We live in a hacker house of 9 people where we’ve raised over $40 million for our startups in the last 6 months. Here’s why hacker houses were the perfect place for @dimadolgopolovn and I to start @DigitalBrainApp and why you should reconsider if you’re leaving Silicon Valley

We moved in when we were just starting to build. We had no idea what we wanted to build, but living with 3 other companies put us in a place where we lived and breathed startups

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner we’d ask what problems these startups faced. @dimadolgopolovn and I would whip together an MVP that could potentially solve these problems.

We’d learn their feedback and iterate. We’d built multiple products over time and launched a bunch on @ProductHunt. What we quickly learned was that there were multiple other hacker houses in the valley. All of us started to form a family.

Naturally, we started to share all the crazy ups and downs of startups. We shared our mistakes so we didn’t make them twice, we shared investors, and we became a community of builders, founders, and learners

This type of scrappy builder culture is incredibly difficult to recreate anywhere else. It’s engineers and product thinkers who live together with this insatiable need to build something people want. Silicon Valley is where this happens. The garages have become hacker homes

7 out of 9 of us are immigrants. We all came here for this very reason. Most of the founders who I live with and others in different hacker houses are still here and our community is only growing stronger. It's so hard to leave when there's so much value entrenched here