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Status: Ongoing Project
Vitalik at an Arcadia visit.
You can contact us at joinarcadia.org or per email at [email protected]. We’re open to both guests and new residents!
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Arcadia is a new & growing group house in Berkeley, California, fully launched in September 2022.
We are a small group of entrepreneurs, researchers, and autodidacts passionate about improving the future of humanity.
We think that a lot of serendipity comes from intermingling different life paths and different life stages, so we want Arcadia to be diverse across areas of life. We’re looking for the house to be:
A quick shortlist:
We’re looking for great individuals who share our core values:
Caring & investment: All house members contribute to the house and take care of it — we’re a do-ocracy, you can just do good things and you’re encouraged and empowered to proactively make changes and improve the house as you see fit (within consensual bounds).
Many group houses end up with their residents being less productive than before due to distractions within the house. We think this is a problem. Living with exceptional people should increase your output manifold, not decrease it.
At Arcadia, the most common feedback we’ve gotten from guests and residents is how surprised they were that their productivity increased significantly. A combination of our house culture, the atmosphere, and the dedicated working spaces led to Arcadians and our guests noting — on average — 2.6 productive hours gained per day.
Our days are usually quiet and work-focused, and then we eat and rest with house dinners in the evenings and occasional larger events. All socials are optional: If your current project engrosses all of your time and attention, we embrace you focussing only on that!
Whiteboards conveniently double as focus protectors.
Health and self-improvement matter, and we hold each other accountable for that. From common diet experiments to improving air quality, we care about sustainable health. For example, going on a two-day opt-in common house fast, or having 2-5 air purifiers in all social spaces installed.
Beyond the usual work-focused days, we love to do communal activities and occasional weekend retreats. Here’s a few things we did or are doing:
Roadtrips …
… to watch a SpaceX rocket launch at Vandenberg, to camp in Sequoia National Park, and to Yellowstone Park.
Reading Nassim Taleb in Yellowstone Park. Is humanity antifragile against the supervulcano?
Fun stuff
Paintball, surfing, playing Jugger, yoga, and more.
Paintball, with other Bay Area group houses.
House retreats
Going to conferences together, travelling to other cities together, or multi-day retreats at other group houses.
On the program this autumn: A house retreat in Boston to visit laboratories and allied communities in October, then house retreat in NYC in November.
Multi-day retreats at other group houses are great. Here: At another group house in the Bay.
Finding the property for Arcadia was striking gold. Arcadia has 3.5 stories, up to 10 bedrooms, dedicated coworking space, a dedicated deepwork floor, a balcony, a rooftop, dedicated guestrooms, and lots of cozy hidden corners to retreat to. Here are the looks and features of Arcadia House:
Arcadia is within one of the most lively and lovely parts of Berkeley. We are literally a 20-second walk from the UC Berkeley campus. Most residents aren’t associated with UC Berkeley — the campus is filled with beautiful nature and libraries which are open to everyone.
A 20-second walk in the other direction leads you a lively central street with dozens of restaurants, boba stores, and shops. Berkeley feels like a vibrant, alive city, and multiple guests, even older employees or founders, found it “refreshing” to be in this city around a vibrant student campus.
An epic library residents like to work in. 6-min walk.
A hidden creek, a 5-minute walk away.
San Francisco’s tech scene often suffers from a low signal-to-noise ratio; it’s easy to get distracted by flashy start-ups which don’t matter. Arcadia’s location in Berkeley is a bit removed from this, both spatially and culturally. It allows you to sit down in a curated environment with exceptional people, and focus on projects you care about.
We do value access to San Francisco, especially immersing ourselves there intentionally for events that are worth it. SF downtown is just a 23min car ride away (if you avoid the traffic) — closer to downtown than some parts of SF itself. The Bay Area Rapid Transport (BART) is also close and takes 30 minutes to SF.
If you want to get a feeling for our location, you can use 2315 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley, as a placeholder address.
For a community to flourish, amazing common spaces matter. We designed and furnished a large common area, directly on the main floor, at a location where it’s easy to serendipitously hop into a conversation if you’re passing by. Most paths through the house lead past the common space too.
There are also many other nooks and spaces around the house.
Half of our main floor is a dedicated collaborative workspace, with hot-swapping desks and coming with some equipment you can use and borrow for work, ranging from monitors to caffeine pills. It’s amazing for planning and working on projects together, and you can invite collaborators to visit and work from here. Also, there are lots of whiteboards!
We value work and getting stuff done.
If the main work floor is distracting you, and you just want to churn out a good work session, we have the entire basement floor dedicated to deepwork, where it’s most quiet and uninterrupted. You can set up camp there, and even buy & set up a personal dedicated desk if you’d like. The deepwork floor features whiteboards, earplugs, coffee chocolate, and phone lockers where you can hand in your phone and lock it for a pre-committed amount of time.
Most personal and innovative progress comes from intensely focused work. We live by this principle.
All our floors are covered by our Wi-Fi 6 with an average of ~150mbit/s and generally up to 300mbit/s.
We value health and exercise, but we also need to take a lot of video calls. Why not do both at once? As a nice extra for the house, we have treadmill desk where you can combine these if you’d like — taking a call while walking eliminates all Zoom fatigue, we promise. It’s awesome.
Fun-not-so-fun: Upon first setting it up, Isaak worked for 1 week straight from the walking desk, overdid it, and had to take a month-long break to let his legs recover…
The upper floor rooms share a long, sunny balcony next to a row of trees. It’s an amazing spot to read during the morning and evening.
And, the house has an awesome rooftop, which stretches for the entire length of the house. We furnished it nicely and love to eat together up there, under the sunset afterglow and with a view over Berkeley.
Rooms at Arcadia are generally clean and nice, but also not luxurious. Room choice ranges from large, beautiful sunny rooms to small & simple basement chambers.
Do you want to live in a simple and cheap basement chamber? You can do that. Our rent goes as low as $1,400 for those. (Compare to Berkeley’s $1,845 average 1-BR rent and $2,295 average 1-BR apartment rent.)
There’s a range of intermediate choices on the main floor. Most rooms are nicely sized and can be furnished with a bed, desk, and other furniture. Choices on this floor range from $1,500 to $2,000 per month.
The upper floor has the sunniest rooms, with all of them having windows facing south (sun!). Their size varies, and rent for the largest, sunniest rooms is up to $2,200.
By default, expect rooms to come unfurnished, but more often than not the house can probably provide a few pieces of furniture, niceties, and decoration!