My Year in San Francisco’s $2M Secret Society Startup

Is it just me or isn't this a case of a rich guy building his own cult? It either became too expensive or more likely he became bored with it and shut it down.

To me it all seems like another planet from that of 'ordinary people' with a house and kids and hobbies. To each their own, I guess.

OK, so my most memorable moment was The On Call Day From Hell.

I've told this story a few times a few different ways, but for this purpose, you could call what we did theatre. Every 5, or 10, or 15 minutes, all weekend, some weekdays and evenings, the show must go on. ~6 Locations spread through the city, two separate experiences, both with their own windows, problems, and margins for error.

Sunday morning comes around and I get an alert about one of the locations. The system didn't come online (startup was automated for one experience, and manual, but staffed for another). The automated experience wasn't booting up. I had a three hour window to make the trek from Oakland to SF and debug this, probably minor issue.

I had VPNs everywhere, if I needed to show up, it was usually a hardware or networking issue. I was grumbling as I left my girlfriend on Sunday morning. I felt like it wasn't my turn (there were two other engineers, one other who would sort of rotate these duties at the time). So I'm trudging along and I get a text from the staff member running the other thing. She tells me that "there's water under the tunnel". This is very bad. This particular thing was built into a basement, which was at one time a creek. Even in the drought we were pumping ...water (and mission st run off)... out fairly constantly.

So I parlay the problem downtown by forcing an unexpected reboot of all equipment and make sure it sets itself up properly. I move to the mission and I'm woefully underprepared. The set itself has begun getting wet, I go to the source and it's just a black hole. Our construction crew set it all up initially, and would normally be the go-to for this, but we were a very small crew. Construction wasn't responding, and the first appointment was in 45 minutes. This was my problem. So I psych myself up. I was going to something else and definitely not planning on getting shoulder deep in sludge. I undress as much as I can around other employees, the two of us cover the set with as much protective barrier as we can and I just stare at it.

I'm about to get into the sort of territory where I'm cautious about telling it to the HN audience, but I shit you not, a voice from inside the hole, and from a very good friend whispers to me "psssh. Hey, you, It's down here. Come on down".[1]

And I get shoulder deep in a sump pump field disassembly and repair. No appointments were missed, edited or canceled that day.

[1] There's a very practical and boring explanation for this, but it was a very laugh-out-loud at my own weird life sort of moment.

I'm not holding up the co-ops as some sort of paragon, but I think they're clearly a stepping stone in the right direction. At the very least, the cooperative business model has allowed them to (more or less) self-govern and adapt to a rapidly changing populace over the course of many decades. In my experience, they also have a much more diverse population on campus than the dorms or greek houses. While it's true that the largely student constituency is what's currently funding the co-ops, the BSC has always been a separate institution from the university; were Cal to suddenly shut down, I have no doubt the BSC would still find plenty of people to fill their seats, if for no other reason than the alluring economic prospect. The institution itself, as it's currently structured, does not require an outside source of funding to prop it up: the business is a closed loop, and the incentives are aligned. (Correct me if I'm wrong... I don't know how much the BSC relies on donations, etc. to survive.)

> Speaking as a former UC Berkeley Cloyne co-oper, I've seen a handful of former co-opers try to transition the "magic" of the USCA into normal life. They failed because the reality is that American society doesn't it lend itself well to collectivism and the lack of capital needed build a functioning co-op.

True, but many others have succeeded. I know for a fact that there are a ton of graduate and post-graduate independent cooperatives in Berkeley. They're not exactly common in the US, but you can find them if you look around. (And it's not like the concept is new: the Rochdale Principles are almost 200 years old.) To be fair, it probably takes a dedicated and idealistic group of people to make it work; I'm sure many BSC co-opers never really held a deep-seated belief in cooperative living.

As far as the experience goes, one of the things I'd say over and over is that if you noticed my work, I did a bad job. I was building the automation, electronics, mechanics, and hardware and software systems to make things tick. I was typically working with about two other hacker-types. sometimes hardware and audio folks, sometimes web and software folks.

So there was this beach on the top floor of a building downtown. When you were invited in, a whole day would pass in the scope of twenty minutes. More than anything, it was a place to think. And through some very clever crafting with about a dozen RGB floodlights (and previous work deconstructing how to work the Philips Hue API) we made it simultaneously look like an office/gallery, that would pass from dawn through early morning, noon, afternoon, sunset, evening and the sort of blue-midnight you only see on television.

I didn't really "do" the experiences, I always knew what was behind the door when I opened it, and often times I was "doing" it for QA purposes, but that part of that room will probably stick on me like a soft spot for a very long time.