Hacker Residency

Travis and co-founders launched Hacker Residency as a lean experiment with no formal business model. They posted an announcement online (primarily via Tony Den's X/Twitter post, which garnered 200,000 views) and opened applications through an online form. This generated 500 applications for just 10 spots in their first batch. Travis personally conducted 75 interviews with applicants to assess vibes, project quality, and fit, then selected what they considered the best 10 founders to live together in a villa in Da Nang, Vietnam for one month. To fund the first batch without a business model, Travis reached out to sponsor companies — mostly AI companies he knew from his Silicon Valley network — by texting contacts directly and sending cold DMs to developer relations staff at companies he didn't know personally. He framed the residency as a "30-day hackathon" to sponsors already accustomed to funding 1-2 day hackathons, offering 30 days of content visibility instead. A shared Notion doc with a one-liner pitch and Tony's viral tweet embedded was used as the sponsorship deck. Sponsors included Cognition (Devon), Open Router, and Exa. The batch roughly broke even.

Travis has a deep Silicon Valley network built over years of open source contributions (hundreds of public GitHub projects), prior exits (Stamped acquired by Yahoo; Automagical sold to largest customer), and having gone through HFZ (a premier SF founder residency). Tony Den (~1–1.5M ARR bootstrapped) had a large Twitter/X following whose announcement tweet hit 200k views. Co-founder David Park also brought venture-world credibility and network. The team had a ready-made blueprint from HFZ's 5-year-old playbook to avoid starting from scratch.

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No explicit failures mentioned. Travis notes the first batch had logistical villa issues (flooding room, sink placed outside), and that four weeks felt too short — feedback led to extending batch 2 to six weeks. No failed acquisition channels explicitly called out.