We walked past empty beer bottles and chalkboards scrawled with 7.5m > 250k, the words ENERGY, CONTROL, STATUS, and ECO, and drawings of squids. “Not until you finish your homework,” Fontenot chided. He asked Fontenot if he could come along for the tour. Jared Zoneraich, 17 and finishing some high school assignments, was sprawled with his laptop on a couch. As I stood surrounded by a coterie of teens, I didn’t have the heart to ask if they knew about the nearby, internationally famous sex club, Mission Control. On the wall was art that their property-management company, also started by a teenage entrepreneur, had picked out for them, like plastic stag heads and photos of ostriches. Scattered on the tables were business self-help books like Make Yourself Unforgettable, a guitar with a sticker that read FUCK IT, SHIP IT, a projector, and some chocolate wrappers. Fontenot told me that all his stuff fits in a single backpack others, hanging out on worn-out sofas, claimed to have smaller backpacks. They stack their few personal effects (deodorant, sports shoes) in plastic drawers along the wall. Residents, who pay between $950 and $1,450 and range in age from 18 to 23, keep their mattresses on the floor with plain white sheets tangled at the feet. The stairs open to the first of two expansive living rooms with utilitarian decor.

He led me up the narrow stairs, past pink salt lamps and a fog machine left over from a Himalayan sunset–themed party the previous weekend.

When I’d arrived that afternoon, Dave Fontenot, 22 and the group’s elderly leader, met me at the door of a dingy-looking building in the Mission District. We watched the sun set over Twin Peaks, and Matin told me about his high school dropout friends like Latta, 17, who served as lead engineer of Yo, a viral messaging app that simply sends the message “Yo.” A large steel vent, on which someone had written the words BOOB MANSION, pumped out hot air and the smell of tortillas from a vegan Mexican restaurant downstairs. “Do you know Zach Latta?” asked Fouad Matin, 19, on the roof of San Francisco’s unofficial tech teenager headquarters one recent night.

Ari weinstein deskconnect