In the scenic coastal retreat of Carmel, a sprawling compound full of taxidermy, relics, and artifacts from fallen civilizations has become a secret explorer’s club for tech executives, where Palantir employees hold self-defense sessions and billionaires throw birthday parties. 

Consider it the anti-“Mountainhead”: Instead of tricked-out movie rooms, sleek marble kitchens, and luxury bidets, the home has outdated tech, no outdoor lights, and railings marked with wooden notches to help drunken guests find the steps. 

The man behind Hacienda Aguajito (Spanish for “the Little Water estate”), Peterson Conway VII, has become an unlikely host for the last generation of tech leaders. 

The 79-year-old has spent decades creating the 23-acre living museum, accumulating mementos from his career as an antiques dealer and smuggler who drifted into and out of conflict zones. However, it wasn’t until his son Peterson Conway VIII got a Silicon Valley job that the property — where you’re as likely to see 17th-century temple ruins as a collection of elephant guns — started hosting Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and celebrities like Clint Eastwood and motivational speaker Tony Robbins.  

In 2006, the younger Conway joined the Peter Thiel-funded information-security startup Palantir as a recruiter, building out much of the early team in Australia and Europe. And like any good colleague, he extended invitations to his dad’s incredible house.  

Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar held his wedding at Hacienda Aguajito, while Joe Lonsdale, the billionaire Palantir co-founder, celebrated his 30th birthday there. Now, the younger Conway uses it to host twentysomething AI and hardtech founders as they debate the singularity and drone warfare over dinner.

The place feels almost primordial for Silicon Valley founders obsessed with ancient philosophies and Roman emperors. The distance from modernity is the draw. “We get in a sauna, we get naked, do cold plunges, all of that,” the younger Conway said. “The objective is more to get a spiritual alignment.”

Conway’s father, who was raised in Carmel, purchased the property for $750,000 in 1995. He then spent his career hopping around the Middle East and Asia before settling down in his hometown.

He opened antique shops, first in the Mission and later in Carmel, and used the proceeds to build out his retreat and retirement home. He built it himself while living out of a teepee (he’s half Cherokee) and bathing in a handmade wood-fire tub. 

Taking a tour with him through the property is a head-spinning exercise: Conway has a penchant for epic storytelling that stretches credulity. Within five minutes, he tells me about getting a tapeworm in Paris as a teenager, working as a bulldozer operator in Israel, and convincing a group of professional climbers to let him tag along on Everest. “I might not be able to romance in Nepali,” he said, “but I know the name of every piece of equipment.” 

He made it to 21,000 feet on the world’s highest mountain before three porters died falling into a crevasse. “It put a real damper on the ascent,” he sighed. 

Even relatively mundane details of the property have astonishing backstories. The dining room’s carved wooden walls, adorned with metal hooks, previously served as palace ceilings for an Indian Maharaja, Conway said.   

“He lived on the diet of a virgin a day. It’s from the zenana, the harem quarter. So you can imagine what the hooks might be for.” 

A stuffed and mounted mountain lion prompts another story, about a romantic evening spent with his former fourth-grade teacher.

Above the TV in the living room, he mounted an old propeller that previously belonged to his son, who has his flying license. The younger Conway, who is currently head of talent at A*, a venture capital firm, likes to say he “rebelled” against his father’s free spirit by going into business. But he has his own share of eccentricities, including taking founders on flights in his small plane while wearing his signature cowboy hat.

On one outing this year, he ran out of fuel and was forced into an emergency landing on Highway 85. 

“I turned on all of my lights, the cars started to separate, there were a couple of high-speed Porsche SUV’s heading my way, playing chicken, and I was rocking my wings to try and get everyone’s attention, and I had to put it down,” he told a local news station.

Given the Conways’ seemingly endless well of adventures and discoveries, it’s no small wonder their compound has served as a source of inspiration for people who spend most of their lives looking at screens.

Palantir’s Sankar was so enamored with the atmosphere at Hacienda Aguajito that he offered to buy any of the Conways’ unused artifacts. They sent over a big rig filled with relics, antique doors, and windows valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars. But a few years later, Sankar decided to return the haul. His family decided on a different direction.   

The younger Conway left Palantir in 2019 but says the house’s relationship with the company remains, down to one of his dad’s Mujahideen guns, which hangs in Sankar’s home office. Now, through his role at A*, a new generation of founders is finding a place at the compound.

Before becoming head of product growth at AI company Cognition, Theodor Marcu had been thinking of starting his own AI company. He had worked with A* on a previous venture, so the younger Conway invited him to bring prospective employees to the home.

They cooked in the 400-year-old oven, patched together from broken temple pieces, and sweated out ideas in the homemade sauna, where Marcu had his back whacked with leaves and branches to simulate blood flow. “It was one of the most unique experiences I’ve had in Silicon Valley,” he said. 

His favorite memory, though, is of hanging out in the library, where the elder Conway keeps an eclectic mix of volumes, including “The Tantric Way,” “Navajo Textiles,” and the fantasy romance bestseller “A Court of Thorns and Roses.” Sitting in a circle, Marcu and guests listened to Conway’s Lawrence of Arabia tales and were moved to open up “about our own struggles, our own interests, our own curiosities,” Marcu said. “It felt very, very raw.”  

Conway the Elder can barely recall the names of all the people who have come through his home — “Sergey and whatever his name,” he said of the Google founders — but he loves to see the Silicon Valley crowd marvel at his artifacts and stories of adventures to remote corners of the globe — places that are being transformed by the very technologies his guests helped build. 

But despite his house becoming a haven for new-school defense contractors, he hastens to clarify that he wasn’t one himself. Though the younger Conway likes to refer to his dad as an “arms dealer,” since he would trade in antique rifles during his travels, “none of these rifles fire,” the elder Conway argued, motioning to a pile.  

That’s not to say they never revel in real arms. The father and son recently drove to the Mojave Desert in their airstream trailer to watch the Sequoia-backed startup Mach Industries test new high-tech missiles in the sweltering sands. Different desert, different weaponry, but a familiar kind of trip for the Conways.