is definitely something that I've heard from recent YC alumni.

As for weekly gatherings--I think that might be a bit distracting for the teams there, but I can see occasional gatherings being valuable.

This. Thinking and problem solving is a social process, the human brain is designed to be fueled via lots of nuggets of social. Theres a huge amount of variability in what sorts of socialization different folks need and what form it needs to take, but it's absence creates a terrifying inability to think clearly and execute.

Foam earplugs plus around the ear headphones solve most hearing other people distractions. :)

Point being, if my group is in YC this summer, we're definitely looking for a social living space

It could be distracting but a weekly (small) gathering would be pretty beneficial. Teams could get feedback and their pitch down. It'd be like "office hours" with peers and a couple of beers. I am sure you will experiment to see what works.

I signed up (we applied for YC). Having gone through the hassle of finding a place in a few places recently it is a huge pain in the ass. This is a great idea but I'm not sure we'd be able to commit to a 6 month contract.

I think a 6 month contract isn't too bad, when you consider that it's basically:

1 month for moving in before YC starts

3 months for YC

2 months for wrapping things up and finding a new place and moving

Great idea.

I was thinking about creating my own post for a YC hacker house, but I'd rather not deal with organizing and getting a landlord on board with something like this.

Cost: $500 + $600 * numBedrooms) <= cost <= ($1000 + $1200 * numBedrooms)

You decide numBedrooms for your team. The fixed cost is to cover shared rooms (kitchen, conference room, living room, etc).

Larger teams will incur a larger utilization of shared resources, and hence should pay more for shared resources. It more fair simply to divide the overall cost.

That's true. But on the other hand, imagine this situation:

3 teams with 3 people. The house has 7 br. 2 teams each buy 3 br (for a total of 6 of the 7 being used), then the other team buys 1 br, and they all always work from and hang out at the house. It would be lame that that 3rd team was paying 1/3rd the cost of each of the other teams. So this formulation was an attempt to account for that.

Basically, my theory is--be reasonable. If you're using 42% of the house, you should pay 42% of the costs. I'm happy to adjust the costs to make it work out in a reasonable way.

I wondering what the reaction would be if a few well known and loved VC firms (that have funded YC companies before) got involved and subsidized part of the rent for something like this or even something on a larger scale. Thoughts on that idea?

I'm not sure how subsidizing the rent would help the companies, especially if they've already gotten into YC (and thus just got a bunch of investment, with other investment pretty readily available).

Seems like it would be better to just keep the investing as direct dollars for equity, like it is now. Unless I'm missing something? I'd be happy to be wrong here. :)

I'm thinking of it similar to how corporations want their names on rooms and/or buildings at colleges. Showing a level of support which, while not a quid pro quo, shows support in a way that isn't directly linked to a benefit.

The support could come as monetary support and maybe doing the thing that PG doesn't have the time for as mentioned here (coordinating housing):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3650877

Just signed up. I've been sequestered in my fortress of solitude for too long!!...Now if only I could get accepted to YC and cash in on this deal...

Where is that Zencoder house? (http://yfrog.com/09x7fsj)

I don't have an exact address. I spoke with Jon (of Zencoder), he said it was somewhere in the Santa Cruz mountains. Such a place is probably a little too remote for most people (it was a 30 minute or more drive to YC)

I don't mind, I have a car and don't mind sharing. I kind of like the idea of living in a remote fortress, like a mad-scientist. But yeah, probably not practical for enough people, unfortunately.

I agree with everything you said.

Hopefully you signed up and made a note about your preference for a remote area?

Yes, I did, though I'll only know today whether yc has a chance of happening (interview invites go out this evening I believe).

We actually did this for Tinfoil Security; rented a kickass place in San Jose (4bed, 4ba, 4000 sqft, 2 acres of land, deer and turkey roaming around) and love coming home to it after being at work for crazy hours.

We also have a room open, in case anyone here is interested. :) Currently it's occupied by the founder of Tinfoil Security (myself and my cofounder) and another company called Apparel Dream (a Chilean company in Plug n Play).

Admittedly, we're probably moving eventually to somewhere closer to Mt. View / Palo Alto, but for starting out its definitely been great. :)

curious, will you be funding this out of pocket with the rent from the people living there used to reimburse yourself, or will you be using the rent paid by the people living there to pay the rent? I assume the former but I thought it might be worth you clarifying. Great idea, good luck!

I haven't fully decided--it's not going to be free, for sure. Probably, people will pay me and I will pay the landlord, since that seems more convenient, but I could easily be convinced to just have people pay directly instead.

As I said on the page, the goal is not to make money, so any payment will just be to cover costs. I'm not quite wealthy enough to just give away the space for free yet :)

My point was more that if one person flakes for whatever reason or a startup drops out and you're financing the entire thing directly with the rent paid by the rentees you're in for a world of hurt unless someone comes up to cover it... I assume if you pay for it and then the rentees reimburse you the worst case is you lose money; not that people end up homeless.

This is great! A great idea for any incubator area.

Are pets allowed?

I can't see anyone objecting to a fish or something. As for cats and dogs... my guess is probably not, either because other people would object, they would be bothersome, or the lease would not allow for it. So it's possible, but unlikely.

Thanks for the reply. Great idea to get like minded people together. We hope you plan to share the stories and results from the house. Will make interesting reading if all house mates end up making it big.

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