Two Hacker House Roommates Just Raised a $2 Million VC Fund

Two former roommates at a San Francisco hacker house have raised just under $2 million to invest in founders they already know intimately — sometimes better than the founders' own investors do. Surabhi Todi and Lisa Shmulyan emerged from stealth with Mission Street Capital, a pre-seed vehicle born out of Mission Control, which bills itself as the city's oldest hacker house.

The sum is small by any modern venture standard — some seed rounds today dwarf it entirely. But the founders are explicit about what the money is for: making very early bets and building a track record to raise larger vehicles later. Whether a sub-$2 million "Fund 0" can generate returns meaningful enough to attract institutional capital is the question the fund has yet to answer.

Who is backing the fund?

The limited partners read like a roster of the AI establishment. They include researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, plus investors from Andreessen Horowitz, CRV, and Emergence. The anchor investor is Fly.io, a cloud computing startup.

That a cloud company — not an institutional LP — anchors the fund says something about the vehicle's scale and stage. Takeaway: the money is insider money, not endowment money.

Why are hacker houses becoming investors?

San Francisco hacker houses have produced a long list of multibillion-dollar startups, from Perplexity to OpenRouter. Most of the riches, however, have flowed to outside investors rather than the communities that incubated the companies. That is now changing, and the AI boom is forcing the issue: the hottest companies can reach staggering valuations just months after launch, which makes early access the entire game.

Mission Street is part of a small but growing group. AGI House, a competing hacker house in Hillsborough that convenes AI founders and researchers for hackathons, launched AGI House Ventures to invest in startups from its network. HF0, short for Hacker Fellowship Zero, has run a San Francisco live-in founder program since 2021, providing both housing and capital to small groups of technical and repeat founders.

Mission Control itself was founded by a group of Thiel fellows in 2013. Its alumni include the cofounders of Hightouch, an AI marketing company now valued at $2.75 billion, along with Marty Kausus, cofounder and CEO of the a16z- and General Catalyst-backed b2b support platform Pylon, and ScaleAI co-founder and Passes CEO Lucy Guo.

Takeaway: the houses watched billions of value walk out the door and decided to stop being landlords only.

What does 100 hours of diligence look like?

Todi said the idea for the fund emerged during a late-night discussion outside one of the house's bathrooms, about founders who had lived there and built companies now worth billions.

"We could have invested in that startup at a pre-seed valuation," Todi said in an interview with Business Insider.

Her pitch is proximity as diligence. Mission Street scouts can spend up to 100 hours getting to know a prospective founder day and night — washing dishes with them, doing their laundry. A traditional VC, by contrast, typically gets a few hours over coffee, when a founder is on their best behavior. Todi pointed to one resident who replaced the house's couch cushions without being asked as evidence of founder-grade initiative.

"If they're a leader in the house, we're going to invest in their company," she said.

The claim is appealing, but note what is missing: no returns data, no realized exits, and no evidence yet that house leadership predicts startup success. The fund is selling a diligence method, not results. Takeaway: the thesis is testable, but untested.

What is in the portfolio?

The early portfolio holds a dozen startups. They include Smallest, a voice AI company; Aside, an AI browser that raised a $6 million seed round led by Y Combinator; and HydraDB, which builds knowledge graph infrastructure for AI agents.

Founders do not have to live in Mission Control to qualify. Todi says she wants to reach the broader hacker house community — and she moved out of the house herself after launching the fund.

"Founders want to live with other founders," Todi said. "They don't really love hanging out with VCs."

That last line is the fund's structural tension: Mission Street wants access to founders before anyone else, but its partners are now, formally, VCs. Whether staying early and staying small keeps that access intact will determine if Fund 0 becomes Fund 1 — or a footnote in the hacker house experiment.