This time on Cribs we did something really different. We went to the LoveNest.
It’s actually a technology co-living space instead of a startup.
in Palo Alto, California.
I met up with Love Nest papa Joel Dietz to take a tour.
Well we call this the Love Nest
and it's sort of like a community incubator. You know we made community software and
we thought oh that we should do but first is actually build a community.
So it's a co-living house. Sometimes there are people here working
and it has the official mission statement of helping bird to fly.
That's the sort of Nest theme.
It kind of reminds me of maybe
a call back to the 1950's commune but updated or people in
startups and technology?
You could say that you know I think there's a lot of things,
in which the people who are really into decentralized technology.
Have these Utopian ideas of here's how we want to society to be and they're
dedicating a lot of time and energy to making those things reality.
So what's going on over here? It looks like we have some people working from home?
Yeah absolutely. These are some of our
team members sort of been working on this technology called Swarmbot,
which is again sort of doing this community software development
but using blockchain. So it's of of the things things we're most excited about.
People who were here early on where involved in this
decentralized technology called Ethereum. And that's a global distributed network.
Like us we did a kind of crowdfunding campaign and so we're all
kind of have this large global network of people who participate.
And then sometimes some of them come through. Like last night, we had someone was here
for a conference on the future of governance and he stayed on one of our beds.
It’s a little burning man, a little startup incubator.
Friends, co-founders and what the house calls tech nomads gather to work and play in the house’s many rooms.
You’ll see people doing early morning yoga in the backyard or enjoying a late night hangout in the hot tub.
And an emphasis on a vegan lifestyle.
Oh wow and it looks like we have and aerialist.
Is that the correct term? Aerialist. Hi. Do you live here?
I do live here.
So it's not just people working on bitcoin and decentralization that live here then?
Yeah no. Absolutely not. I mean i think we've always had this larger vision of
building community and I was working on community projects before that. So that's
core to our DNA. We attract a lot of like artistic type people,
who kind of doing, we have like house band. You know we have lots of
little interesting projects going on. what percentage of people living here working
What percentage of people living here working
on a startup or are involved in the startup world?
I would say it's like pretty evenly split between startup people and
people working on non-profits, people who are in graduate school.
We have rocket scientist in-training doing kind of interesting stuff and then people
working for some established company like Google or Facebook.
Our first group of people that kind of people we reach out to was
within the bitcoin community because we built our own crowdfunding platform to do the
crowdfunding, you know, to kind of bootstrap this community network.
And that was all on bitcoin because bitcoin was the only thing that was available at that time.
Many of the members of the house came from the infamous startup castle that you might
remember down on the peninsula.
there are a lot of weird rules that the place and when the
landlady shut it down a handful of the tenant wound up at the LoveNest.
According to Joel, it's a more loving accepting place free of stringent commands.
Thanks for inviting me into your meditation room.
Welcome
How often does this room get used in the house?
Everyday I'd say.
What other perks are in the house? I notice that we went past the hot tub and the aerial gymnast.
And then I also heard that you have a tea lounge here?
Yeah we have a tea lounge set up, an art space for people to make art.
That gets quite a lot of use as well.
And we have several people in the house that are musicians so very often you'll come here
and there will be late night jamming and laying down some beats.
I also notice that you have Elon Musk over your toilet in the bathroom?
Is he like you folk hero in the house?
I think you know we just have to look up to Elon Musk
because he's above the toilet. We force everyone to do that. Whether or not they want to.
Ok fair enough. Thanks so much for showing me around.
I know this is kind of an experiment for us us probably for you as well.
And so thank you for welcoming me.