San Francisco invented the garage startup and then, somewhere around 2023, quietly retired it. The founders arriving now do not want a garage. They want an eight-bedroom house in Pacific Heights with a kitchen big enough to feed twelve people at midnight, and they are willing to pay more for it than most law firms pay for office space.
This is a map of where that is actually happening — the named houses, the rents, the programs, and the mechanics of how a group of people ends up living and building in the same building. If you are trying to understand why a 1920s mansion in Alamo Square is now the most competitive address in early-stage technology, start here.
What a hacker house is in 2026
The phrase has drifted. In 2013 a "hacker house" meant bunk beds in the Mission and a rent you could cover on a part-time contract. In 2026 it means one of four fairly distinct things, and conflating them is the main reason people talk past each other about this trend.
| Type | What it is | Who pays | Typical shape |
|---|---|---|---|
| The residency | A funded, selective, time-boxed cohort that lives together | The fund, in exchange for equity | 10–25 founders, 3–12 weeks |
| The company house | One startup's team living in its own headquarters | The startup | 5–10 people, a year or more |
| The community house | A membership house built around events and density | Residents, nightly or monthly | Rotating, days to weeks |
| The cohort annex | Furnished housing rented around a program the house does not run | The founders or the program | A room each, one to six months |
The first three get written about. The fourth is the largest by volume and the least visible, and it is the part hyperstay operates in: founders who are in San Francisco for a batch, a fellowship, a fundraise or a three-month sprint, who need a furnished room in a good house for a month or more and do not want to sign a year's lease to get it.
The residencies
HF0 — the monastery at Alamo Square
HF0, founded by Dave Fontenot and Evan Stites-Clayton, is the house everyone else is measured against. It runs a twelve-week live-in residency for roughly ten teams a cohort out of the Archbishop's Mansion on the northeast corner of Alamo Square Park — a thirteen-bedroom building reported at around $15 million in value, with the dark wood panelling, ornate staircases, cold plunge and meditation space that have made it the most photographed startup interior in the city.
The organising idea is subtraction. Fontenot's framing — and the Bloomberg and Invest Like the Best coverage that followed it — is "monastery mode": take away laundry, rent, cooking, commuting, and errands, and what remains is twelve weeks of building with nine other teams who are doing the same thing in the same house. Food, housing and logistics are handled. Residents trade distraction for proximity.
The terms have moved as the fund has grown. Early cohorts were reported at $250,000 for 2.5%; current public descriptions put it at an uncapped $1 million SAFE for roughly 5%, with the fund continuing to invest alongside syndicate partners afterwards. HF0's most recent vehicle is reported at $100 million, up from earlier funds of $8 million and $16 million.
The portfolio is the argument. HF0 alumni include Lovable), OpenRouter, Krea, Browser Use, Coframe, Featherless AI, Forage and Zeta Labs. Lovable alone raised a $200 million Series A led by Accel in February 2025 at a $1.8 billion valuation, a $330 million Series B in December 2025 at $6.6 billion, and a $400 million Series C in August 2026 at a reported $13.3 billion. One residency, one house, one cohort — and a company that went from a demo to a double-digit-billion valuation in about eighteen months.
The Residency — five mansions and a waitlist
The Residency runs the volume end of the same idea. It leases five San Francisco mansions — four in Pacific Heights, one in the Mission — each housing between ten and twenty-five founders, with the largest a twenty-two-bedroom house in Pacific Heights holding twenty-two people. Cohorts run three to six months. Founders get housing, meals and model credits, plus therapy, executive coaching and conflict-resolution sessions, and a demo day with investors at the end.
What makes it interesting is the price. It starts around $2,000 a month, or founders can pay in equity. Nick Linck, who runs it, describes the thesis in terms of Maslow's hierarchy: remove the bottom of the pyramid — shelter, food, belonging — and people can put everything into the top. There is a waitlist of more than a hundred, and the program has kept expanding, including into converted Academy of Art University dormitory buildings.
AGI House and the fund-attached houses
AGI House, in Hillsborough on the Peninsula, is the other well-known model: a large house that functions as an events and demo venue for the AI research community, with a venture fund attached. The house is the deal flow. Hackathons on the weekend, investments on Monday.
The company houses
The more startling 2026 development is not programs. It is individual startups renting mansions as headquarters, which is what The San Francisco Standard documented in March 2026.
- Adam, an AI startup, moved five employees into a $5.5 million Spanish-style villa in the Marina District overlooking the Palace of Fine Arts — five bedrooms, five people. Founder Zach Dive, 26, who had raised more than $4 million at the time, put it plainly: "We came to this realization that we're doing our life's work. So why not live in the best place possible so we feel inspired everyday?"
- Artisan took a six-bedroom house in Russian Hill in 2024 at $27,000 a month.
- Cluely bought into SoMa with a nearly $4 million, six-bedroom house for six employees — then left for New York after running into zoning problems, which is the cautionary half of this story.
- Cognition worked out of a $10 million neoclassical mansion in Atherton before moving into a San Francisco office following its Windsurf acquisition.
The demand side is now visible in how agents talk. Compass agents Dunja Green and Milan Jezdimirovic fielded a founder looking for a house with eight to twelve bedrooms plus office space who was willing to pay $30,000 a month. A North Beach property — five storeys, four bedrooms — went for $30,000 a month. A 2500 Divisadero listing in Pacific Heights with eight bedrooms and eight bathrooms drew inquiries from multiple venture firms. A nearly 20,000-square-foot, seven-bedroom house near Duboce Park listed at $7 million. Offers as high as $75,000 a month have been reported from venture firms to owners of large homes.
Dave Costello of Compass described the shift: "We're seeing this trend of people that are not just wanting to buy a house of that magnitude for their own personal use, but it's involving office workers as well."
Set that against a San Francisco office vacancy rate of about 33% at the end of 2025 and the trade becomes legible. The city has a surplus of offices nobody wants and a shortage of large houses everybody wants, because the thing founders are buying is not square footage. It is hours — the hours you get back when the commute is a staircase.
The community houses
Vibe House SF is the clearest example of the next variation: a hacker house for people who have aged out of hacker houses. A 4,000-square-foot, $4 million property in West Portal with four rentable rooms and three bathrooms, run by Sahin Boydas, 44, who is also CEO of the AI startup Lovie. Stays cap at two weeks, events run three times a week, and the amenity list reads like a wellness retreat: organic cotton pillows, $140 "grounding" sheets, bidets, goat-milk soap, custom water-filtering showerheads, prebiotic sodas, and remote-controlled frosted quartz singing bowls.
The residents are founders in their forties, fifties and sixties with exits behind them — Björn Stansvik, 52, and Dave Sifry, 57, among them. Boydas's line about why: "I feel like I'm 25 in a 44-year-old body, with a 65-year-old's experience."
It would be easy to mock the sheets. The structural point underneath is that the house format turned out not to be about youth or poverty at all. It was about density of peers, and that is worth as much at fifty as at twenty-two.
Why it is happening now
Three forces arrived at once.
The programs went in-person and concentrated in San Francisco. Since the Winter 2025 batch, Y Combinator has required founders to relocate to San Francisco for the entire batch, with no remote track. YC now runs four batches a year of roughly 150–200 companies each — 199 in Winter 2026, 193 in Spring 2026. That is a predictable, recurring wave of founders who need somewhere to live for three months and have no interest in a twelve-month lease.
The housing market got tight in exactly the wrong shape. San Francisco's median two-bedroom rent passed $6,000 for the first time in 2026, reaching a reported $6,020, up 25.9% year over year, with one-bedrooms at $4,180. Active listings fell about 30% year over year. In the neighbourhoods founders want — the Marina, Pacific Heights, SoMa — vacancy went from roughly 13% in 2020 to about 3%.
The evidence turned against distance. A 2023 Nature paper by Lin, Frey and Wu analysing millions of papers and patents found that remote collaboration produces fewer breakthrough ideas: distributed teams contribute to late-stage technical work but are markedly less likely to combine their knowledge on the conceptual tasks — conceiving ideas, designing the research — where knowledge is tacit. If your competitive advantage is the quality of an idea nobody has had yet, that finding is not neutral.
Put those together and the mansion stops looking like excess. It looks like the cheapest way to buy proximity in a city that has made proximity expensive.
The gap this map leaves
Notice what the named houses have in common: they are closed. HF0 takes ten teams. The Residency has a hundred-person waitlist. A company house requires being the company. Vibe House caps at two weeks.
Meanwhile the actual population of founders in San Francisco for one to six months — the YC batch that just landed, the fellow at Stanford, the European team in town to raise, the eight-person company running a sprint before a launch — mostly needs something unglamorous: a furnished room in a well-run house with good internet, for a defined number of months, at a monthly price with nothing to assemble and no lease to break.
That is the business hyperstay is in. Furnished homes across San Francisco, private rooms or entire houses with six or more bedrooms, 30-night minimum, rent and utilities and internet and cleaning in one monthly number. We have hosted founders and operators from Y Combinator, Hexa, Stanford's Mayfield Fellows Program, Latitud and General Catalyst-backed companies, and we book cohorts of twenty-one-plus rooms across our houses when a program brings a group to the city together.
The map above is the interesting part of the story. The boring part — where everyone else sleeps — is the part we run.
Have a correction or a house we missed? Write to team@hyperstay.com. We keep this page current.