Live-In Startups combine frat-house with venture capital
Tucked away on a leafy Palo Alto street lined with manicured, multimillion-dollar homes is a low-slung apartment building that houses the Meetro commune.
Not a commune in the Haight-Ashbury sense. Meetro is six guys and an Internet startup crammed into a three-bedroom walk-up.
Live-work startups first took root in the world's most famous garage -- the one that, in 1939, launched Hewlett-Packard and reshaped Silicon Valley, replacing fruit orchards with business parks. David Packard and William Hewlett tinkered in the 12-foot-by-18-foot Palo Alto garage but didn't technically bunk together. Hewlett, a bachelor at the time, slept on a cot in a shed in the back, while Packard and wife Lucile shared a ground-floor flat in the turn-of-the-century shingled house.
This most recent revival of live-work startups is powered by young do-it-yourselfers who are taking advantage of better, faster and cheaper technology to bootstrap their young companies rather than take on investors and give up a greater stake in their vision.
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