After years of debate about remote work, Silicon Valley has identified a compromise: move your bed closer to the office. Ideally, into the office. The culture will become difficult to miss.
The Atlantic’s June reporting examined San Francisco hacker houses as places where founders live and build together. Its account describes both practical motives, including housing costs, and the companionship of attempting a company among other people doing the same. We have not visited these houses; the broader reflections here are our own.1
The difficulty starts when the home becomes another place to be evaluated.
The shortest commute in the asset class
A shared working environment can make learning faster. Someone nearby may know how to fix a technical problem, introduce a useful contact, or explain why an apparent disaster is ordinary.
This is a real advantage of proximity. It is not exclusive to technology founders, but founders can benefit from it.
Proximity also reduces the distance between work and the rest of life. That can be welcome when a person chooses an intense period of focus. It can become more complicated when every ordinary activity takes place in front of people who share the same professional scoreboard.
A quiet evening may begin to feel like a public statement about ambition. The person not working becomes visible in a way they would not be in a separate home. Nobody needs to issue an instruction for the norm to exert pressure.
This is a general possibility in work-centered communal living, not a claim about the rules of a particular house.
Community is more than adjacency
A group of founders in one building is not automatically a supportive community. It can become one through trust, reciprocity, and an ability to talk about things that do not improve the company.
A friend can hear about a bad week without asking whether it changes the investment case. A professional network may be supportive too, but the resident ought to know which conversation is taking place.
A good house may contain both. The risk is that the commercial vocabulary gradually occupies all the available space. A dinner becomes a salon. A visitor becomes deal flow. A roommate’s difficult week becomes a lesson about resilience.
At some point, the most generous thing another resident can offer may be a conversation that does not end with a suggestion to ship faster.
The founder is allowed to be a person
The heroic startup narrative tends to edit life down to relevant inputs. Sleep supports performance. Exercise supports performance. Friends support performance. A meal is a delivery mechanism for continued performance.
A resident should be able to rest, disagree, or leave without having to present the decision as a growth strategy.
There is no universal floor plan
A person can build an excellent company from a quiet apartment, a conventional office, or a kitchen table surrounded by responsibilities that do not appear in the origin story. The house is one possible environment, not an entrance examination.
Investors should be especially careful about treating visible lifestyle intensity as evidence of eventual business quality. It is easy to observe who is present late. It is harder to observe who has understood a customer or made a better decision.
A home with no performance review
Shared costs, meals, and useful company can make a house worth living in. The arrangement does not need to turn every hour under its roof into evidence of commitment.
The problem is not sleeping near the office. It is discovering that the office has acquired jurisdiction over sleep.