Sam Altman-Backed Hacker House Wants to Eat Early-Stage VC

Interview with Peter D'Ambrosio, The Residency Co-Founder

San Francisco is having a hacker house moment. Across the city, startups and self-styled communities are leasing mansions and filling them with young founders: from well-known places like HF0, Mission Control, and Accelr8, to two separate houses that both go by AGI House, to a rotating cast of smaller experiments that appear and dissolve within a year. Most of them amount to a single house.

The Residency is a different kind. It runs five mansions in SF alone, four in Pacific Heights and one in the Mission, each housing between 10 and 25 founders. The largest has 22 bedrooms. One of its programs carries a waitlist of more than 100 people, according to reporting by The San Francisco Standard. Zoom out, and the footprint gets bigger: 14 houses across four continents, seven of them directly operated, the rest run by partners under the same brand. Its advisor list includes Sam Altman.

No one else has stitched this many hacker houses into one network. Which raises an obvious question: what exactly is this thing? On a recent afternoon in one of the Pacific Heights houses, I sat down with co-founder Peter D'Ambrosio to find out.

Sam Altman-Backed Hacker House Wants to Eat Early-Stage VC

Sam Altman advises it. Its residents raised $400M in two years. Inside The Residency, the hacker house network that says it will eat early-stage VC.

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