The Pitch That Fell Short of the Whole Story

A hacker house, where young, ambitious engineers from all over the world pack themselves into small rooms, collide, and shape each other’s ideas, sits at the center of San Francisco’s early-stage startup ecosystem.

I first encountered it at a Demo Day—the Demo Day of The Residency, a hacker house backed by Sam Altman. The room was small and dark, but the energy was loud. Founders pitched with big voices and sparkling eyes. They were young, deeply passionate, and carried careers that already felt oversized for their age.

One pitch, in particular, stuck with me.

"I became an AI researcher at NASA, then worked at the Pentagon and the Department of Defense. After that, I joined the CIA. I started two health-tech startups, sold one, and became the CEO of a Y Combinator-backed company."

"My co-founder, Pablo, directed a National Geographic documentary, bootstrapped two companies to six-figure ARR, and sold a B2B SaaS product used by some of the largest companies in the world."

Nadav Shanun, CEO of Geome

In retrospect, it wasn’t great storytelling. It was a surface-level summary that failed to capture what was truly compelling about them. But weirdly enough, it was impossible to ignore.

NASA and National Geographic, within the same founding team?

When I later asked Nadav and Pablo to meet for a coffee chat and had a long conversation with them, I realized the Demo Day version of their pitch had barely scratched the surface. Their story wasn’t just impressive. It was far stranger and far more extreme than I had imagined.

One grew up around war, learning to think in terms of defense. The other grew up close to jungles, shaped by nature. Their stories couldn’t have been more different. How those two paths eventually converged, and why they met at the literal peak of Yosemite before becoming a team, was what truly caught my attention.

These days, this is what a hacker house in San Francisco looks like: young people like Nadav and Pablo, consumed by their work in small rooms, trying to build something far bigger than themselves.

This piece follows two young founders, just 20 and 22 years old and shaped by radically different lives, as they arrived in San Francisco and began working toward a vision scaled not to a startup but to the planet.

[Inside Hacker Houses] War and Nature, When Two Extreme Young Meet

An interview with Nadav&Pablo, Founders of Geome

EO Magazine