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LikeALittle's Ridiculous Hacker House
- physcab 15y agolal is a curious site. I've known about it since december when my sister told me about it. She used to spend hours on it reading to me funny little flirts that people wrote. The initial users had a great sense of humor and it was really lightweight and fun. Now though, it is so heavy and serious! It seems like half the people who post are depressed by a breakup and are looking for an outlet. Also, since the site is less popular now than it used to be the posts stay up for a while and the content is rather stale.
- flynnwynn 15y agoAny shot at hiring female engineers is out the window...
- rokhayakebe 15y agoI think they kind of meant it like "We are working so much we do not have time for girls".
- jeanhsu 15y agoNot because of the comment in the video, but because I can't imagine that that startup culture and living/working space would be appealing to any female engineer.
- makmanalp 15y agoI think it's a bit presumptuous of you to talk on behalf of all female engineers. I know at least two that would not mind living there.
- jeanhsu 15y agoreally? interesting...any females on HN that wouldn't mind living there?
- kapy 15y agoYes, me. Given the right company, I would be all for that. His "Females?! In MY ridiculous hacker house?!" was not a sell, but otherwise I see no problem. That startup culture and that space might not be appealing to you, but please don't speak for all females.
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- jeanhsu 15y agoyeah the communal nap area and movie room don't look too attractive...
- msredmond 15y agoActually, I think the "inspiring" (his words) Aston Kutcher poster makes it so the shot at hiring anyone with actual taste is out the window.
- jacobolus 15y agoIt's pretty clearly a joke...
- sonoffett 15y agoI'm so glad they mentioned Philz, some of the best coffee I can find in the bay area and filled with hackers.
- phodo 15y agoWhen I saw that Philz, I recalled all the long hours I spent at that table outside working on my at-the-time first iPhone app... the valley is a very special place.
- guynamedloren 15y agoLoved this episode.. Now this is what I picture when I think about a startup! Kinda makes me wanna move out west...
- MatthewB 15y agoThis is why I'm moving to Silicon Valley. I want this.
- jacobbijani 15y agoBuy a fucking vacuum.
- danilocampos 15y ago> Buy a fucking vacuum. http://i.imgur.com/CuFuD.png http://i.imgur.com/CuFuD.png
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- fungi 15y agomy god man... that's impressive
- etherael 15y agoThis to me is one more link in the chain of evidence that this is not just the 2000 bubble rehashed. Not just different people but different kinds of people are in charge this time, different methods are being employed. The focus is less on sheen and who has the biggest flagpole or best in house sushi chef and more on results and methods. I like that a little, even on the chance that it does fail again at least this time it will be on our terms.
- jrockway 15y agoI think this just means that software and software development is cheaper this time around. Back in the day, your CRUD app needed a proprietary compiler using proprietary libraries running on a proprietary operating system talking to a proprietary database. This cost mucho money, and was super buggy. So you needed a lot of smart programmers and a lot of time to get anything that worked. These days, you just use Ruby or Perl or something and its 100x faster to develop and probably runs faster than 1999 C++ on a mainframe did. So there goes your main cost. (Netscape is a good example from that era. Not that great a piece of software -- it ran super slow and needed a lot of people to write it.) Also, good startups are pretty easy to do with just one person. So when you only have one or two people, you don't need flashy offices or sushi chefs... you just rent a nice apartment and order out. Expensive, but much cheaper than what people did in 1999.
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- w1ntermute 15y agoIt's not that you didn't have to hire them, it's that hiring them was a luxury you usually couldn't afford after you'd paid for everything else.
- hncommenter13 15y agoJust for the record, as someone who worked on web apps in 1999, we used Perl + MySql. No, they were nowhere near as effective as those tools and others are today, but I didn't know anyone using a mainframe. We did use expensive Sun gear instead of cheap linux boxes, though.
- Smirnoff 15y agoI love LAL team. I was one of the active admins at my school. I flew to Cali for a week and Evan let me stay at their place for a week. These guys sleep like for 3 or 4 hours and code for the rest of the time. Amazing company :)
- edw519 15y agoMy favorite bit: Evan: This is one of our recruiting strategies. We literally go to recruiting events...and we just tell them, "Hey, I'll give you a thousand dollars if you can beat my co-founder, Prasanna here, in a coding challenge." Jason: Do you usually win? Prasanna: Ah, I mean, if we lose... Jason: Then you're going to hire the guy... Prasanna: Yea.
- mattberg 15y agois it just me or does it remind you of the house from the Facebook movie?
- fungi 15y agoallot more partying and girls in the myface movie... that looked pretty smelly and claustrophobic to me, but going by the comments i'm in the minority. e: just to clarify, you guys are awesome and i admire your work and attitude... just each to their own and when in rome yada yada
- bengl3rt 15y agoReminds me of every house in Palo Alto. Makes me miss home :)
- sebastianhoitz 15y agoI love this startups attitude. Awesome!
- tkahn6 15y agoThis looks so much fun. Wow.
- myprasanna 15y agoIf you guys want to join the mess, we're hiring :) http://lal.com/about/the_game http://lal.com/about/the_game
- wyclif 15y ago"We are hiring the best in the world." EDIT: I wish I was experienced enough to work with you guys.
- sandropadin 15y agoHow much coding can there be that these guys need to live like this?
- d0m 15y agoWhat do you mean need to live? I'd pay to live their and work on lal. The only thing I didn't see what the coffee machine, hope it's a good one.
- sandropadin 15y agoA slip of the keyboard. Obviously if they received $1 million in funding, the team is smart enough to choose how they live. I'm just saying, it probably wouldn't burn through their funding if they hired a maid to come in occasionally. :)
- 3dFlatLander 15y agoI'm older than these guys--late 20's, married, no kids (yet). I just don't see this lifestyle bring very practical for married/family folks. But then again, I've never heard any stories of people other than young singles doing stuff like this. Anyone know of any outliers like this in the valley?
- nostrademons 15y agoI'm the same age but single, and I applied to LaL but realized that I just don't have the energy anymore to sustain the pace they want. I could've done it at 19, I probably could even have done it at 24, but now that I'm 29, I just can't code for 14 hours a day, let alone 20. (Actually, that's not entirely true - I've pulled 14 hour days for 4-5 day stretches working on a Google doodle or coming up to a launch, but I need like 2 weeks of recovery time afterwards.) Alas, I wasted my twenties on college and 3 failed startups. It's certainly possible to start a company in your 30s - PG did it, founding ViaWeb at 31 and selling it at 34 - but it does seem like a bit of an uncanny valley without many founders. My theory is that people who are the type of person that's going to found a startup probably would've founded it by 26, and then if their first couple attempts failed, they're licking their wounds at 30 and trying to figure out how to give it another go. Those same people often end up starting follow-up ventures much later, after the kids are self-sufficient. I have one friend from elementary school whose dad is working on his second startup at the age of 70. His first venture - founded at around age 60 - ended up IPOing at a market cap of several billion before crashing and burning.
- calbear81 15y agoMost of our engineering and management team is married or with kids and are early Google and FB employees so there's no desire to have to go with this type of lifestyle. I admire the youth who can pull this off and I think it makes sense when you are bootstrapping a service that requires a lot of work to scale up quickly.
- esmevane 15y agoThis is interesting to me. How can I put this as diplomatically as possible? I'm glad that there is a culture like this out there. It espouses productivity and gives a real view as to what folks will do in order to try their hand at a serious venture. Clearly the guys here are aware of exactly what they're doing by putting this whole thing on film. They're happy, they believe in their projects, and they're not ashamed to put this on the record. Having said that, I remember my early 20s, too.
- corin_ 15y agoStartups may need to live on a budget, but good to see that they didn't overlook the importance of nice whisky with the Johnnie Walker Blue. No office should go without a good scotch.
- dstein 15y agoThis was a lot more entertaining than the typical Techcrunch blog spam. They should maybe try to do more things like this "boots on the ground" sort of stuff. I'm so tired of hearing about so-and-so getting funded by so-and-so, that stuff was never interesting. But here we're getting some actual honest content. We get to see a startup doing tech stuff, where and how they work, in their natural habitat. That aside, these guys kinda look like they're following the Social Network playbook to the T. I wonder how long it'll be until they hire Sean Parker and dilute one of the founders' stake in the company.
- jmtame 15y agoIt all looks pretty easy when you see a TC write-up on them and VC business cards sprawled out on the floor, but some interesting back-story from Evan on how LAL got started (from the Startups Open Sourced interview): "As soon as I graduated from business school I started a company called ProFounder with two cofounders, Jessica Jackley who had started Kiva before, and Dan Mauriello. While doing that, I met my current cofounders for LikeaLittle, Shubham and Prasanna. They had left Microsoft, came to Stanford, and used to hang out there because they were trying to start a company. A mutual friend introduced us and after a month or two we decided to join forces. So we started ProFounder. I worked there for about six months and then it moved on to L.A and I didn’t want to go to L.A; I decided I wanted to stay in Silicon Valley and do some consumer Internet things. So, Shubham, Prasanna and I came back to Palo Alto, lived together in a one-bedroom apartment with no furniture, slept on the floor, subsisted off of rice, and tried a bunch of stuff until we caught something that worked. This was January 2010. For several months we just brainstormed; it wasn’t until October that we actually came up with LikeaLittle. We had probably tried 10 ideas before that and they all failed miserably. So, in October 2010, we created a first edition of LikeaLittle. We’ve been working together for almost a year, but before YC we had not done any fundraising. We were bootstrapping the entire time; we were living in a one-bedroom apartment our entire time together and then for a two month period, [my cofounders] lost their visas, so we had to go and live in India together. So we lived with my cofounder’s family in India and were doing the startup from there. It was interesting, the power would go out all the time and our users were in America so we had to be on U.S. time; all kinds of crazy stuff was happening. But, in India there were no expenses. The family would make us food and we’d stay with them; we literally had a zero dollar burn rate in India. So that was pretty fantastic; we kind of had an infinite runway. We’ve basically spent the entire year living off of rice and beans and sleeping on the floor, together."
- davidu 15y agoThat's actually amazing, surprising and awesome. Love hearing that backstory. It really changes my impression of the video.
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- jmtame 15y agoSpeaking of Hacker Houses--if anyone is looking to join one in SF with a few other hackers (one YC founder, one Facebook coder, and myself) let me know jmtame at gmail
- knodi 15y agoDamn, I can't believe I turned down there job offer.
- chegra 15y agoIf they want you then, they want you now; give them a shout.
- namank 15y agoI like the bit about the free projector..."yeah so old startups just give us stuff"
- cemregr 15y agoThe story is impressive... And I hope they're on to building something big and serious. Am I getting this right, 5 ACM finalists working on a nicer version of craigslist's missed connections?
- pnathan 15y agoI am so glad these guys are happy. I would not be okay working in that environment. I already have had (and left) a dorm room. My perfect coding environment is a quiet office, alone, with an awesome view of mountains. High speed internet. Silent computer. Company IM. Garguntuan monitors. On the walls, whiteboard, and a bookshelf somewhere. So, totally not LAL!
- tuhin 15y agoExactly my thoughts. Dorm rooms is like so 2 years old. I want a decent setup, a good view, high speed internet and a vision to win the world.
- chopsueyar 15y ago...and ponies.
- astrange 15y agohttp://lal.com/gatech http://lal.com/gatech is more or less a horrible wasteland… it's certainly no http://onlyattech.net/ http://onlyattech.net/. Is there supposed to be something entertaining about this, besides reading the submissions from creepy people in the CS building?
- mcxx 15y agoThe LAL designer posts some stories and photos here http://musho.posterous.com/ http://musho.posterous.com/ (unfortunately, it's in Slovak only).
- juiceandjuice 15y agoWhen I was looking for an room 6 months ago in Palo Alto I thought it would be cool to live with hacker/programmers/whatever. I quickly changed my mind when every house I saw with self-proclaimed hackers ended up looking like this.
- crocowhile 15y agoI don't understand one thing: if they raised already millions and believe so much in their future, why do they eat $1.5 red beans and why they don't hire a cleaning lady? It looks to me they are way past the ramen profitable phase, aren't they?
- olalonde 15y agoDoesn't seem to make them too miserable either...
- crocowhile 15y agoYou don't know this, do you? Also, I happen to be sleep researcher. There is TONS of literature that says that people, when sleep deprived, make all sort of mistakes. I don't care what they say: I would not trust a line of code from someone who claim to sleep 3 hours a night no matter how smart they are (and they surely are smart).
- olalonde 15y agoI was referring to the place. Did they really say something about sleep in the video?
- codelion 15y agoNothing against LikeALittle, but I really wish people with such kind of raw talent and dedication were doing something better than solving the problem of anonymous flirting.
- emreas 15y agostay tuned ;)
- Aarvay 15y agoI just love it