In July, Zoe Isabel Senón, a 25-year-old software engineer turned longevity community builder, strode onto a stage at Vitalia, a pop-up city in Roatan, Honduras, and pitched a longevity co-living house 2,632 miles away, in San Francisco. “Longevity biotech has the potential to save billions of lives,” she told the assembled futurists, transhumanists, techies, and crypto-royalty, “yet it suffers from a shortage of talent.”
Dressed in a black, off-the-shoulder, peasant-style minidress, Senón delivered her presentation with earnest intensity. “There’s no unified nexus,” she said. “Aevitas House will fix this.” Her ask: $50,000 to fund a four-month co-living pilot.
“It’s shocking that this doesn’t exist,” she told The Standard one month later, referring to a house filled exclusively with people trying to live forever (or at least not die prematurely). In September, Aevitas House — named for the Latin word for “immortality” — welcomed six longevity researchers to a 4,000-square-foot Victorian in NoPa. The inaugural residents included Dmitry Zaika, a Russian native with a background in biotech engineering, and Yoyo Yuan, a Minerva University student exploring biocomputing with human neurons. Over the next few months, Senón and her cofounder, Rob Shekoyan, 24, organized a series of salons, “revolution against death” parties, pitching workshops, and fireside chats with longevity leaders. Ivan Morgunov, CEO of gene therapy startup Unlimited Bio, discussed accelerating aging interventions, and Peter Fedichev, director and cofounder of Gero, a biotech research startup, opined on engineering life beyond 120 years.
Aevitas residents were asked to submit cheek swabs for the house’s biobank project. “It sounds crazy, but we’re collecting data to understand what works,” said Senón. “Ultimately, it’s about unlocking real, tangible health improvements. We use the term ‘radical life extension’ to attract the right kind of people.”
Hacker houses — group spaces where mostly young, sometimes broke startup founders grind long into the night — have been a staple of Silicon Valley and San Francisco since the early 2000s. In recent years, the houses have become more themed, including the now-defunct Crypto Castle in Potrero Hill; the AGI House, dedicated to the search for artificial general intelligence, in Twin Peaks; and the crypto-attuned Web3 House in the Presidio. But whereas the earlier hacker houses emphasized productivity and a maximalist mindset toward work, the new co-living houses are hyper-focused on finding incremental ways to squeeze — or permanently extend — the time in one’s body.
In November, Mark Hamalainen, co-executive director of the Longevity Biotech Fellowship and technical advisor for ARPA-H, a federal agency that supports longevity moonshots, opened Longevity Lodge, a co-living community in Lake Tahoe. Cofounded with Nastya Egorova, CEO of a nonprofit aimed at building community around radical life extension, the Lodge was created as a hub for scientists to collaborate on cutting-edge aging research.
“When we don’t discuss dinner plans or board games for the night,” the lodge’s website says. “Aging research is all we talk about in this household!”
Hamalainen awards residency — rooms start at $2,000 a month — based on “fit,” with intake forms asking applicants about their biohacking devices and ideal life expectancy. “I want to live forever — the longer the better,” said Hamalainen. “The more people that work on it, the higher the chances that it happens.”
The Lodge advertises activities, such as communal cold plunges in Lake Tahoe and group sauna sessions, but these are secondary to the main purpose. “The biohacking stuff is small potatoes,” he said. “The important thing is well-funded R&D to solve aging entirely.” (One perk of raising money out of the Longevity Lodge: zero income and capital gains tax, as it’s based on Tahoe’s Nevada side.)
A new frontier
The emergence of longevity-focused hacker houses is a natural evolution of the Bay Area hacker mindset, said Chelsea Rustrum, an author of the co-living manual “It’s a Shareable Life: A Practical Guide on Sharing.” “Experimenting with the body and the mind is not so different from experimenting with new business models,” she said. “The focus seems to shift more toward wellness.”
The movement toward longevity-themed houses is reflected in projects like Frontier Tower, a 92,000-square-foot, 16-floor co-living (depending on permits) and co-working hub set to open on Market Street in February, with founding memberships priced at $190 a month.
One floor is reserved for longevity scientists, with others assigned to deep tech, decentralized science, crypto, and AI. Two shared floors will foster “cross-pollination of ideas,” according to founder Jakob Drzazga, who hopes this will enable “the next breakthrough idea that elevates humanity.” Floor 3 will have a day care center; Floor 2 is reserved for wellness and workouts and will likely be equipped with longevity-enhancing tech, from hyperbaric oxygen chambers to IV drips, blood draws, and infrared saunas, he said.
Drzazga, a German Blockchain entrepreneur, who previously founded an artist’s collective in Berlin, said Frontier Tower — originally named Berlin House — stemmed from his love of pop-up cities like ZuVillage Georgia and Edge Esmeralda. He wanted to recapture that magic, without the havoc wreaked by disrupted diet and exercise routines due to nomadic living. “[We’re] creating a permanent ‘pop-up’ village, in the middle of a city,” he said. “Living with talented people in your field and interacting with them [daily] is far more impactful. More touchpoints mean more creative energy, [which] means faster progress.”
San Francisco was the obvious location, he said, due to the density of talent. He’s not concerned about the city’s sky-high development costs and famously sketchy conditions of this portion of Market Street: “I’m bullish on San Francisco.” The vision is suitably ambitious: The project’s charter includes negotiating visa deals for residents, providing health insurance, and creating “Black Mirror”-esque personalized social graphs to help members prioritize connections with one another.
While Frontier House is designed as a permanent institution, a number of temporary longevity hacker houses are set to open this year. In April, Vitalist Bay, a two-month longevity pop-up city, is headed to Berkeley. Around 70 full-time residents and 4,000 visitors are expected, all gathered together under the banner of “solving aging,” said Adam Gries, an engineer turned investor who co-founded Vitalism, the nonprofit that’s running Vitalist Bay.
Attendees can partake in on-site DEXA Scans, VO2 Max testing, sauna sessions, and blood draws, while they chow down on the longevity-approved fare that’s included with their tickets. “[We’re building] a concentrated ecosystem of health acceleration,” said Gries, who is firmly in the techno optimist camp. “Anybody visiting will be immersed in the latest research, innovation, and policy, [and will be given] permission to dream about a better way to address aging.”
Another pop-up longevity house is Phoenix Aerie, scheduled to open in June in San Francisco. It will provide free, three-month residences for eight emerging longevity scientists ages 18 to 25, said founder Hudson Eaton, a 21-year-old biochemistry and molecular biology undergrad at Brown University. “The time is right for a co-living house,” he said. “I no longer get the crazy eyes when I talk about longevity.” Applications are open through January.
Of course, not every longevity house lives up to the hype. In September, Tianyu Guo, 28, a generative AI engineer from Canada, cofounded Hylomorph in Hayes Valley, naming the house after Aristotle’s idea that everything is made up of matter and form. Guo hosted twice-weekly Bryan Johnson-approved Blueprint dinners and organized group meditations and accountability work groups for his housemates. “The major theme is how we can use biohacking to maximize our productivity,” he said.
But the good times didn’t last. The hectic clip of startup life was not conducive to a longevity mindset, he said, pointing to an endless stream of events, chaotic parties, and hackathons that got in the way of his hoped-for community vibes. “San Francisco is not optimized for longevity; the pace is too fast,” he noted.
In late November, Guo returned to Canada, joining a friend’s longevity-focused co-living house. “We have a monk, we meditate — it’s a much better situation,” he said. Still, he hasn’t ruled out a return to San Francisco: “It’s the right environment for a co-living house, but next time, I’d open one in the South Bay.”
So far, Senón has had the opposite experience with Aevitas House. It’s been so successful that she and Shekoyan are negotiating to extend their lease and have opened applications for their next cohort, which will focus on bio-enhancement in addition to anti-aging. “Interest in longevity is growing,” she said. “Radical life extension is like aiming for the stars. Maybe we’ll land in the stratosphere, but that’s still progress.”