🌊 Inside Silicon Valley’s $50M Frat House

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By Max Towey

In the quiet, hilly town of Hillsborough, CA, I unexpectedly found myself in a $50M palatial estate last Saturday afternoon. 

Five of the eight most valuable companies on the planet are based within 30 miles; however, the estate is not the home of a tech executive, nor that of an old-money Bay Area scion. Instead, it’s the venue where young tech bros and far fewer tech gals convene for hackathons, boozy hangouts, pitch startups, and to “vibe code” their companies every weekend. And it has a name: AGI House.

To get to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) House from downtown San Francisco, you take I-280 S for about 30 minutes. The weather changes along the drive, as you cut through the peninsula’s microclimates. One minute it was foggy and rainy; the next it was sunny and dry. What didn’t change on the drive, however, were the billboards on the side of the road: Virtually every one advertised some new AI company. At one stretch, I counted 12 consecutive AI billboards. San Francisco’s latest gold rush appears to have squeezed out personal injury lawyers and HVAC repairmen.

Arriving at the estate a little after 4 PM on Saturday afternoon, we parked on the shoulder of a neighboring golf course among a fleet of Teslas and Porsches, along with some cheaper cars. Apparently, not everyone has made their first startup exit yet. We greeted the Roca reader who had invited us, and, approaching the illustrious Neo-Renaissance mansion, wondered what this place was.

“I have no clue who paid for the house,” one of the AGI House guests told us, laughing. “It’s a mystery.” 

Another said with greater confidence, “Oh, some anonymous tech billionaire got it. A guy who wanted to give back.” 

A third added, “It’s a dude who spends a lot of time in China. I think I know who it is but I don’t want to say it.” Nobody seemed to care about who this mysterious Keyser Söze might be. They were too busy meeting fellow entrepreneurs, crafting pitches, and building the future to worry about who their benefactor may be.

I soon lost interest, too, because as I entered AGI House and began speaking with the budding AI moguls, other far more interesting questions gripped me: Were we at Los Alamos? Or was this the tech sequel to The Big Short? Or something else entirely?

Right now, if your startup doesn’t end with “.ai” in Silicon Valley, then you might as well be selling rotary phones. AI has overtaken Sand Hill Road – the Wall Street of Venture Capital firms – so thoroughly that it makes the crypto boom of 2022 look like a TikTok dance trend. In the first half of 2025, nearly two-thirds of all venture capital investments in the US went to AI companies, per a PitchBook analysis. At the national level, the numbers are staggering: Stanford researchers found that $109B was invested in American AI last year, dwarfing China’s $9B and the UK’s $4.5B. In the Valley (and at AGI House) right now, founders are looking to join the ranks of the dozens of unicorn AI companies – those worth more than $1B – minted in the last year. 

During our visit, Google was sponsoring a hackathon at AGI House. While we heard that AGI House throws some wild parties, the coders buttoned up for Google. The grounds were sprawling with top tech talent – you have to apply to attend. The house founder let us stop by after hearing we had 1.7M followers on Instagram, though he was out on the town when we showed up. 

One of the first people we talked to oversaw the Google AI product that recently took the internet by storm: Google Veo.

Editor’s Note

Thank you all for reading. Do you think AI is taking the world to a brighter or darker place? Send in your thoughts here.

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We hope you enjoy the rest of your weekends. We’ll be back tomorrow.

—Max and Max