The Silicon Valley hopefuls living in hacker houses

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Megan McCarty-Corino (0:25)

Inside the hacker houses of Silicon Valley. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty-Corino.

Film maker Kenji Yamamoto got a gig working on Apple promotional videos a decade ago, and he went looking for affordable temporary housing in the pricey Bay Area. What he found was an inside look at the world of hacker houses. These are group residences for people who come to Silicon Valley to pursue their tech dreams, sort of a college dorm for startup hopefuls. Yamamoto takes viewers inside that world in his new documentary for PBS called The Dreamers and I.

Kenji Yamamoto (1:16)

The hacker house is a suburban house. It's the work-live situation. Oftentimes, there are two or three bedrooms, maybe eight bunk beds per bedroom with 24 people, one bathroom, one kitchen. This is where innovators can talk to innovators, makers can talk to makers.

After my seventh house, I met Carlos and Carlos actually responded by saying, I will cook for you. To me, that was his first sign to say, I'm welcome. And our agreement was that I could stay there as long as I wanted to.

Megan McCarty-Corino (1:56)

And so Carlos was running this hacker house that he called Startup Embassy. And you profile a number of the folks that you met at Startup Embassy. Tell me about Habibay. Who is she and what was she hoping to do in Silicon Valley?

Kenji Yamamoto (2:14)

Habibay, it was a very young scientist from Istanbul. And she invented fire extinguishers that was the size of a cell phone. And there was a dormitory in Istanbul that burned down and 16 young women were killed. And that affected her. And she said, if there's anyone who can figure this out, it has to be me.

She learned how to be not only a good scientist, but a good businesswoman.

Megan McCarty-Corino (2:48)

And then there was Lucas, who is from Seville, Spain, who you started out hoping he was going to be kind of your your star success story. He was set to sell his startup to a big company, but it didn't quite work out that time. What did his story say to you about kind of the the entrepreneur experience?

Kenji Yamamoto (3:08)

Lucas from Seville, Spain, who didn't have much of a command of the English language, but he was learning as he was making himself available to funders of his, what was then at that time, pre-AI self-coding software that he invented. He spent 10 years developing this project, and he showed to me the persistence of an entrepreneur. He would not give up creating this non-coding device that would self-teach itself how to create apps without any other coding application needed by the user.

He was fearless. He learned how to speak English well enough to do business, and he would never stop. Even though he had four children back in Spain, many of them were very, very young, and his wife was very ill. He had everything against him as a husband and as a supporter of his family. But he always kept in mind that his business was very important. As his wife said, he has two startups. One was his family and one was his company.

And she knew that she would win. That her startup, the family would always win.

Megan McCarty-Corino (4:53)

You follow the ups and downs of these entrepreneurs. And then there's kind of the tension of housing in Silicon Valley, which is always a big tension.

In 2015, local residents in Palo Alto started to complain to the city about these kinds of short-term rentals that were housing large groups of people. We've got a clip queued up.

SPEAKER_4 (5:16)

I'd like to thank the council for hearing me. Groups of 10 or more live in a single house, partying until three and four o'clock in the morning.

Sergei (5:27)

We call the police.

Carlos (5:28)

We call the police again.

SPEAKER_4 (5:30)

Stop it now.

Megan McCarty-Corino (5:34)

How challenging is it for these kinds of hacker houses to sort of coexist in these communities?

Kenji Yamamoto (5:40)

It was very challenging. And even though the city of Palo Alto where a startup embassy was located, didn't go forward to the city council to actually stop these operations, but the pressure of neighbors complaining about the loud parties that would go on and their garbage cans filled with beer bottles that were not their own created problems. And that would be true of just about any community that had a hacker house nearby.