24hrs Inside a $150M Silicon Valley Startup Tower

Granola is the AI notepad for professionals in back-to-back meetings. Get your first month of Granola free: https://www.granola.ai?via=inside-startups In this episode, I go behind the scenes with Xenofon Kontouris, Frontier Tower San Francisco CEO, and the founders building inside it. Frontier Tower is a 16 floor building in San Francisco turned into a vertical village for early-stage founders. Every floor is dedicated to a different industry, AI, robotics, biotech, crypto and longevity, giving founders access to space, community and each other without needing to already be plugged into the city. The tower is run by Berlinhouse, founded by Jakob Drzazga, Christian Nagel and Christian Peters, who buy underused buildings and turn them into founder communities. They also opened Superhero Hotel, built specifically for founders who need a place to stay in San Francisco for a few weeks while they build, raise or find their next opportunity. The startups working inside Frontier Tower have collectively raised over $150M. That includes Kasim Inan and Darryl Foong, who raised $11M to build an AI native phone carrier, and Lesya Hendrix, who pivoted her robotics startup out of NASA-dependent space contracts into construction robots after government timelines kept moving further than her runway allowed. Everyone tells early-stage founders that Silicon Valley's network is everything. How many more good founders now get the opportunity to build something groundbreaking and raise capital in order to change the world Inside this episode: - A tour of Frontier Tower's 16 floors, from the AI co-working floor to the biotech lab - Peter Grafe, founder of BlueAlpha, on leaving Tesla to build AI for marketing decisions - Alan Helmick, founder of Utilitron Robotics, demos a 3D printed carbon fiber robot and an AI-powered social robot named Chloe - Lesya Hendrix on pivoting her robotics startup out of space and into construction, and the day she turned four back-to-back investor no's into a check - Kasim Inan and Darryl Foong walk through the AI native phone carrier they raised $11M…