Valley of the Gods

by Alexandra Wolfe

  The Silicon Valley Start-up Mansion Crawl started with a barbecue and pool party at the Villa. From there tourgoers took the bus to TheGlint for drinks and dessert, before winding up at Factory Zero for wine and cheese.

  Down in Palo Alto, another group of Thiel fellows was experimenting with its own home. Near the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s house in Palo Alto, past Google founder Larry Page’s California Arts and Crafts $7.95 million mansion, is a seventeen-thousand-square-foot English Tudor–style house covered in vines and buttressed by a fuchsia flower garden surrounding a pool. A lone grey SUV sat out front. Every now and then a teenager with a backpack and glasses walked out of the arched doorway, got on a bike or a scooter, and rode past mothers and fathers walking their dogs, or couples driving to and from work. At that corner house, however, the parents didn’t live there.

  During that first summer of the Thiel Fellowship, seven lived in one of these co-living homes at the intersection of Santa Rita Avenue and Cowper Street. After months of searching for affordable housing on Craigslist, they stumbled upon this 1920s five-bedroom house with all its period accoutrements, from butler doors to dumbwaiters. They all worked on different company ideas. Four of the boys, Sebastien Zany, Darren Zhu, David Merfield, and Nick Cammarata, all moved here with Laura Deming, the native New Zealander who “wants to extend the human life-span for a few centuries—at the very least.” Ben Yu joined them a few months later. Some of the fellows roomed together in the upstairs bedrooms, while others squeezed into the garage and the pool house. They divided the $5,500 rent until May 2012, when the owner wanted to put the property on the market for $5 million.

  As of late October 2011, though, they still hadn’t finished furnishing it. Instead, they sparsely and somewhat haphazardly decorated the downstairs with laptops and whiteboards, making the house function as more of an office than a home. On the mantel facing a long wraparound couch was not a television but a big-screen computer monitor.

  “It keeps us focused,” said Zhu, referring to the lack of television. Farther down the hall was the dining room, where they used the long dinner table for meetings. Zhu and Luan, cofounders of Dextro, a robotics company that would build robots to automate the biotech industry, both wore glasses, jeans, and striped polo shirts. The two, who first met as Yale sophomores, decided to work together after being accepted as fellows.

  They had covered one wall with dry-erase boards, which they’d filled with algorithmic designs for robot creation and outlines for business development strategies.

  The seven of them created a minifamily, and in this house, they showed off the life they had built together. We walked around the corner to the kitchen, where they opened the fridge to show that it was fully stocked with sausages, vegetables, pasta, fruit, and loaves of bread from Whole Foods. The fellows cooked most nights rather than eat out or get takeout. “We’re trying to stretch the money as much as possible,” said Luan.

  The kitchen led outside to a brick-covered patio that looked out to the pool house, where Zany lived. “Sebastien has his own suite out here!” exclaimed Zhu. Zany would soon spackle the walls with supplies from Home Depot and hang up posters and tapestries, turning the small structure into an airy dorm room. The next building over was the garage, containing bikes, ­scooters—and a grand piano. When a mentor dropped off the piano before he moved houses, the fellows couldn’t believe it. “We got someone to give us a piano and have it delivered!” Zhu said excitedly.

  Upstairs, Merfield and Cammarata lived and worked out of their bedroom. Luan and Zhu occupied the sprawling master suite in the middle of the floor. Although they’d been living in the house for more than a month, David had just discovered that his four-hundred-square-foot bedroom had a balcony, though he still hadn’t been out on it. “It’s pretty great,” he said. “We keep finding things in this house we never knew were there.”

  As the only girl, Deming had her own room next door. Laura, working part-time at a lab, was having trouble coming up with funding for her proposed longevity private equity fund. She had no shortage of mentors willing to meet with her, but she didn’t have a business partner who could help run the financials of her company. She preferred to spend her time with mice in the labs than with most of the men who had tried to date her under the guise of investment. Deming, like the other fellows, had a command of her field unusual for her age and sex, as well as an unusual obsession with it. She fit in well at Silicon Valley’s many happy hours, where companies hosted employee after-work events more regularly than the staff socialized on its own. When the Thiel House’s owner announced he was looking to sell, Deming started socializing more, to see if she could find a new living situation.

  At one of these, at former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s venture firm Innovation Endeavors, she met Julia Lipton leaning against a balcony rail sipping San Pellegrino. Pert and petite, Lipton, twenty-two, looked out over the city of Palo Alto, where she had lived for a year while working at Quixey, a search engine for apps. She was at one of a handful of these happy hours that she attends each week for networking purposes with her start-up house roommates. The following night, her boss, Quixey founder Liron Shapira, would host a happy hour for college kids to encourage them to stop out of school and work for him. “At least that’s the subtext,” Lipton said. Shapira dropped out of college himself to launch his own company, “and he encourages people to learn computer science not in the classroom but by starting a start-up,” she explained.

  As with many twenty-somethings who moved to Silicon Valley, Lipton’s work and social life had become one. She spent most of her time at the “Quixeyplex,” the one-story Palo Alto building where colorful stickers of apps such as YouTube, Skype, and Twitter cover walls and staircases. Lipton ended up there after graduating from the University of Southern California and then interning at Merrill Lynch and Accenture—“pretty standard jobs,” as she recalled. In college, she had studied with engineers and found that she and they seemed more excited about programming than about partying. So for senior year spring break, instead of going with her friends to Cancún, Mexico, Lipton flew out to Silicon Valley and scheduled meetings with interesting people she had found on LinkedIn. There she met with entrepreneur Adam Rifkin, who offered her the in-house public relations and marketing role she has now. By March, Lipton had relocated to Palo Alto, where she moved in with another start-up staffer and soon adapted to the techie schedule.

  Tonight Lipton wasn’t drinking. After all, she had to go back to work. She did, however, sample some of the start-up diet-friendly cuisine, slicing a piece of manchego cheese to pair with Marcona almonds. All purchased from Whole Foods, there was nary a refined carbohydrate in sight—or possibly even in the building. The natural, organic fast-food joint Lyfe Kitchen occupied the ground floor and had become an official canteen for tech offices along University Avenue. So prevalent was the gastronomically aware engineer, that area restaurants had entire menu pages designated to these healthful new start-up habits.

  The houses reinforced those habits—healthful and otherwise. The Villa would become the backdrop of the reality show Silicon Valley. Produced by Mark Zuckerberg’s sister Randi Zuckerberg, along with the same team that made the Den of Thieves TV series and the MTV Video Music Awards, Silicon Valley followed five mansion dwellers trying to build billion-dollar companies as they party and conference hop their way through the Bay Area. Two cast members, brother and sister Benjamin and Hermione Way, lived in the Villa, where they worked on their media start-ups. Hermione, who calls herself a “vlogger,” or video blogger, wrote for the tech website The Next Web. Her brother started a company at age fifteen that raised $50 million. This show was the precursor to an HBO comedy series also called Silicon Valley. Although it wasn’t a reality show, it looked like one. With characters resembling Thiel, Sergey Brin, and the TechCrunch Disrupt conference’s Michael Arrington, many Silicon Valley dwellers thought it could have been a documentary.

 
Their house was an imitation of Zuckerberg’s Palo Alto home in The Social Network. But others like it had existed before in one form or another. One of the first was Rainbow Mansion, started in 2006 by Chris Kemp, then NASA’s chief technology officer, and other NASA employees looking to share rides and costs. The sprawling abode had been home to some fifty tech employees over the last few years. Though the early mansion dwellers were from NASA, within a few months they started recruiting people from Apple and Google, as well as students from Stanford. It became the first of these communal living homes with shared rent in which inhabitants work, eat, and play together.

  “We figured the Bay Area had lots of giant mansions and we thought we’d find one on Craigslist,” remembered Kemp, a slim thirty-nine-year-old with spiky hair, clear blue eyes, and thin-framed glasses. Few had cars, so they figured living together would be a more efficient way to get to work. When they found a property big enough at the right price—an eighteen-room Spanish-tiled mansion on Rainbow Drive in Palo Alto—it was already furnished with 1990s-style décor, a grand piano, and a personal theater. Five of the first group of eight who would live there pooled the funds for the first and last month’s security deposit, totaling $50,000. The only downside was that with so many people in such a large house, they ended up in the highest bracket for power and water consumption. Also, neighbors did not appreciate the parties the house would regularly have for hundreds of company employees. Still, the housemates stayed. They liked being able to hold spontaneous salons where they would talk about work and ideas.

  • • •

  When Celestine Johnson first arrived in the area, she too lived in Rainbow Mansion. Now she was hovering in Eric Schmidt’s orbit. For many newbies, gravitating toward a kingpin was a reliable path forward. He was hers, and she had infiltrated the world of Innovation Endeavors, in part through her co-living communities.

  Johnson had been working on the Corporate Social Responsibility team at Apple, looking after Supplier Responsibility, or human rights and the environment. When she walked into Rainbow Mansion, she found eight male roommates watching the nature documentary series Planet Earth under a five-by-five-foot tetrahedron built out of paper towel rolls hanging from the ceiling. Scattered around the living room were telescopes belonging to a few of the guys who worked at NASA. Then there was the didgeridoo that one of them had fashioned out of sugarcane.

  Johnson had discovered this Cupertino co-living commu­nity by answering a Craigslist ad seeking a roommate who would want to “join an intellectual community to change the world.” After a series of phone interviews with housemates who asked her what she was doing to change the world, and how and why she planned to do it, and then an in-person interview, Johnson was offered her own room. It had sleek, new wood floors. The house was crowded, but noise wouldn’t be a problem. Her housemate in the next room had turned his into a meditation room equipped with raised flooring and tatami mats. “I think I was in the maid’s room,” she recalled. “But it was a reasonably sized room”—especially compared with the master bedroom, which at one point had four people living in it, including one in the closet.

  With occupants ranging from their late teens to their midthirties, the $5 million houses full of telescopes, terminals, and other high-tech toys, and everything from pools to motes to koi ponds, were veritable MTV Real World mansions, except they boasted whiteboards instead of flat-screens. The male-to-female ratio was nearly 10:1.

  This new surge in communal living intensified as Facebook and Google started growing in the mid-aughts, and Silicon Valley companies and venture capital firms encouraged their employees to live and code together. Paul Graham’s incubator Y Combinator gave entrepreneurs seed money on the basis that the employees live near where they work, bringing new young talent to the valley every year. Based on this model, investors and tech companies started using housing as a place not just for beds but also for brainstorming.

  So far, Google, Innovation Endeavors, and a string of venture capital firms along Sand Hill Road had their engineers in co-living communities such as the Blackbox Mansion, a shingled, traditional family home on the outside that could be booked only through Airbnb, the online housing and vacation rental site, and the actual DevHouse, an event company, named after this phenomenon, that sets up networking events for techies. UpWest Labs, an Israeli seed fund, and Innovation Endeavors organized their live-work spaces as incubators for company ideas.

  Business rules were stringent (“Attend meetings for which you sign up. Cancel with staff if you will not be able to attend”) while interpersonal rules were often written in casual college-like vernacular (“Residents may not enter into each other’s rooms unless they are invited by a resident of that room”).

  Leadership and nightly chef duty often remained self-­selecting. Every night after a big Costco shopping run to stock the Sub-Zero fridge, which soon multiplied as the house filled up, entrepreneurs would take turns volunteering for kitchen duty. Former NASA employee Kemp said the task usually fell to the vegan or vegetarian housemates who wanted to make sure “no one throws hunks of cow on the grill.” For the first few years, Kemp was the house leader, but then new people started to take over. “The most interesting people were the last you’d want to remind to pay the rent on time,” he recalled, “so by being the most responsible person, I was actually the least interesting.”

  After converting the second-floor media room into a hostel, they let friends of friends and area interns use the space, while entrepreneurs unable to afford the monthly rent could crash on futons or bunk beds. “Economics were not the driving factor of the house,” said Kemp. If guests were creative and added to the house’s culture, they might not have to pay as much. Rather than asking can they afford it, Kemp’s questions were always “Are these people doing something important?” and “Are they going to add to the character and the experience of the house?”

  Kemp figured that if the multiple-family-home idea did not work out, he would try to create a home for employees based in the area for weeks at a time. He hoped to build a sort of temporary community of rotating entrepreneurs, envisioning a giant house where different people would have private rooms where they could leave their belongings. “They’d have a sense of community but also more privacy and a more culturally rich space,” said Kemp.

  So far, though, the government was not making it easy. When Google tried to build a company-sponsored community designed around colleague collaboration close to its campus, the city rejected the plan. But even though having Google house its staff in its own residential village didn’t get past the local government, there was nothing the city could do about the employees organizing their own living situations that way. For entrepreneurs to take the risks involved in starting a company—often for low pay and a high amount of faith—living together served to reinforce their commitment to a company cause that often, by sane standards, would never exist. Long hours at work with little relief in terms of social activity almost forced work to be viewed as fun.

  Because the willingness to live together was already apparent in the area, Kemp thought there would be room to expand what he’d built at the Rainbow Mansion. In the meantime, a new Silicon Valley status quo had emerged out of his original vision: now the first stop after getting a job was often a co-living community. But for housemates in all of these mansions, the realities of co-living could prove to be overly alternative. In 2009, after living in Rainbow Mansion for a year and a half, Celestine Johnson moved into a live-and-work house in Woodside that she said was full of interesting engineers and physicists, plus gardens, their own chickens, and house-brewed beer—but that was about it. Eventually she moved to San Francisco, for the reason that these live-work mansions exist: “All we did in Cupertino was Rainbow Mansion; there are limited options for young people to go in Silicon Valley.”

  Meanwhile, the live-work concept would continue to evolve. Johnson and Chris Kemp started working on the idea of devel
oping crash pads in Palo Alto for venture capitalists, company employees, and founders to stay when they are too tired to commute back to San Francisco. And one of their other housemates, Jessy Schlinger, a woman who moved into Rainbow Mansion a few months into Johnson’s tenure there, took up that mantle for the most part and was now starting a new network of entrepreneurial mansions called Embassy Network. Langton Labs’s Todd Huffman sent her people to fill some of the houses if they didn’t fit into his space. “She’s one of the go-to people for collaborative living,” said Johnson. Schlinger just took over an old monastery in San Francisco and installed a bowling alley in the basement.

  In a way, these share houses were still just a later stage of the hippy living tradition that the Bay Area had long been known for. But this time, the captains of industry were leading the charge. If psychedelic drugs once put people in a collective trance in the 1960s, these days that drug was the ephemeral motto of “changing the world”—which, when translated into East Coast, meant “changing the wallet,” to make it much fatter in as little time as possible.

  • • •

  By 2012, John Burnham’s own wallet was getting slim. He had gone through practically all his grant money in his first few months, so he had to move back down to Silicon Valley: to a small studio in Mountain View, about ten minutes south of the Thiel fellows’ house on Santa Rita.

  Still, he said he was making strides at his new company, Daric, by working on it remotely from his home in Mountain View, writing algorithms for the back end of his business. He would occasionally travel back east to meet with company advisors (when his parents bought him a plane ticket home). He said he had convinced business leaders such as Jennifer Johnson, co-president at the investment management firm Franklin Templeton, and Kenneth Chenault, CEO of American Express, to advise the company.