The Secret History of OpenStack

The Rainbow Mansion sits high on a hill overlooking Silicon Valley. With a roof of Spanish tile and a chandelier in the foyer, this 5,000-square-foot West Coast mini-palace was once home to a man who made his millions selling chips for PC graphics cards and CD-ROM drives. But today, it’s a kind of Silicon Valley commune, a place where the Young Turks of the tech world can live and share their work.

Googlers live here. And NASA engineers. One resident builds electric cars at Tesla, and yes, Apple engineers have lived here too. But the whole idea of the place is that residents aspire to something more than a day job. Just off the foyer, there’s a communal library that hosts regular salons — free-form discussions where residents have called for everything from the death of nationalism to a world where the free flow of information across the net outweighs the need for personal privacy. In the garage, there’s a makeshift hardware lab where Mansionites build miniature submarines, satellites, and unmanned aerial vehicles you can fly with your Android phone. And over the years, more than a few startups have been launched from these same rooms.