Month: September 2025

ThirdLayer operates out of a live/work-zoned loft that was previously occupied by another Y Combinator startup. Their landlord, it turned out, was their investor. The desks and kitchen are on the main floor; up and down the stairs, you’ll find beds.

In the kitchen, the sink was full of dishes because everyone likes to “sit and work” and not “do chores,” per 22-year-old cofounder Regina Lin. They have plastic utensils and rarely cook.

“This stack of ramen used to be a lot bigger,” Lin said, pointing to a tower of different instant noodle brands. “It was very high.”

Next to the kitchen is their common area, where they film social videos, store their prop gimmicks, and often house overnight guests. Lin said that she sleeps there from 4 to 7 a.m., “and then I escape to my bedroom before anyone in the morning comes and sees me passed out there.”

The floor is filled with standing desks. Lin’s desk is littered with Blue Bottle cups; she said that she usually has at least four. Affixed to one desk is a bed for their cat, Tobi. Lin thought a cat would be “good for company culture.”

ThirdLayer has beds both upstairs and downstairs. Julia Alvarenga, ThirdLayer’s intern, got the most prized room downstairs: a storage closet. The company’s design engineer also lives there, and they outfit the downstairs couch as a bed when remote employees visit.

The founders sleep upstairs. Lin sleeps in a king-size bed; she said she wanted a smaller mattress so that they could fit more, but it was too big to get out the door. Her cofounder, Kevin Gu, sleeps on a couch just feet away.

“Everyone in the house is just right next to each other all the time,” Lin said.

The room has a closet, though it doesn’t have any racks to hang clothes. Lin suspects that it was built as a room to take calls. The founders leave their suitcases in there, and Lin also stacks her clothes in a large plastic bin next to her bed.

The upstairs bathroom is small. If Lin wants to do her makeup or get ready for the day, she’ll go downstairs to the bigger common bathroom, she said.

25-year-old Docket cofounder Boris Skurikhin’s mattress is on the floor.

His makeshift nightstand is a short cardboard box, on which he stacked his computer and a biography of physicist Andrei Sakharov. His clothes are folded and stacked against the room’s windows.

“We moved here very, very quickly from New York,” he said. “We started the YC batch that following Monday, and we were build mode, we were think mode. Furniture was not that important.”

Skurikhin doesn’t like clutter; he says the almost empty room allows him to walk around and think.

The living room has two desks, his and his cofounder’s. He doesn’t use the desk much, since the office is within walking distance. The “most interesting part,” he said, was a piece of paper with the cofounders’ three tenets stuck to the wall with some packing tape:

1. No pivot discussions
2. B2B SaaS, Real Money ($1k+/month) contracts
3. Daily 50 outreach each

In their doorway is a small “conversational table” where Skurikhin sometimes eats lunch or dinner. He doesn’t touch the kitchen much, he said, though he’s proud of his tea collection.

Every time 28-year-old Nectir founder Kavitta Ghai has a “mental block” at her Los Angeles apartment, she uproots to an Airbnb where her team can meet her. Now she’s in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood; she especially liked the spot because of its record player.

Ghai does not have time to cook food — “DoorDash is my best friend,” she said — but keeps some supplies on hand for when she hosts friends or hackathons.

In her living room, Ghai is playing meditative music — something she “always” has on.

“Does it work? I don’t know,” she said. “I must set the vibes of the house. The candle has to be on. I’ll wake up in the morning and walk around with my incense.”

The Airbnb also has a small patio, one of Ghai’s non-negotiables: “I need to be able to walk outside on days when I’m working for 12 hours.”

The porch is also an ideal spot to sit out and have a coffee in the morning, or to smoke a joint, she said.

Ghai’s desk is not in her bedroom, another non-negotiable while picking an Airbnb. She needs separation, she said, and having a separate desk area allows her to create a “little WeWork.”

The bedroom features floor-to-ceiling windows, as Ghai likes to wake up to sunlight. The first thing that she does every morning is make her bed.

“My friends say my homes look like serial killer homes,” she said. “I like it to look like nobody lives there ever. I need you to walk into my house and be like, ‘Is this a staged home?'”

Inside Ghai’s closet, there are two designer bags: one Dior, one Louis Vuitton. They’re both vintage, Ghai said. She likes to go to vintage stores and find nice bags that need some care.

“I like to do my little art projects,” she said.

29-year-old Josh Sirota sleeps on an air mattress in the middle of the Eragon office.

He tries to get up at 8 a.m., when he wanders over a few feet to his desk. He’s the only one who sleeps there full-time, but the office has cots and a couch for those who work particularly late.

Upstairs is more bed space and a conference room, but the area is currently strewn with Sirota’s clothes.

“We just moved a month ago and I’ve been super traveling, so we haven’t set up this area yet,” he said.

Sirota’s room will eventually be upstairs, too, he said, and it will have an actual mattress and a closet. For now, the space is empty.

Outside, Sirota has a tent set up. Photos of tents pitched in what was inaccurately described as the X office recently spread around the social media platform, which Eragon recreated for a marketing stunt. Next to the tent is a stationary bike for office use.

Eragon is part of Andreessen Horowitz’s accelerator, A16z Speedrun. Sirota said he was meeting Ben Horowitz that week, and on his desk was a copy of Horowitz’s “What You Do Is Who You Are.”

He also had Andrew Chen’s “The Cold Start Problem,” which he said was “essential reading.

Next to the books was a can of green tea, a Redbull, and a bag of socks gifted by his sister. There was a bag of leftover McDonald’s from an Uber Eats delivery.

Stacked up high on his desk were at least five canisters of Zyn nicotine pouches.

26-year-old TrainLoop founder Jackson Stokes’ apartment doesn’t have a living room. It’s worked for him: “We were just never actually here,” he said, explaining that he’ll spend 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. in the office on a normal day.

It’s more spacious than his last apartment, which was a five-bedroom with six guys in it. That apartment also didn’t have a dishwasher.

This apartment also has a robotic coffee machine, which he bought off a friend for $1. “It’s very tech,” he said.

The company coffee maker is much nicer. He recently bought a $1,500 machine for the TrainLoop office. They haven’t moved into the new space yet; the machine sits on his bedroom floor.

Stokes wants to have a nice bedroom. He called it a “bit cluttered” — there’s a plant on top of the coffee machine — but said that he’d been “nesting.”

Stokes has books from Stripe Press and paintings from local artists on his shelves. He also has two framed printouts from photobooths: one from his time at Google and the other from Y Combinator’s end-of-batch party.

Stokes’ top shelf also contains alcohol. He has a bottle of wine from winning first place at an OpenAI hackathon and a bottle signed by his YC group partner, Michael Seibel. There’s also a bottle of Clase Azul, which is still sealed because “we don’t drink that much.”

“I actually have not rung the bell on this one yet,” Stokes said of the bottle’s topper. “But I have rung the bell on others.”

23-year-old Haokun Qin and his Gale cofounder moved into their Toronto apartment two months ago: “We just shoved our stuff in here, and we’ve been here maybe half the time.”

He keeps his room basic, just “whatever I need to sleep.” That includes a bed, a nightstand, and a heated blanket — no comforter or duvet needed.

“I move around too much to have that much stuff on me,” Qin said.

His favorite thing in the room, Qin said, was the protein shakes that he stores under his bed.

In his bathroom, Qin has a variety of skincare products.

“I don’t even know what it is, but half the stuff my mom bought, and half the stuff I bought on Amazon over time,” he said. “I couldn’t tell you, man.”

In his apartment’s living area, Qin has floor-to-ceiling windows. He points out one to The Velocity Incubator, a local startup program. His office, he says, is a three-minute walk away.

Opening his freezer, Qin pulls out an ice pop and laughs. “We call them freezies,” he said.

Are you a startup founder with a story to share? Contact the reporter at hchandonnet@businessinsider.com