Something happens to people who live at Mission Control. I watched it enough times over a year and a half to stop calling it coincidence. They often arrive with nothing: no idea, no co-founder, sometimes no savings. They leave as someone different. Not always with a company. But always transformed and set on a lifelong path of personal growth.
The house is one of the oldest hacker houses in SF. It started in 2013 when a group from the first cohort of the Thiel Fellowship moved into a Mission District address that nobody would have called remarkable. Vitalik Buterin used to hang out there. Lucy Guo used to live there. They weren't building together. They were just in proximity, sharing a kitchen and a certain orientation toward what was possible. The house never stopped. A decade later it's still running, still full, still producing exceptional founders. Alumni who have built companies with a combined valuation over two billion dollars. A satellite house down the block because demand outgrew the original.
Over that time I interviewed several dozen founders who wanted in, helped run the house, organized everything from small salons to 400-person ragers. I loved it enough that my roommate Ker Lee Yap and I decided to build our own.
We called it Satellite. Creative naming, we know. Across the street from Mission Control, five founders per cohort, early stage, mostly AI and hard tech. Ker Lee is warm and quirky and brilliant in the specific way that makes people feel like friends with her immediately. Everyone in SF seems to know her and love her. She has this unfettered belief in the people around her that is genuinely rare, the kind that makes you gain more energy in what you are doing from being in the room with her. I have always been able to see people clearly: not who they're presenting, but who they actually are and what they might become. People have always found their way to me. I don't fully know how to explain it except that I can hold someone's potential before they can hold it themselves, and I can feel how people might affect each other over time. Together that was a real thing. We interviewed dozens of people per cohort. The conversations were long and we weren't running through a rubric. I was trying to feel something a form cannot capture: whether these specific people, together, at this specific moment, would do something to each other that none of them could do alone.
We met with our founders regularly. Made introductions, reviewed pitches, got them into rooms they wouldn't have found otherwise. We hosted brunches and dinners and gave them small amounts of money to grab coffee with each other.
On certain evenings we'd set up the common space for coworking. Lights low, music on, tea on the counter. No agenda, just the room. And what I kept watching happen in those rooms was the thing I couldn't have engineered directly: people stopped performing for each other. Someone would say something they hadn't planned to say and another person would profoundly connect to it. Someone else would stay after everyone left to keep talking. The bonds that actually lasted, the ones that became co-founder relationships and long friendships and the kind of trust you call on at 1am, almost none of them came from the structured moments. They came from those unremarkable evenings where nothing was happening except people being in the same room, tired, working on something hard, not pretending.
The founders from that cohort were so bonded by the end that they went on to live together in a new house. We had a sentimental send-off party where they wrote letters to their future selves and to the next cohort coming in. I still think about that night.
That's what I was trying to make. I didn't always have language for it while we were doing it.
We shut Satellite down after several cohorts. Not because it failed. Because doing it right, really right, required more than two people building their own things on the side could sustainably give.
This is the part that never makes it into most writing about residencies. Ker Lee was starting a venture firm with two of our other roommates. I was building a company. We were pouring real time and energy into our founders: the introductions, the pitch reviews, the late conversations, the constant thinking about what each of them needed and whether we were providing it. It filled something in us. I don't want to understate that. But it also took from us, quietly, in ways we didn't always notice until we were already somewhat depleted.
HF0 runs out of a thirteen-bedroom mansion near Alamo Square with a full team of chefs, mentors and cleaners whose entire job is to hold the container. That's not a luxury. That's how you do it without burning the people running it. Mission Control works differently: over a decade of embedded culture, referral-only selection, relationships that compound across years. No one person really runs the house, and plenty of residents wouldn't even call it a hacker house. One of my favorite people who still lives there is an engineer and an incredible athlete who does every sport imaginable, swims in the ocean every Saturday, runs marathons, and has a better fashion sense and a fuller social life than almost anyone I know. She's not building a company. She is most definitely a hacker. A living organism rather than a built instrument. Both produce something real. They're just doing different things.
What we had was each other. And what we learned was that even two people who are genuinely exceptional at this, who love it, who are doing it as an expression of something true about them, is not quite enough when you're also trying to build your own things at the same time. Community at this level of care is a full-time orientation. We gave it as much as we could. I'm proud of what we made. I also understand now why the houses that last longest are the ones where someone has made the work of holding the community their actual work, not something alongside it.
The landscape right now is proliferating fast. Cold plunge tubs. Compute credits. Demo Days. Chefs. Beautiful websites. Every new residency has some version of the same pitch: remove the friction, let founders build. Whether this is the natural maturation of something that genuinely works, or the moment a real cultural phenomenon starts to calcify into something more sellable and sensationalized, I'm not sure. Probably both.
What I'm more certain about is this: most of them are underestimating the selection. The houses that produce, the ones you hear about years later in the stories founders tell about where everything started, are not defined by their amenities or their programming or their investor networks. They're defined by the quality of attention someone paid to who goes in the room and how those people were nurtured, held accountable, and empowered during their time there. That attention is not scalable. It is not optimizable. It is a practice that requires taste and time and genuine care about specific human beings, and it is the thing most easily sacrificed when the pressure is to grow, to run more cohorts, to make the model work at larger numbers.
The residency that changes someone is small, careful, and run by people who understand that the house is just the address.
I think about the founders at Mission Control and the ones who trusted us with their earliest founding journeys at Satellite. Not as a portfolio. As people I watched become something at a specific moment that won't come again. The ones who found each other in that room and are still deeply interwoven into each other's lives. The ones who said things over a random late night conversation they didn't mean to have that they've since built companies around.
We made something real. And I still believe, having seen it from the inside of both the oldest hacker house in SF and the one we built from scratch across the street, that there is nothing quite like what happens when the right people are in the right room at the right time, and someone cared enough to make sure that's who was in it.
That's the whole thing.