Re: [sudo-discuss] Startup House

So here's the pitch: You want to come to Silicon Valley and be a successful founder while you're still young, hungry, and unencumbered? You'll need a place to stay, great network connectivity, partners (this is a team sport), connections, and mentors. Location matters: you'll want ready access to neighborhood conveniences; to San Francisco, Palo Alto, and San Jose tech/finance hubs; to parking and transit. If you're admitted to the Acme House: You'll get... - 24x7 immersion in startup culture, just the way Facebook started. - Great bandwidth, food, whiteboard walls, projectors, infinite post-its, and everything you need to focus - Serious networking opportunities within the house, the better to find partners - Access to an angel network and other outside networking opportunities - Weekly check-ins with our incubator-vetted mentors We limit the time you can spend here. We expect you to graduate to your own space inside a year. Here's the reality: - This is more expensive than a simple real-estate play. You're writing checks for recruiting, project staff, common facilities, and housekeeping (frat house squalor) above and beyond rent. You're selling rent+incubatorship+camaraderie and have to make that case. Most houses or apartment buildings in Oakland need some expensive retrofitting to get high bandwidth and enough power and outlets. Fiber is relatively unavailable (although San Leandro has local fiber loops). Depending on where you locate, working things out with neighbors and City permits can be time consuming and costly. - The money comes - from tenants (charging a big premium to people relatively unwilling to pay it) or - from investors (who subsidize the house in exchange for equity or rights to equity) or - from collateral sources (producers of a reality TV show; sponsors who seek some marketing advantage). - You have to fight expensive churn: very high startup failure rates drive tenants out, there's drama from close quarters, and tenants move out if they find outside funding or co-founders living elsewhere in the Bay. Normal landlords seek long term tenants who pay on time without fuss. So it's tough. It would really help if the house has a tight focus. B2B Growth Hacks startups. Neurochem tech startups. Wearables/fashion/QS consumer startups. Health/clinical startups. This assures a more valuable space design (e.g. arduino startups would need a good hacker space) more synergy, better chances of connections having value, and an easier time attracting partners, investors, media. - Phil Phil Wolff pwolff(a)gmail.com skype:evanwolf +1-510-343-5664 http://about.me/evanwolf bio <http://letmydatago.org/>http://twitter.com/evanwolf @ http://www.linkedin.com/in/philwolff cv http://LetMyDataGo.org blog http://www.facebook.com/philwolff face On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 10:15 AM, Sonja Trauss &lt;sonja.trauss(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote;wrote: