“Do you know Zach Latta?” asked Fouad Matin, 19, on the roof of San Francisco’s unofficial tech teenager headquarters one recent night. “You know he rebuilt Yo’s backend. He’s baller.”

We watched the sun set over Twin Peaks, and Matin told me about his high school dropout friends like Latta, 17, who served as lead engineer of Yo, a viral messaging app that simply sends the message “Yo.” A large steel vent, on which someone had written the words Boob Mansion , pumped out hot air and the smell of tortillas from a vegan Mexican restaurant downstairs. Matin warmed himself under it.

When I’d arrived that afternoon, Dave Fontenot, 22 and the group’s elderly leader, met me at the door of a dingy-looking building in the Mission District. He led me up the narrow stairs, past pink salt lamps and a fog machine left over from a Himalayan sunset–themed party the previous weekend. The stairs open to the first of two expansive living rooms with utilitarian decor. Residents, who pay between $950 and $1,450 and range in age from 18 to 23, keep their mattresses on the floor with plain white sheets tangled at the feet. They stack their few personal effects (deodorant, sports shoes) in plastic drawers along the wall. Fontenot told me that all his stuff fits in a single backpack; others, hanging out on worn-out sofas, claimed to have smaller backpacks. They all wanted to show me. Scattered on the tables were business self-help books like Make Yourself Unforgettable, a guitar with a sticker that read fuck it, ship it , a projector, and some chocolate wrappers. On the wall was art that their property-management company, also started by a teenage entrepreneur, had picked out for them, like plastic stag heads and photos of ostriches. They call their house Mission Control. As I stood surrounded by a coterie of teens, I didn’t have the heart to ask if they knew about the nearby, internationally famous sex club, Mission Control.

Jared Zoneraich, 17 and finishing some high school assignments, was sprawled with his laptop on a couch. He asked Fontenot if he could come along for the tour. “Not until you finish your homework,” Fontenot chided.

We walked past empty beer bottles and chalkboards scrawled with 7.5m > 250k , the words energy , control , status , and eco , and drawings of squids. Fontenot — who wears his hair in a faux-hawk and said he’s famous for his pajama bottoms but had put on trackpants for my benefit — led me up a metal ladder to the gravel-and-tar roof where we met Matin, who had dropped out of school and moved to the Bay Area on his own when he was 17, to watch the sunset, as is their ritual.

“We don’t consider this a hacker house,” Fontenot said, handing me a fake mustache on a stick designed as a prop for selfies. “We don’t consider this a frat house or a co-working space. This is our home.”

As the demand for tech labor grows, ambitious teenagers are flooding into San Francisco. There’s no official tally of the number of teens who work in tech, but Fontenot estimates that there are as many as a hundred recent high school dropouts working on startups in the city. Some were too distracted by programming projects and weekend hackathons to go to class. Others couldn’t pay for college and questioned why they should go into debt when there is easy money to be made. Still others had already launched successful apps or businesses and didn’t see why they should wait at home for their lives to start. In Facebook groups for young technologists, they saw an alternative: teens lounging in sunny Dolores Park ( dolo , as they call it), teens leasing expansive South of Market office space, teens throwing parties whenever they want. And so they moved to San Francisco, many of them landing in houses like Mission Control.

Their parents watch from afar, some more supportive than others. “We just miss him. We miss him a lot,” Tanya Latta, Zach’s mom, told me. “But the ultimate goal for us as parents is to have our kids be able to be self-sufficient and happy. So when we saw that he’s reached out a little early, we were really happy that he’s in his element. But it happened so fast.”

Fontenot isn’t an entrepreneur right now so much as the Peter Pan to these Lost Boys — and they are mostly boys — a playful leader and evangelist. At one point, he wanted to build a startup called Doork and even bought Doork.com. “Door with a k for knowledge,” he said, laughing. He told me he’s in a creative period of his life, trying to apply the “growth mind-set” to everything, which in his case right now means playing ukulele, recruiting young talent for companies, and hosting enormous national hackathons. One of Fontenot’s acolytes made T-shirts with a stencil of Fontenot’s face and the words: Do You Know Dave? He uses his Facebook URL shortcut (bit.ly/helllyeah) as a business card, coded in such a way that adding more l’s will still lead to it.

“Hackathons are technological Woodstock,” Matin said, using a phrase repeated by many of the young programmers when talking about these events, which have become increasingly powerful tools for recruiters to find young talent, as well as for teens across the country to meet one another and gin up the courage to move west. “Woodstock was a beacon for an ideology. Janis Joplin — ‘Look to your right, that’s your brother.’ That’s what hackathons are, too.”

As it got dark, Fontenot left to go to a Y Combinator event for female founders. Matin left for something called Nerd Night. I climbed back down the metal ladder to the living rooms, where a party was starting. I met Latta, the soft-spoken and brilliant son of Los Angeles social workers; Jackson Greathouse Fall, a dapper 19-year-old who moved here from Oklahoma; and 18-year-old Ryan Orbuch, handsome, outgoing, and geared up for the startup hustle.

“I would compare it to a very extended family,” said 19-year-old Max Wofford, who wore a baggy startup T-shirt and recently moved here from Southern California. “In this sort of house, in this environment, I get to do what I like, and I excel.” He hesitated for a second and gestured around, his messy hair falling in his face. “But I can’t really say I know exactly how living works here. Since I’ve just been sleeping on a beanbag.” (Wofford, who is 6 foot 3, has recently upgraded to a sheet of memory foam.)

Fontenot came back with a platter of cheese and grapes and a box of wine left over from the YC event. Matin put mounds of truffled brie into a loaf of bread and baked it. The guy at Bi-Rite Market had explained the difference between cow and sheep cheese today, he said, pouring himself a drink. Some teens wandered over to start snacking. “Don’t eat all the cheese before people get here!” Fontenot said.

Their teen world can be all-consuming, even isolating. When I met up with Ryan Orbuch at the Ferry Building a few weeks later, we watched a woman push a stroller past. “One thing about living here is I forget different sizes of people,” Orbuch said. “Like babies — I haven’t seen one in months. I forget how many sizes they come in. Old people I see more. I had an old Lyft driver the other day.”