Enter the gardens of Arcadia.
A new community in the Bay Area, centered around a 14-BR hacker house in Berkeley.
About Us
Arcadia is a new & growing community in the Bay. Our core house, a 14-bedroom in Berkeley, launched in September 2022.
We are a small group of entrepreneurs, researchers, students, and autodidacts passionate about improving the future of humanity.
We believe that a lot of serendipity comes from intermingling different life paths and different life stages. So, we’re looking for the house to roughly be:
- a third researchers/professors/PhD candidates,
- a third founders/entrepreneurs, and
- a third students/autodidacts.
All these groups tend to share a dedication to their personal work and mission — Arcadia is not a very loud & socially intense house, but rather a quiet, focused place with passion & relentlessness in the air.
Arcadia functions as a serene island between starkly different places and communities: Our Arcadians come from Emergent Ventures, Oxford Neurosciences, SpaceX, YCombinator, biotech academia, B2C software companies, Progress Studies, and more.
Isaak Freeman
Isaak skipped through Austrian high school to then take three unconventional gap years. During the gap years he had a couple dozen projects: self-teaching biology, neuroscience research at Oxford, an experimental event called Future Forum, and more. Nowadays, you’ll find him whiteboarding linear algebra in the deepwork basement and quietly devouring books.
Abinaya Dinesh
Abinaya is Arcadia’s CCO – Chief Curiosity Officer. Lively and energetic, if you find yourself chatting with her, she’ll probably rapidly absorb much of your knowledge and expertise with captivation. She’s thinking and learning a lot about ecology and CS these days. Abinaya also has the greenest thumb of all Arcadians, and we’re deeply grateful to her that all our plants are still alive. 🍀
Brent Burdick
Brent dropped out of university to rigorously self-teach programming in 8 months. He’s fascinated by learning and learning methods, currently working on improving Anki and Spaced Repetition algorithms given the recent advances in AI. He proudly holds the “Random Hugs” award in the house.
Samarth Jajoo
There’s one person always grinding away in the deepwork basement. From morning until night, Samarth will be (self-)studying Computer Science, Cognitive Science and Molecular Biology. When university finals are over, Samarth just begins! But these are only his current interests, his past is full of surprises…
Sulaiman Ghori
A walking encyclopedia, Sully spontaneously flew to Berlin for university, which he attended for two weeks, before dropping out and becoming the quasi-CTO for a startup whose founder he met at a coffee shop. He is now building AI tools, but a close examination of his palm lines intertwined with Mars being in the rising occident this month, makes it plenty clear that his destiny is to build a space company.
Aakarsh Bengani
Quite quiet on the outside, Aakarsh is like an ocean who’s depth it’s easy to underestimate. Having done work in both Venture Capital and AI Safety, he is now exploring Cognitive Science. Aiden and Alice envy him, as Aakarsh is the person with the most sane sleeping schedule in the house.
Alice Herston
Determined to beat Aiden as the crazy sleeping schedule champ, Alice already holds the award for the longest streak of an ice-cold shower every day (“A good replacement for sleep” said no doctor, ever). Having a knack for hardware, she loves to get her hands dirty, especially with ‘Hondi’ – her beloved car made for adventure that the house often travels in. With a love for photography, adventure, and Hondi by the side – she’s guaranteed to be down to go on a last-minute trip to go cliff jumping.
Ananya Chawla:
Well, you know, Ananya isn’t actually living at Arcadia, but by now she’s part of the soul of the house. Constantly exploring BCIs, and organizing neuroscience conferences, we diagnose Ananya with a neurological neurosis with neuroscience. Whenever she’s in the coworking space (almost always), she envelops the people around her with radiant love. You never leave a conversation with Ananya not energized.
Shaun Martin
Shaun used to be a quantum physicist, lecturer at MIT, and a researcher at IAS, but he is now passionate about revolutionizing education and learning through his company, Applied Cognitive Sciences. He was our legendary in-house Thought Coach for a while, sitting down with Arcadians for up to 10-hour stretches, honing their problem-solving skills.
Sana Raisfirooz
We at first totally missed that Sana had arrived at the house as she went into full hermit mode with her nanotech research. But the more and more she’d spend late nights chatting with people, it became clear Sana is not just an absolute treasure but also absolutely hilarious — especially when she’s on a crusade to roast the hell out of you. These days she’s cocooning elsewhere, busy infusing her mind with physics textbooks.
Aiden Bai
Aiden got his first computer in Grade 6 and only in a couple of years, he figured out a way to make React.js 70% faster. Currently in YCombinator, 18 year-old Aiden is expanding his company Million.js. House myth has it that one person always has a scary sleep schedule, and Aiden is holding that title like a champ. You’re guaranteed to find him shipping at 4 AM.
Michael Andregg
Moritz Wallawitsch
Before immigrating to the US from Germany, Moritz learned how to hack at CODE University. He co-founded RemNote, a knowledge management app famous for its integration of effective learning techniques. On the side, he runs a substack blog and podcast — “Scaling Knowledge”.
You’ll see Moritz up early in the mornings — working and eating microwaved mangos with cottage cheese. (We have an unclaimed prize for the first person to find out why he’s doing that.)
James Lin
We’ve got a lot of engineering blueprints and whiteboards on our walls, and the person most likely to zone out watching them is James. Deeply curious about physics, math, and biology, he’s come a far way from his initial interest in longevity triggering a long phase of self-teaching.
James thinks a lot about how lovely it’d be if humanity did not wipe itself out with engineered superviruses in the next century, and about how seriously we need to take biosecurity as a civilization.
James is also the World Gravity Chess Champion. Never heard of gravity chess? You’ll have to learn fast.
Lisa Thiergart
Born in Singapore, raised in Japan, studied in Germany, and moved to the US, Lisa is a zealous rocketship that has now landed in the Bay. She deeply cares about making artificial intelligence safe in order to safeguard the long-term future of sentient life. Specifically, she’s curious about neurotech-based approaches to building safe AI. Lisa is deeply entrenched at the intersection of artificial intelligence, neurotech, research, and entrepreneurship.
Patrick Finley
If Steve Jobs were alive, he’d surely adopt Patrick as his son. Patrick dropped out of Georgia Tech after working on race cars, robots and rockets, including working at SpaceX on the Starship vehicle. He since founded a software startup, a local Irish arts school, and then the Collegiate Propulsive Lander Challenge. Patrick is also a 2x world champion Irish musician on the violin, and has sold out concerts touring the US. Patrick also loves racing and is happy to challenge you to Arcadia paintball matches.
Will DePue
In high school, Will casually built and sold a seven-figure company without raising a dollar. You’re most likely to catch him lying down in the stairwell staring at a coding problem for hours and being too stubborn to give up. When the house spontaneously flew to Texas to watch the first-ever SpaceX Starship launch, Will spent more time fixing his browser-based implementation of GPT-2 than watching the rocket launch.
Trevor Chow
An Emergent Ventures grantee and an econ whiz, Trevor got into global development over a decade ago (when he was 9!). Now, he studies maths at Stanford and blogs about the long-run progress of humanity. Trevor is a repeat guest at Arcadia, and you might see him around on weekends, listening to Taylor Swift or thinking about scaling laws in machine learning.
Chantal Braunwalder
During her travels from Switzerland to Uganda, we had the pleasure to host the visionary bundle of energy that is Chantal. Chantal is a recent graduate of the University of St. Gallen and Harvard and has ambitious plans to kick off a new high-impact charity in Africa, dedicated to enhance the self-reliance of refugees. She deeply cares about addressing intractable challenges in developing countries at the root level to enable present-day human flourishing.
MP
MP is a certified MD working on improving human health, longevity, and cognition. He’s among the most knowledgable preventive medicine doctors & biohackers on Earth. MP is definitely the Arcadian most likely to live to 120 years.
Alyna Jen
As a guest from our early days, Alyna still holds Arcadia’s record for late-night boba runs, and she blames her newly developed boba addiction on her guest stay.
Alyna runs 888DAO, a community and investment tool for the Chinese diaspora.
Jason Benn
Jason has years of experience in organising well-run group houses, and he often drops wisdom for us to make sure that things run well.
Tyler Cowen
Tyler made the early days of Arcadia possible and occasionally mentors us on to enable Arcadia & the Arcadians become their best possible version.
Paul Rohde
Paul is the productivity coach of a a couple Arcadians. He is a psychology PhD at LSE and founder of the Flourishing Humanity Corporation.
Why Arcadia?
Community
Become productive
Amazing people
What are we looking for?
Agency
There are so many problems to solve, things to be created, and ideas to be had. Take action!
Ambition
Visionaries and dreamers. It matters to see and believe in the future you want to contribute to.
Thoughtfulness
About life, the consequences of actions, and humanity’s future.
All house members contribute to the house and take care of it — we’re a do-ocracy, you can just *do* good things and you’re encouraged and empowered to proactively make changes and improve the house.
Kindness
House Culture
Many group houses end up with their residents being less productive than before due to distractions within the house. We think this is a problem. Living with great people ought to increase your output manifold, not decrease it!
At Arcadia, the most common feedback we’ve gotten from guests and residents is how surprised they were that their productivity increased. A combination of our house culture, the atmosphere, and the dedicated working spaces led to Arcadians and our guests noting — on average — 2.6 productive hours gained per day.
Our days are usually quiet and work-focused, and then we eat and rest with house dinners in the evenings and rare larger events. If you’re looking for a quiet, dedicated, work-focused place, this is for you.
Tom Schulz from Solaris noted after his visit:
“You’re all waking up, working peacefully together in your common space, taking a lunch break, working quietly, and then eating dinner together… It feels like a tech-monastery.”
Whiteboards conveniently double as focus
protectors (picture from a house retreat elsewhere).
About the house
Finding the core property for Arcadia was striking gold. Arcadia has 3.5 floors, up to 14 bedrooms, dedicated coworking space, a dedicated deepwork floor, a balcony, a rooftop, dedicated guestrooms, and lots of cozy hidden corners to retreat to.
For students at Berkeley: Arcadia is literally 20 seconds from campus. We’re closer to campus than “on-campus” housing!
Lively
A 20-second walk in the other direction leads you a lively central street with dozens of restaurants, boba stores, and shops. Berkeley feels like a vibrant, alive city, and multiple guests, even older employees or founders, found it “refreshing” to be in this city around a vibrant student campus.
Focused
San Francisco’s tech scene often suffers from a low signal-to-noise ratio; it’s easy to get distracted by flashy start-ups which don’t matter. Arcadia’s location in Berkeley is a bit removed from this, both spatially and culturally. It allows you to sit down in a curated environment with exceptional people, and focus on projects you care about.
We do value access to San Francisco, especially immersing ourselves there intentionally for events that are worth it. SF downtown is just a 25min car ride away (if you avoid the traffic) — closer to downtown than some parts of SF itself. The Bay Area Rapid Transport (BART) is also close and takes 30 minutes to SF.
Events
We think that events can contribute a lot to a house, but can also take away a lot of attention. So we balance it by hosting small, curated events occasionally. Usually they’re invite-only and topic-focused. But sometimes we host larger events too, especially for special occasions!
A taste of the dozens of past Arcadia events:
Vitalik visiting Arcadia
Community Paintball
Dinner with Sam Altman
Open role:
The Gardener of Arcadia
As the house grows, we’re also looking for a local who’s interested in co-running many of the essential house logistics — the title-giving example is watering our plants.
Other responsibilities include organizing communal dinners, running events, house improvements, and more.
”The Gardener of Arcadia” is paid, part-time or full-time depending on how much responsibility they’d like to take up. This role also gives you experience as a part-time operations lead and running medium-sized projects, which might be helpful for your career.
As of now, this role is open! Let us know if you’re interested: hello@joinarcadia.org
Come join us!
We’re open to both guests and new residents! Send us an email at hello@joinarcadia.org with information about you.
