Hacker hostels fuel new breed of tech builders

HBO's five-season popular show Silicon Valley is being played out in India as a slew of so-called hacker hostels gain traction from Bangalore to Dharamshala.

- Rwit Ghosh

The profanities and coders in open bathrobes are missing, but the rest of the vibe is very much Silicon Valley with tech builders pushing hard at creating their magic.

Hacker hostels are places where such builders live and work, complete with the chaos of multiple teams sharing the space 24x7. They are usually hosted by either a single person or a group, where people come from all over to ‘hack’ something together, be it an app, robot or even a startup.

People as young as 14 years attend these one-to-three-month long residency programs, entering India’s burgeoning startup ecosystem very early. Some groups born out of hacker hostels have managed to raise money for their startups.

"It's a very recent and growing phenomenon in India. It started picking up only this year," said Bhaskar Kode, founder of AI Grants India. The company is a nonprofit that helps budding startup founders and builders get access to large language model credits, hacker hostels as well as introductions to venture capitalists or exited founders.

"We wanted to remove the friction that currently exists when it comes to fostering AI in India," he added.

Traditionally, hacker houses in India have had a visibility issue. They've either been unreliable or unable to sustain as a business or just bad at brand positioning across social media.

"LocalHost cracked distribution fairly well and that's how people are getting to know that the hacker house culture exists in India," said Nimisha Chanda, India lead of The Residency, a hacker house that was started in 2023 in San Francisco by Nick Linck. The India chapter is based out of Bengaluru’s HSR Layout, a suburb where every second street is home to startups.