Has This San Francisco Office Gone Too Far?
Kylie tours Frontier Tower, a 16-floor San Francisco building where three German entrepreneurs house crypto, biotech, AI, and arts communities under one roof. Residents are building an internal stablecoin, testing hyperbaric oxygen chambers, running open-source biopunk labs, and retrofitting elderly robots with new arms. The vibe is genuine weirdness mixed with real ambition.
Chapters
We're in San Francisco at Frontier Tower. Ah! And hi, I'm Kylie, and this is my first episode with Core Memory. I know, I'm so scared!
Okay.
I'm excited and nervous.
Okay, I got it. We are here at Frontier Tower. There's 12 floors.
12?
16.
Last year, 3 German entrepreneurs bought this decrepit building on the corner of 6th and Market Street for $11 million. The trio pitched a rather lofty idea born out of a combination of crypto parties, VC blogs, and Burning Man, because, well, of course. The hope for Frontier Tower was to build a space where communities could live and work in one place. The VC world calls it a network state. I call it a frat house with extra steps and more nerds. The building's owners haven't really succeeded on the dorm room part of the equation, but over the last year, all 16 floors of Frontier Tower have grown its community with hundreds of eccentric builders in biotech, robotics, longevity, artificial intelligence, and whatever this is. Here at Core Memory, we love a group of weirdos. So join us as we enter the rabbit hole floor by floor, starting from the top. We're here at floor 16.
There's lots of boho rugs and soft couches, but not a lot of people. Floors 16 and 15 are community spaces, but honestly not a whole lot going on here outside of generic furniture. Sheet music!
Doo doo doo doo.
So let's keep moving on down. Most floors have unique names. Each represent the niche the floor owns. So this one, you should take your shoes off.
All right, very San Francisco.
Yeah, very San Francisco.
This floor is all about human flourishing. It's early in the day here at Frontier Tower, so all of the floor leads are noodling on big ideas for their flagship event taking place in a few months. I don't like meetings. When does the flourishing start? And who is this guy? Weren't we going to see robots and science experiments? Didn't we tease this episode with a bunch of robots and science experiments? But then they offered me tea, and this does make me feel flourished.
We become known as the heart and soul of the building. We can press button, come up here, have tea. We all know that outside of this very safe bubble of this building, this city, Lots happening in the world, the polycrisis, we're in the middle of it. So we want to hold the space to deal with the messiness of complex systems change and also our inner work to say, how do we get there? How do we get to a better future?
It's delicious. Capitalism be damned, that was some good tea. Now let's go find some real nerds. Moving on down to floor 13. There's no floor 13. On to the 12th. This is their most secretive floor. Oh, it's this guy again. His name is Zeno, and it turns out he's actually the lead of the whole tower.
The objective of this floor is to create a forum where you bring Web3 and Ethereum ethics into the Web2 Silicon Valley, Bay Area mentality of building products and going to market.
It's hard for me to pretend to care about crypto. I get why I'm getting the rundown here, though.
How old were you when you created Ethereum? Yes.
Yeah, 19. 19 years old.
The germ that became Frontier Tower started with the Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. It started with Zuzalú, a pop-up city in Montenegro. You pay a fee and then you enter the beautiful network state where you get to work, live, and party with like-minded technologists.
We are also very close to launching our own stablecoin that's going to allow for the community to have an internal economy.
Frontier coin?
Hello! Welcome! This is the health and longevity floor. You enter as you are and you exit hopefully biologically younger.
I would like to live forever, I think.
I mean, who likes death? Involuntary death? Who likes diseases and aging and degeneration and so on? The mission is much bigger, to really make death optional. We have here a doctor doing consultations and also Hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
How does it help?
Well, it's one of the interventions that has the most evidence on wellness and potentially human lifespan.
So you go in and it Benjamin Buttons you, you come out a few years younger?
That's the hope.
Do you need gum or would you like some gummy candy?
No, because I think we're just going to pressurize it to like 1 point something, right? 1.0. So I'm okay.
Hi, can you hear me?
Yeah.
Oh my gosh.
Live long and prosper. Which channel are you on? Maybe I turned it off by mistake, I don't know.
Oh, hey, can you hear me?
Yep.
What's it feel like in there?
It's cool. It's just meditating and, yeah, hopefully getting younger.
This is the Accelerate floor. It's all about VC. But could this empty floor say anything about the current state of startup funding in Silicon Valley? Down we go. Ah, AI. Where the party's at.
My whole spiel is I try to reduce anxiety around tech through education.
Tell me more about the collaboration between all the floors.
Yeah, I'm data-driven, so I'll tell you, I ran 62 events last year. 48 of them were some kind of collaboration with a different floor. If you like frontier technologies, if you want to deal with human flourishing, art, and AI in the same place along with robotics, come here. One of the first collaborations I did was surprisingly with the art floor because people were saying, 'Let's run a party.' I'm like, 'I'm okay at parties. Let me go talk to the arts people.' And they said, 'What do you think about an Algorave?' I have no idea what an Algorave is. These people are cooler than I am. I get it. And then they threw an amazing Algorave party with like the Algorave DJs, and I snuck in like a couple of robotics people serving drinks and like a digital twin thing that somebody wanted to do. And I think that's the whole point of AI. AI for AI's sake is a little boring, but when you weave it into all of these different disciplines, it gets a lot more interesting.
This is my favorite floor, biotech. You may remember it from my story on the Chinese peptide rave. Remember when you read it?
Hello!
Peptide lab!
Yeah!
Oh my god, good to see you!
Me too!
What's up?
Nothing much, shooting.
So this is the biopunk lab. Over here we have bioprinters.
What?
Yeah, so this is a number of open source projects to print human tissue.
Ew.
Yeah.
Can I get any weird diseases in here?
No.
Okay.
No, not at all.
Just curious.
Part of the point of a space like this is that it's a realm where you can come learn and play in biology. That's not really allowed anywhere else. One of the things that's sorely lacking, particularly in the sciences, is bravery more than anything else. And if you look back in history, there are a number of Nobel Prizes that were actually awarded for people who were self-inspiring. Experimenting. So ranging from the guy who first did a cardiac catheterization, um, who did it on himself, all the way to this person who discovered stomach ulcer and ended up drinking a martini filled with this bacteria that caused him to have stomach ulcers to prove a point. And so we have this amazing history of scientists who are brave and experiment on themselves, and I don't think that's really put into the limelight or celebrated.
Is that the biopunk ethos?
There's a difference between hacking and punks, right? Biohacking is this idea of exploitation of a system for personal gain, where biopunk is an idea of rebelling against a system for mutual aid. Doing it in a way where it's safe and also you're among community.
Also, is this pee?
It looks like pee.
No.
That's bacteria food.
What other experiments are you doing in here?
Well, if you are menstruating, You can come in and donate menstrual blood, and then they'll isolate and purify stem cells from that. Julia is the one who collects menstrual blood here.
Oh, cool.
Yeah.
Isolating stem cells, this mononuclear layer, and those cells are like highly apt for regenerative medicine and specifically scar-free healing. If you think about it, like, it's endometrium, it's the womb, so like it's its biological function is to be able to create another human. Yeah. And it does that in 9 months.
Yeah.
But it didn't have to do any of that work. So they're even more like vigorous. They have all that kind of kinetic momentum to be prepared to do that. One of the biggest things is lacking consistent and large cohorts of data on women-specific biology.
I think about this all the time. I'm like, they don't know anything about us.
Same. And I think that's why right now is like the optimal moment to be doing work like this.
I think I'll take the stairs this time. Off to floor 7, Makerspace. We caught the Makerspace crew in the middle of some sort of party.
Would you guys like Jell-O shots?
Jell-O shots?
Jell-O shots for you.
Oh, what cool shit do you make back here?
We're in the process of prototyping an electric mini bike. If you come over here, So here's a fun machine that we made in-house as well.
Okay, hold on, let me play this real quick.
Yeah, this game was made in about 4 minutes or so, pretty much entirely vibe-coded.
Wow.
Is he doing a photo shoot?
Yeah.
Yeah, I think everywhere Nicky goes, he's always doing a photo shoot. This is floor 6, the arts and music floor, but we've also named it MAS, Music Art Social Space.
Nice.
Music and art are some of the foundations of Frontier Tower. The trio of Germans that own the place run it from a company called Berlinhaus. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the city was left empty from residents fleeing the conflict. The desolate buildings were rebuilt into some of the world's most famous clubs and art houses. The same idea is what made this overlooked part of San Francisco the perfect location for Frontier Tower.
Nice.
The 5th floor is currently abandoned or under renovation. I believe it's slotted to become the new gym space, which is temporarily housed on floor 3. Spoiler alert. Let's go see some robots.
Oh my God, a robot is coming.
A robot.
The robot doesn't open the door for you just yet, but we're working on it.
Welcome to the Robotics floor.
Follow me, follow me, follow me for the tour.
T-Bot is an elderly robot, which means it was made in 2022. We're building arms to load and unload.
Yeah.
So that we can give new life to them, not only with the new modes, but give them arms so they can do more work. You would think I was an alcoholic if you looked at this table over here, but the truth is we're teaching robots to pour.
Bye, Thibault.
Now these don't look elderly.
Here we go.
And then this is rotation.
It's—
yeah, left-right is not as stable.
Rotating is more stable.
Just backwards.
Oh, he's looking at his own reflection. Oh my God, this is me?
Now it's time to get shredded.
Hey, good morning, Kylie.
How you doing?
Oh, morning. Nice to meet you. Yeah.
Gym lead, like a Pokémon trainer.
That's exactly correct. This has been the community space where people can move. The far future vision is collaborations with the biotech, longevity, and neuroscience floors to do some citizen science on human augmentation and under realistic performance conditions. Everyone is, you know, some kind of tech entrepreneur or desk worker or knowledge worker here. So it's the neck and shoulders are just everyone's thing.
Really?
Yeah, uniformly.
Tech neck.
Tech neck. Yeah, there we go.
I'm sorry to say the final floor in our journey is a bit boring. The event space.
I wish I knew this was down here, not gonna lie. That sucks.
Broken vending machines donning AI-generated advertisements. How futuristic.
The fingers.
The fingers.
Holy crap.
Okay, I'm delirious. It's time to wrap things up. As I tried to not get murdered wandering through the unfinished basement, I feel I can't help but reflect on my time at the tower. Truthfully, I'm leaving this building a bit disoriented. You've got everything from biotech scientists experimenting on themselves, artists and musicians channeling reunified '90s Berlin, and longevity researchers disappearing into hyperbaric chambers. Live long and prosper. The only thing I usually find all these groups uniting together for is their love of ketamine. Frontier Tower coalesces the stereotypes together. It's endearing in a lot of ways. Just a bunch of nerds getting together without the leering judgment of the outside world. I'm all for that.
Me?
I prefer the real world. One where humans bring me my cheap wine. I pay with real American dollars, and my friends don't talk about living forever.
See ya!
But hey, at least these people give a shit about something. I want yellow jump.
