Earlier this year, more than 500 women applied for eight beds in a Bengaluru house. They were competing for a place at Nova, a fully sponsored, seven-day female-founder residency where participants live, build and ship products under one roof. Across town in Koramangala, Bengaluru's start-up heartland, the builder lab, LocalHost, ran a 75-day, full-time build sprint for 30 founders. They were provided with workspaces, mentorship, a hardware lab, a media studio and access to grants and investors. What the applicants were queuing for, in both cases, was a room worth being in.
Hacker houses are shared working spaces where technologists and entrepreneurs build alongside one another. Start-up residencies are their more structured cousins: Selective limited-time cohorts that combine accommodation with mentorship, resources, investor access and, increasingly, funding. Both forms of spaces seem to follow a quote often credited to Henry Ford: “Coming together is the beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success”. The builder economy residency has appended one more clause: living together is leverage.
Come together
The Indian builder landscape looks promising. LocalHost calls itself part accelerator, part hacker house. Selected fellows are fully sponsored (flights included) to work out of a dedicated hardware lab and media studio. The aim is to provide young creators with the required resources to ship fast and land pre-seed funding.
Inner Circle, a swanky new hacker house in Indiranagar, Bengaluru, is, in the words of its 27-year-old founder Akhil BVS, “a community of delusional people trying to build cool things”. Then there is The Residency—a Silicon Valley original with actual live-in houses—which now has a Bengaluru chapter in Koramangala.
Others, like Hack47 (which describes itself as Delhi's first hacker house), will pack builders into a villa for a month, while Hyderabad’s The Founding Company, powered by The Residency, offers founders a fully funded 3-month live-in, complete with a stipend. Another residency, Build by SkipTheLine—founded by Prashant Sharma, now Head of Growth & Marketing at Emergent—ran several BuildCamps out of villas in Pondicherry, Dharamsala and Bali from 2023, with its 20K-strong community of learners vibing, tribing and building real products.
Now, none of this is as novel as the branding suggests, so why is the promise of a ‘shared roof’ suddenly in vogue?
Building a community
“India's best builders have always left for the Valley for capital and opportunity, yet what makes San Francisco special sounds replicable; maybe it’s just [the presence of] enough ambitious founders in one place, with capital willing to bet on them,” says Akhil.
Udayan Walvekar, 34, co-founder of GrowthX, a community of AI builders, expands on the point. “Earlier, there were cheaper spaces where builders lived and worked together. Today, the best hacker houses are high-density creation networks,” he says. When anyone with a laptop and an AI subscription can ship a product over a weekend, being at the right place at the right time can exponentially scale one’s career.
And being in the same room, residents insist, delivers connections that no Slack channel can.
Vatsal Sanghvi, 30, the Bengaluru-based founder of 1811 Labs, joined LocalHost for the discipline of building alongside others, but what he found was serendipity. A chance run-in at the office reconnected him with an old friend who had since moved to San Francisco, started a company and raised capital. The reunion brought Sanghvi introductions to founders and potential customers in the Valley.
Tarini Sai Padmanabhuni, 21, CEO of Detectif.ai, which detects audio deepfakes, foundher first investors on demo day at The Residency in San Francisco. Her experience there included advice from the likes of OpenAI’s Sam Altman. “Just sitting in a room and working is the mistake; the real progress lies in the friendships a residency lets you nurture,” she says.
Reading the room
However, proximity can have its disadvantages. Sanghvi points out that start-up residencies usually promise to handle housing, food and logistics. “But all of those things can get messed up. Treat a residency as an accountability device. Anything more than that is a massive win,” he says.
Rangashree Rangaraja, 25, a Bengaluru-based strategist, has this to say about Sanctuary, a three-day, women-only Web3 hacker house at India Blockchain Week 2024: “I mistook a rising engagement graph for true progress,” she admits. The house’s energy made vanity metrics feel like traction. To get the most from the experience, researching who the mentors are becomes of paramount importance. “Research the mentors, skip the irrelevant, bring only the questions blocking your product,” says Sai Teja, 32, a Delhi-based consultant who mentors at residencies.
There is also the question of who gets a room at all, and what can be done for those who don’t. For example, Nova Residency—the house with 500 applications for eight beds—is a residency built exclusively for women founders. Manasa Kalaimalai, 22, started it after noticing the number of women in India's builder rooms—nearly zero. CXXO, the Kalaari Capital initiative that backs women founders, sponsored Nova Residency because the biggest barrier for women is rarely capability; it is access to the informal networks that accelerate careers.
“A pitch tells you what a founder has built and what she wants to build. A residential programme gives the opportunity to see how she builds,” a CXXO spokesperson says.The VC firm is equally alert to the model’s main hazard—the constant proximity of watchful investors can get in the way of founders focusing on refining their own goals.
Across the industry, the residency model is catching fire. Antler, an early-stage fund, runs residencies around the world, where applicants can arrive without a co-founder or even an idea and leave with both, plus a cheque, if they survive the internal pitch. Down the fund-size ladder, micro VCs are adopting the template too.
People are building in the most connected era in history, yet reaching for the oldest comfort that creatives know—the residency. After all, the surest way to build a great company is to keep great company!
Shalaka Kulkarni is a Bengaluru-based author, who writes at the intersection of technology and culture.