Photograph by Ryan Young for Bloomberg Businessweek
In a city full of weird and wonderful thoroughfares, Broadway Street remains one of San Francisco’s finest. It begins at the water’s edge and runs past the Financial District, the strip clubs and Italian eateries of North Beach, and the eclectic mix of stores in bustling Chinatown. After the Broadway Tunnel, the street traverses hilly, residential neighborhoods until it arrives at Pacific Heights and an especially impressive stretch of real estate known as Billionaire’s Row. This is where the moneyed—old and new—enjoy the finer things in life, such as ample parking.
Three years ago, something extraordinary happened on Billionaire’s Row: One of the mansions was put up for rent. Instead of being taken by a rich financier or executive, the $8 million house was leased to eight people, most of them entrepreneurs in their 30s. The home has since morphed into a hive of startup activity: A multimillion-dollar iPad accessory franchise began there, as well as a lettuce-growing machine and a database company. “It’s like an incubator,” says Ryan Turri, a resident and aspiring beef jerky magnate. “You’re up at two in the morning and bouncing ideas off three or four guys who are all smart.”
Incubator houses have become a Silicon Valley trend. There’s the Rainbow Mansion in Cupertino, which has its own website and 5,000 square feet of space to house employees from Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG), as well as startup junkies. In San Francisco, graduates of Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology have formed rival startup communes. A wealthy devotee of the Grateful Dead owns a network of “Dead Houses” that get rented out to young Stanford alums. “They’re all named after Dead songs,” says Altay Guvench, 31, who just opened a talent agency for programmers called 10x Management. “I live in Sugar Magnolia with eight other people. It’s a beautiful house in the marina.” There are houses with people dedicated to building hardware and others aimed at knocking out smartphone apps. “Room in hacker house available,” reads a recent posting on Meetup.com. “It would be a plus to find someone into the startup scene and who likes to hack on side projects.” Click here for the complete story by Ashlee Vance.