Small rooms, cramped spaces and an abundance of ideas. All over the Bay Area, Hacker Hostels are popping up – apartments accommodating young, aspiring entrepreneurs looking to build their ideas into an IPO-worthy reality. This week, Brian Chen of the New York Times wrote an article about these hostels titled, “Crammed Into Cheap Bunks, Dreaming of Future Digital Glory”.

Not only does this short-term housing option offer a cheap place to stay while these dreamers work on their businesses, solutions and products, the article also says it provides “…camaraderie and idea-swapping”, which is critical to fostering innovation at any type of organisation.

With the burst of new startups coming out of Silicon Valley and various incubation hot spots around the world, spaces like these truly cultivate the interconnected mentality held by most young entrepreneurs. But starting companies in cramped quarters isn’t anything new, as the article points out, as in the 1960s researchers at Stanford slept in the attic and waited their turn to work on the shared mainframe computer.

So for just $40 a night you can grab a bunk, a work space and focus on building the next big company. Who knows, you may just find your future business partner working and sleeping right across from you.

While this may sound like an extreme, we at Telefonica Digital have already seen success in fostering entrepreneurial success through events like Campus Party, where 10,000 people camped together in a former Berlin airport, or Wayra, where entrepreneurs may not live together but do work together in Academies across 12 cities. We believe that any opportunity to work together and build new technologies that change the way people view the world is a good thing for all.