Agora Startup House was a project planned by a few UC Berkeley students to foster entrepreneurship at Cal. Its vision was to “accelerate and facilitate the growth of your venture while still at school.” It’s a lofty goal that many others have tried to achieve and failed. But this was going to be different. This was going to change the way we thought of startup houses. This was going to help everyone.

The Agora Startup House

Shawn and I found out about Agora through a poster on campus. On paper it looked like a really good idea. A place to live, a place to work on our startup, and potentially academic units on top? It was the solution to all our problems.

So we went online and applied. The application was just made up of easy questions we’d already answered in applications for other incubators. Not much for us to change. Just click submit and wait.

The Interview

Within a few days we got a response offering us an interview. Shawn put on his extra-fancy outfit and cologne. I changed out of my daily t-shirt and jeans into something more presentable and on we went.

I think the interview was the first red flag. It was almost too easy. They didn’t ask any hard questions and we didn’t have to think to answer them well. We were pretty confident that we did amazingly.

The acceptance email came a few days later inviting us to the open house so we can see where we’ll be living for the next year.

The Open House

The open house was probably the second red flag. Holy cow. The place was messy as hell — nothing was maintained, very little natural lighting, and everything smelled funky. There was a broken piano in one room (“You can fix it if you know how!” said the house manager), and not an unbroken chair in the other. Rooms were messy and unmaintained. All this was during an open house when they’re trying to show off the house.

We saw the room they had planned for our team of three. “It’s a really big room where two people live now. I’m sure the three of you can fit in here!” they said. I should’ve started looking for other places that second. But laziness was setting in. Apartment hunting is hard. So we moved in.

The Room

We moved in on a sunny day — August 18, 2012. I first got up there by a car, but I could tell that it was going to be a steep uphill walk to get there from campus. We got our stuff up there and assembled the furniture that had been delivered so far.

Our room was bigger than the dorms, but still not that big. We were stuffed inside the room with 3 beds, 3 desks, and 3 sets of drawers. This room was all the way in the attic (which is probably one of the worst places to live ever). The room itself was messy as hell. Dust everywhere, small windows with spiderwebs all over them, the sun baking the room making it stuffy and humid.

There were also two huge, dirty mattresses on the floor. One had dust all over and the other had some mysterious stains. We obviously didn’t want these in our room so Shawn and I worked together to get them down extremely narrow stairways all the way down to the basement, which was a graveyard of similarly decrepit items.

My fondest memory of the room is waking up every day to the sound of bees. Every morning, there would be at least one bee in our room that I would have to get rid of. Some bees just flew in and flew out. Others must have felt like battling me and my can of bug spray. Eventually (I don’t know why I didn’t figure this out earlier) I realized that there was a beehive on our side of the house.

The Program

This wasn’t a normal incubator. We realized that pretty fast. This wasn’t for their lack of trying though — it just seemed like they were inexperienced. One indicator of a good incubator is whether the people running it have had success running their own ventures. These people didn’t. So all the help they could give us in the world wouldn’t have helped very much.

There were mentors but they helped very little. The mentorship was extremely informal. The only mentor I can remember came in on a random Sunday afternoon to talk to us and brought his 5 year old son along. None of the mentors were targeted for any specific purpose to help the companies — they were mostly random semi-successful entrepreneurs from around the Bay.

There was also the problem of transparency. When we moved into Agora, we didn’t sign a contract. There was no rental contract, nothing about the program, nothing protecting either us or the people running it. So our obvious question was “Why are they running this program?” The only conclusion was that they were making money off of the rent we were paying.

For our small room with three people, each of us were paying $690. Others in the house were paying similarly high rents. This was ridiculous — we could rent an apartment and still pay less.

The Departures

Together we asked the house manager for the financials of the house. He showed us a plain excel sheet with all the expenses and how they were being divided up. One thing stood out to everybody — a field called “Misc.” This field made up more than 10% of the rent for every person. That’s a lot of money to be randomly to a field called “Misc.” When we asked him what that field meant, he was flustered. All the expenses for the houses had been accounted for — rent, internet, common supplies, etc. — but there was still this field.

My fellow Agora housemates and I concluded that they were pocketing 10% of everybody’s rent as profit. If I remember correctly, they tried to justify this as the cost of running the program.

Everybody realized that there were no contracts therefore nothing binding us to stay in the house. People started looking for places to live other than Agora. Some even chose to couchsurf while looking for a place to live.

We finally wrote our own response to the problems in the house and decided to move out.

We never got our security deposit back. Weak arguments were made by the people running the program as to why, but in the end all of us were out $690 each.

TL;DR

Living in Agora sucked pretty hard. We all learned a lesson and now we’re more careful about the people we choose to associate with. The bright side is that many of the people who lived there when we did (and moved out when we did) moved on to great things. One team is in SkyDeck, one of the people was at TechStars and Iris was born from the ashes of our team that left Agora.