On a recent Thursday afternoon, Miki Safronov-Yamamoto, 18, and several housemates sat in mismatched chairs around the dining table in their two-story stucco home in San Francisco’s Glen Park neighborhood. Between sending emails and checking LinkedIn messages, they discussed how to host a “demo day,” where they and their other house members would show off to investors the start-ups they were building.
Ms. Safronov-Yamamoto, the youngest member of the house and a rising sophomore at the University of Southern California, glanced up from her laptop and declared that they “should low-key talk” more about how long their presentations should be. Maybe three minutes, she suggested.
“Is the audience mostly investors?” asked Ava Poole, 20, who is creating an artificial intelligence agent to make digital payments easier.
“A lot of investors, but also founders,” replied Ms. Safronov-Yamamoto, who is working on an A.I. start-up that helps detect medical billing mistakes. Next to them, Chloe Hughes, 21, who is making an A.I. platform for commercial real estate deals, bobbed her head to Sabrina Carpenter’s “Busy Woman” playing in the background.
They were part of FoundHer House, a “hacker house” that was established in May and geared specifically toward women. The goal of the house — a co-living environment for techies to hack away at problems while saving on expenses — was to create a supportive community for its eight residents to build their own companies in the nation’s technology capital.
That makes FoundHer House a rare experiment. As Silicon Valley has been gripped by a frenzy over artificial intelligence, attracting technologists and young people who want to work on this new wave, emerging A.I. start-ups and hacker houses have been dominated by men, according to investors and funding data.
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