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For some, the idea of people occupying an inoperative ship berthed by AT&T Park may conjure up images of squatters, rum and beef jerky.
But the "passengers" aboard this vessel - a 135-foot ferry that once hauled cargo through Norway's icy waters - are not exactly slumming it. They are part of a startup incubator, a live/work space called the Icebreaker for more than a dozen small companies.
A recent visit to the lower deck found 25-year-old Paul Baumgart, a summa cum laude computer engineering graduate from UC San Diego, offering truffle oil and duck fat popcorn. That night's dinner discussion was about commercial space, and several members of NASA, including an astronaut, came to chat. A basset hound mix named Lulu slept nearby.
"Does anyone need wine?" Baumgart asked as his friends climbed down the narrow metal steps.
Beyond friends
For the past two years, the ship's owners - Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, and Creon Levit, a project manager at NASA Ames Research Center - have been inviting entrepreneurs from some of the wonkiest, most serious startups to work and host events aboard.
"The original idea was that I'd buy the ship to live on myself, but then I got married," Levit said, sighing. "But I didn't want it to just sit idle, and none of us had intentions of going into the maritime business, so I thought I'd just open it up, let people come use the space."
So the ship's new captains - Levit, Kahle and their partner Ulrich Gall - decided to make it a space for their friends to hang out.
On the top deck, they put in fake grass, a hammock and a picnic table. They made the car deck, the cavernous midsection, into a co-working office. They turned the crew deck down below into a salon, with a long dinner table, velvet couches, and a fully stocked galley, or kitchen. Tucked in closets and crawl spaces are some small living quarters with neatly made beds.
Levit assumed his friends would come by for a few hours and sit alone with their laptops, but the crew quickly grew beyond his friends, and business collaboration came naturally. He attributes the energy to the architecture of a ship versus a building.
"Buildings are oriented toward compartmentalization, isolation, privacy, rooms," he said. "Ships, on the other hand - as anyone who's spent a little time on one can tell you - have very little privacy and have large shared work space."
Levit and Kahle had bought the ship in 2011 from Olle Lundberg, an architect who had redone the interior in a luxe modern style. Lundberg, who'd recently finished Larry Ellison's metal and glass San Francisco home and the Slanted Door restaurant, had brought the ship from Iceland through the Panama Canal to the Mission Bay piers by the ballpark. He cut light wells, put in glass doors and lived onboard.
Eviction notice
When Levit bought the ship (apparently first Facebook President Sean Parker was also bidding for it), he put in the contract that the long cypress table and some of Lundberg's hot sauce collection had to stay aboard. They've operated quietly for two years, with Levit and the co-founders taking equity instead of rent from the companies aboard.
But this summer, the Port of San Francisco issued an eviction notice - people can't live on a boat at Pier 50, port officials said, and any boat there has to be fully operational.
There are receptive harbors - "but a co-working space in San Rafael is just not the same,"
Baumgart said. "What excites me about the space is that cool people come to me here. This neighborhood is where things happen. Instead, what, they want to build it into a bigger Giants parking lot?"
Levit, with shoulder-length gray hair, sat on one of the large leather couches on the cargo deck. His laptop had a NASA sticker on it. "We've had a series of misunderstandings with the port - we've made some mistakes, and they've made some assumptions that weren't true," he said.
Like that this was a party ship?
"Like that."
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/art...#photo-5298435
But the "passengers" aboard this vessel - a 135-foot ferry that once hauled cargo through Norway's icy waters - are not exactly slumming it. They are part of a startup incubator, a live/work space called the Icebreaker for more than a dozen small companies.
A recent visit to the lower deck found 25-year-old Paul Baumgart, a summa cum laude computer engineering graduate from UC San Diego, offering truffle oil and duck fat popcorn. That night's dinner discussion was about commercial space, and several members of NASA, including an astronaut, came to chat. A basset hound mix named Lulu slept nearby.
"Does anyone need wine?" Baumgart asked as his friends climbed down the narrow metal steps.
For the past two years, the ship's owners - Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, and Creon Levit, a project manager at NASA Ames Research Center - have been inviting entrepreneurs from some of the wonkiest, most serious startups to work and host events aboard.
"The original idea was that I'd buy the ship to live on myself, but then I got married," Levit said, sighing. "But I didn't want it to just sit idle, and none of us had intentions of going into the maritime business, so I thought I'd just open it up, let people come use the space."
So the ship's new captains - Levit, Kahle and their partner Ulrich Gall - decided to make it a space for their friends to hang out.
On the top deck, they put in fake grass, a hammock and a picnic table. They made the car deck, the cavernous midsection, into a co-working office. They turned the crew deck down below into a salon, with a long dinner table, velvet couches, and a fully stocked galley, or kitchen. Tucked in closets and crawl spaces are some small living quarters with neatly made beds.
Levit assumed his friends would come by for a few hours and sit alone with their laptops, but the crew quickly grew beyond his friends, and business collaboration came naturally. He attributes the energy to the architecture of a ship versus a building.
"Buildings are oriented toward compartmentalization, isolation, privacy, rooms," he said. "Ships, on the other hand - as anyone who's spent a little time on one can tell you - have very little privacy and have large shared work space."
Levit and Kahle had bought the ship in 2011 from Olle Lundberg, an architect who had redone the interior in a luxe modern style. Lundberg, who'd recently finished Larry Ellison's metal and glass San Francisco home and the Slanted Door restaurant, had brought the ship from Iceland through the Panama Canal to the Mission Bay piers by the ballpark. He cut light wells, put in glass doors and lived onboard.
When Levit bought the ship (apparently first Facebook President Sean Parker was also bidding for it), he put in the contract that the long cypress table and some of Lundberg's hot sauce collection had to stay aboard. They've operated quietly for two years, with Levit and the co-founders taking equity instead of rent from the companies aboard.
But this summer, the Port of San Francisco issued an eviction notice - people can't live on a boat at Pier 50, port officials said, and any boat there has to be fully operational.
There are receptive harbors - "but a co-working space in San Rafael is just not the same,"
Baumgart said. "What excites me about the space is that cool people come to me here. This neighborhood is where things happen. Instead, what, they want to build it into a bigger Giants parking lot?"
Levit, with shoulder-length gray hair, sat on one of the large leather couches on the cargo deck. His laptop had a NASA sticker on it. "We've had a series of misunderstandings with the port - we've made some mistakes, and they've made some assumptions that weren't true," he said.
Like that this was a party ship?
"Like that."
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/art...#photo-5298435
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