The thought of a hacker house usually evokes dingy basements, overcrowded quarters, and sweaty guys. But this Russian Hill apartment defies the stereotype.
Walk up the flight of stairs to the entrance on a quiet street, and you’re met with the aroma of baked goods wafting from the oven and bright light streaking in from windows facing the San Francisco Bay. Wine bottles fill the cabinets, fiction titles line the shelves, and flowers blossom from a vase on the kitchen table.
But don’t let this cozy, classy interior fool you. The women who live — and work — in this house mean business.
It’s 9 a.m., and founders Elle Smyth and Sarah Hamer are running the all-hands meeting of their startup RetailReady in the living room. The team, which includes the founders and five employees, discusses priorities for the day and progress on weekly goals.
After 30 minutes — and a quick break for Hamer to take a fresh loaf of sourdough bread out of the oven — it’s game time. “All right, let’s fucking go,” Smyth says.
Although they started their company less than a year ago, Smyth and Hamer have the presence and poise of seasoned executives.
“We operate like a professional sports team,” says Smyth. “We have a lot of fun, but we’re all very competitive.” She points to a leaderboard she’s drawn on a whiteboard, ranking the work of each engineer.
Smyth and Hamer, who became friends while working at Atlanta-based supply-chain startup Stord, are building a tablet app company meant to replace the paper manuals that document packing instructions. While the two were working on a months-long project for Stord at a Connecticut warehouse, they saw how much warehouse workers struggled to meet the specific packing requirements from retailers like Walmart, Amazon, and Costco.
“There are hundreds of retailers out there, and they all have different requirements,” says Smyth. “It’s really painful for these workers to follow.” The instruction manuals, which often stretch to hundreds of pages, specify how workers should pack products and where exactly to put the label. If any part of the packing is done wrong, warehouses are issued hefty fines by retailers that can go into the six figures.
One night over a drink at a hotel bar, the two broached the topic of starting a company. Inspired, they spent their weekends brainstorming ideas, ranging from a photography marketplace to a Rent the Runway knockoff for toddlers. A year of testing various concepts led them to realize that their hearts were truly in the supply chain.
“We have such a love for the supply-chain industry, but it’s just riddled with problems,” says Smyth, 26, who studied mechanical engineering at Duke. “We call it an engineer’s playground.”
With just an idea, the two applied to Y Combinator last winter and were accepted. After graduating from the startup incubator and being persuaded to stay in San Francisco (YC tells its founders that companies based in San Francisco are more likely to succeed than their peers elsewhere), they found their two-bedroom apartment in Russian Hill.
Hamer, 27, an industrial engineer who went to Georgia Tech, went about furnishing the apartment using Facebook Marketplace to “create little spaces that are warm but eclectic.” She even ordered official-looking signage for the bathrooms from Amazon, marking one for women and one for men.
The two recognize that they are setting the tone for a different kind of hacker house — one that celebrates flattering lighting, elegant interiors, and home-cooked meals.
“You can tell this is a women-owned place,” says Smyth, adding that she prefers to sleep on a real bed rather than a mattress on the floor. Her room has a fuzzy woven throw blanket on the bed and Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs on the nightstand.
But it doesn’t mean the duo is any less grindcore. It’s still a hacker house, with large computer monitors, tangles of cords, and Zyn canisters sitting on desks. The team works 12- to 14-hour days and pulls the occasional all-nighter, gunning to build a unicorn retail compliance company that’s essential for every warehouse.
The founders are thinking ahead, envisioning a time when RetailReady provides the operating system for robots as they become further integrated into warehouses. So far, they have 10 customers and have raised $3.4 million. The cofounders wouldn’t disclose their growth or revenue numbers.
The two have even become micro-celebrities among the supply-chain community for their Sunday “retail roundups” posted on LinkedIn, where they discuss college sports and what’s going on at their startup.
Smyth and Hamer travel nearly every week to warehouses across the country to help them use their tablet app. They delight in rolling out client-requested software updates overnight by coding into the wee hours of the morning from hotel bars and lobbies, harkening back to the late nights on the road brainstorming their company. They’ve shipped big updates like bulk barcode scanning features to clients in a single night and added languages requested by non-English-speaking warehouse workers who use their product.
“We have new technology all around us in Silicon Valley, but for warehouse workers, this is cutting edge and the highlight of their day and what they’re talking to their families about,” says Smyth.
As the startup grows and they consider moving to a bigger office space, it’s bittersweet to think of leaving their Russian Hill abode behind. Hamer says they’ll have to find an office that allows her to continue baking sourdough bread for the team.
“It’s become a part of company culture,” she says. “Bread is officially part of the business.”