Step inside Playa House, at the edge of Isla Vista, and you’ll find builder heaven. Here, the common areas are packed not just with couches, but with workspaces, monitors, and a 3D printer. In the garage, there’s a hardware station for hands-on product building. Out back, you may see a LIDAR-equipped drone zooming overhead on a test run.

Then there are the students. Starting in fall 2025, Playa House welcomed ten residents for the academic year, each intent on building and launching a startup. The first cohort of undergraduates, many of them engineering majors, pursued projects including data infrastructure for AI labs, platforms to collect student performance data, drones for wildfire detection and forestry management, protein mutation AI models and recruitment software.

“It’s not a traditional living experience,” said Joaquin Del Pego, who joined the house in Fall 2025 as a second-year computer science student. In just a year, Playa House’s residents have won grants, raised venture-capital funds for their startups, and been accepted to competitive programs such as Y Combinator, a startup accelerator. Del Pego and his teammate, third-year mathematics major Quinn Godfredsen, placed first at the UCSB 2026 New Venture Competition with their startup, LegalTime AI.

“At our core, we want to help people who have what others might think are outlandish visions,” said Leon Khoshnevis, Playa House’s founder and a fourth-year student this fall. “These visionary ideas are insanely hard to pursue, but being surrounded by like-minded people makes it a little easier. At Playa House, we want the best to be surrounded by the best from day one, because we know that bringing talented people together leads to outsized outcomes.” 

How to Start a Startup House

Khoshnevis knew he was interested in entrepreneurship soon after arriving at UCSB as an undergraduate in 2023. He started doing neuroscience and behavior research, and also participated in the UCSB New Venture Competition, but still felt like something was missing. So he created SBVenture, a nonprofit launched in 2024 to connect students with startups.

Through SBVenture, students could participate in hands-on projects, workshops and speaker series. “A startup would come to present a problem they were having to students, who would then have one week to pitch a solution,” he said. “It was a fun way to get students to interact with startups.”

Still, Khoshnevis wanted to do more for extremely ambitious students. Inspired by entrepreneur Nick Linck, who founded The Residency — a three-month-long live-in program for founders, hackers, and entrepreneurs — he started developing a similarly focused founder house at UCSB.

Starting in early 2025, he developed a structure for the Playa House residency, found a house that could support residents’ technology requirements, and recruited a group of ten residents, who, he said “all had unique backgrounds, but a common trait of being extremely ambitious.”

Life at Playa House

Along with having facilities conducive to charging ahead on conceptualizing, building, and collaborating, Playa House has a schedule tailored to support students who are growing their nascent companies. Weekly meetings revolve around progress checks, and every two weeks, a mentor offers in-house office hours to help residents with the challenges they’re facing, from technical issues to distribution.

Accountability is one of the most important aspects of Playa House meetings, said Arthur Garzon, a recent mechanical engineering graduate who spent his time at Playa House building drones that can help with wildfire management and forest mapping. During a typical meeting, he said, “we talk about what we’ve accomplished, what we need to accomplish, what our largest bottlenecks are. We set pretty ambitious goals, and it’s helpful to be able to talk about all of this with people who have different perspectives from their own projects.”

Living in Playa House, Garzon said, “is significantly different than most other places in IV. You know that these people are driven by what they’re doing. It’s a very collaborative vibe.”

Garzon and his teammates used the Playa House garage’s workspace to build and refine their drones, which have LIDAR sensors that allow users to conduct forest surveys. Garzon worked on wildfire applications for the drones for his engineering capstone project, and is now developing them for use by timber companies to inventory forests safely; he has already raised pre-seed funding for his drone startup, Narion Technologies.

“I’ve always been fascinated by superheroes, and drones are a way of giving people superpowers to see from the sky,” he said.

Garzon’s own vision, both for this project and for his career, he said, “is to provide as much value as I can by building cool technology like this and having it reach people through entrepreneurial efforts.” 

The Playa House community gathers people who share this enthusiasm, said Del Pego. “In most friend groups, your conversations don’t usually focus on what new AI tool just came out, and you don’t stand around in your backyard watching a drone take flight for the first time,” he said. “But at Playa House, that’s exactly what we do.”

For those who want to be a part of the Playa House community but live elsewhere, Khoshnevis and his teams are designing an accelerator program sponsored by AI startup Cursor that will run quarterly. Those invited to join the accelerator program will have access to the house’s resources, and go through a similar process of weekly meetings and a demo day at the end of the quarter, where participants present their projects in front of successful founders, angel investors, and venture capitalists who are interested in early-stage startups. 

Expanding Playa House’s mission beyond its four walls supports Khoshnevis’ ultimate goal to further expand the reputation of UCSB graduates in the broader tech community, he said. “Students who are coming out of UCSB are building genuinely useful things,” he said, “and they’re ready to take their projects to the next level.”