Hacker houses are turning founder networks into VC funds

Former Mission Control roommates Surabhi Todi and Lisa Shmulyan recently emerged from stealth with Mission Street Capital. Its “Fund 0” raised less than $2 million, a modest sum by venture-capital standards but enough to make pre-seed investments and build a record for future fundraising. Limited partners include researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, along with investors from Andreessen Horowitz, CRV and Emergence. Cloud-computing startup Fly.io is the anchor investor.

Mission Street joins a small but growing group of hacker-house communities seeking to invest in founders, rather than simply provide a place to live. AGI House Ventures backs startups from the network of AGI House, a Hillsborough community that brings AI founders and researchers together for hackathons and other events. HF0, or Hacker Fellowship Zero, has run a live-in founder program in San Francisco since 2021, offering housing and capital to small groups of technical and repeat founders.

Mission Control, founded by Thiel fellows in 2013, calls itself San Francisco’s oldest hacker house. Its alumni include the cofounders of Hightouch, an AI marketing company valued at $2.75 billion. Marty Kausus, cofounder and CEO of the a16z- and General Catalyst-backed B2B support platform Pylon, also lived there, as did ScaleAI co-founder and Passes CEO Lucy Guo.

Todi said the idea for Mission Street came up in a late-night conversation outside a house bathroom, as residents discussed former housemates building companies worth billions. “We could have invested in that startup at a pre-seed valuation,” she told Business Insider. She said scouts may spend as many as 100 hours getting to know a prospective founder through everyday life in the house, compared with a few hours over coffee for a traditional VC.

The fund’s initial portfolio includes a dozen startups: voice-AI company Smallest, AI browser Aside, which raised a $6 million seed round led by Y Combinator, and HydraDB, a startup building knowledge-graph infrastructure for AI agents. Todi said founders do not need to live at Mission Control; she moved out after launching the fund. “Founders want to live with other founders,” she said. “They don’t really love hanging out with VCs.”