Justin.tv, which is making Internet history by broadcasting every moment and movement of founder Justin Kan's life, is giving new meaning to the term live feed.

The unusual San Francisco startup is dishing up the kind of gourmet grub usually reserved for Internet giants like Google.

Call it the North Beach diet, produced by Michael Seibel, the 24-year-old chief operating officer of the company, cast member and resident chef of the online reality show headquartered in an apartment high-rise overlooking San Francisco's northeast shoreline.

With its expansive views of the San Francisco Bay and sky-high electricity usage included in the rent, that high-rise is now dubbed the "Yscaper" because it has become home to six startups funded by Y Combinator, the startup investing firm that provided the initial funding for all of them. The ragtag set offers a quintessential slice of startup life.

A central feature of that life: "You have more servers in your apartment than edible items in your fridge," said Matt Brezina, founder of Xobni, which aspires to help people get more out of their e-mail. One founder of a Y Combinator startup even contracted scurvy, a disease that used to afflict sailors who were out at sea too long without fruits and vegetables.

Seibel, like the pioneering former Google chef Charlie Ayers before him, is determined to change the way malnourished entrepreneurs eat. He commandeers ovens throughout the building to prepare tasty meals from scratch, single-handedly getting his fellow startup junkies to consume more than two basic food groups in one sitting. He even persuades them to wolf down what few guys their age will: leafy greens.

How did Seibel find himself playing chef on Justin.tv?

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"I am the only one who knows how to cook," said the Yale political science grad who started cooking in high school and worked as a fundraiser on Kweisi Mfume's failed U.S. Senate campaign in Maryland before joining the startup last fall.

And cook Seibel can, from homemade gnocchi to sushi. In the Silicon Valley spirit of experimentation, he usually makes a dish only once and then, after inspecting what food his guests leave on their plates, tries something new. On Monday night, Seibel even hosted a Passover seder while juggling calls from television producers and bookers, potential advertisers and business partners.

Seibel's culinary inclinations boost Justin.tv's energy, productivity and efficiency, said Kan, the reality show's star who has strapped a camera to his head to stream his life on the Internet 24 hours a day.

"You are far more alert when you eating well instead of having Burger King every day," Kan said.

Until the show launched, creating a media maelstrom, Seibel used to whip up a meal most nights for his Justin.tv co-founders and dinner crashers like Steve Huffman, who lives two flights up. Huffman, who hit it big last fall when Wired Digital bought his startup Reddit, is "our millionaire freeloader," Seibel said. The other entrepreneurs in residence describe themselves as Internet thousandaires.

"It's like a family dinner," 23-year-old Justin.tv co-founder Emmett Shear said. "A horribly dysfunctional, all-young-twentysomething male family, but a family nonetheless. ... It becomes the social event of the day. I fear getting stuck in one room for the whole day working and working only to buy food from the convenience store."

Since November, one night a week, the Justin.tv crew has thrown open its doors for a free-for-all, usually on Thursday nights. The two-bedroom apartment fills up with 20 to 30 neighboring entrepreneurs known by their startup names -- for example, the Xobnis or the Weeblies. The weekly dinners were inspired by Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator.

Seibel organizes weekly bulk-buying expeditions to stretch the startup's shopping dollars for entertainment, hauling home huge bags of rice and bottles of olive oil. Then he takes over the kitchen (and sometimes the Xobni and Weebly kitchens, too) for several hours each Thursday afternoon to give his fellow startups a taste of finer dining. Lubricants of choice are Budweiser and Charles Shaw's "Two Buck Chuck."

Sometimes Seibel's colleagues pitch in. On a recent Thursday night, Shear, who in his college days experimented with lemon, lime and orange bars, baked a chocolate cake served alongside a vat of vanilla ice cream to 18 people from seven startups.

With Kan filming the animated bursts of conversation and consumption, the evenings have the feel of a smartly scripted but completely unpredictable television sitcom, laugh track and all. In addition to good food, these entrepreneurs say they pick up good ideas.

"It's a place to show off what you have done, get help with technical problems, find out what's going on in the venture capital world, get advice," Seibel said. "Everyone appreciates good food."

Justin.tv is holding off on handing Seibel his own camera and cooking show. He borrowed the camera once while preparing a meal and managed to burn his hand, drop food on the floor and curse up a storm.

Still, Seibel's spreads get star reviews from this startup crowd. And that's not surprising.

The startup food pyramid would alarm the surgeon general. These entrepreneurs want their food fast, cheap and loaded with calories. After all, food is for thought, the deep kind that fuels all-nighters. Keeping such erratic hours makes it hard to figure out what time of day it is, let alone what to eat.

"Eating's inconvenient," says Adam Smith, the 21-year-old founder of Xobni. "It can really break your concentration."

The typical startup kitchen comes equipped with the two essential tools to sustain a steady diet of frozen pizza and canned soup: microwaves and can openers. Snacks range from potato chips to Pop-Tarts. And don't count out the nutritional value of condiments.

Consider Justin.tv's "poorest" startup pals, the Weeblies, who are working on a way for even the most technologically challenged to build their own Web sites. The scrawny Penn State dropouts -- Chris Fanini, 22, David Rusenko, 21, and Dan Veltri, 22 -- look forward to Thursday nights all week.

"This is the only day of the week we get a full, regular meal," Veltri said at a recent Justin.tv get-together. Veltri occasionally remembers to pop a multivitamin to make up for certain nutritional deficiencies in his eating habits.

For the first two weeks of startup life, the Weeblies subsisted on nothing but grilled cheese sandwiches. Now their diet ranges from cereal for breakfast to sandwiches for lunch and hot dogs or hamburgers for dinner. No Ramen noodles ("We're not that low"), but macaroni and cheese is OK. They sometimes splurge on frozen pizza. But vegetables rarely make an appearance at the dinner table. The only time they have eaten asparagus, for example, was at chez Seibel.

"We once bought some canned corn," Fanini recalled. "That's our favorite vegetable. I guess I have never seen anything green in this apartment."

The Weeblies do go through gallons of ice cream, a common startup staple for late-night technobinges.

"We went to buy shampoo the other day and we ended up in the ice cream aisle," confessed Brezina, the more health-conscious of the two Xobni founders.

So just how much of a junk food nut is Smith? One of his proudest achievements is his technique for warming chewy chocolate-chip Chips Ahoy cookies: Microwave them for exactly 10 seconds. He averages between six and eight cookies a day. If he stays up late, make that 10.

"It's an art," he said.

Good news for worried parents out there: Ayers, the former Google chef who is opening a chain of restaurants and is consulting with startups, senses a growing awareness in Silicon Valley of the importance of eating right.

"Half of the young twentysomething entrepreneurs that I encounter are eating more healthful, artisan, new age, wellness-driven menus," he said. "Then you have the other 50 percent which still go directly for the pizzas, burritos, burgers and fries, all chased down with a carbonated beverage the size of the Pacific Ocean."

'Yscaper' residents

Justin.tv, www.justin.tv, online reality show

Scribd, www.scribd.com, free online library where anyone can upload documents

Snipshot, www.snipshot.com, photo editing on the Web

Weebly, www.weebly.com, create your own Web site

Xobni, www.xobni.com, trying to make e-mail smarter and more productive

Zenter, www.zenter.com, Web-based PowerPoint