Hacker houses in Germany

If you were looking for hacker.house, that is a cybersecurity firm. It ranks for the same words in German results, which is why the distinction has to sit near the top of this page. SOTI House is an independent community project at soti.house. We run one-week houses for people who are building companies, products and crafts. We are also not SOTI Inc. at soti.net.

The other mix-up is length. Some founder programs that show up around Berlin run for much longer than a week, or behave more like a structured course. SOTI is lighter than that. There is no equity taken, no fixed curriculum, and no requirement to relocate for a season. You bring your own work into a selected room, and you leave after seven days.

The category breakdown is on what is a hacker house. The comparison with accelerators and retreats is in founder residency vs accelerator vs retreat.

A SOTI week is built around people who already have momentum. Founders are central, but the room also works when technical builders, operators, researchers and creators raise the quality of it.

The shape is consistent. A small selected group shares a house. Daytime is protected for real work: shipping, calls, the unglamorous progress you would have made at home, except with better people in the next room. Evenings and a few city moments — dinners, walks, demos, the occasional office visit — give the week its social surface. Then everyone comes back to the same kitchen, which is what makes the conversations compound.

Before arrival, accepted members get an operating pack: who is in the cohort, house norms, a draft agenda, useful links. Nobody should have to invent the week on Monday morning.

We wrote about the design of that room in the SOTI house model and about selection in how curated founder communities work. The short version: the house is not trying to maximize headcount. It is trying to maximize the chance that the right people still want to talk after the week ends.

Germany has a deep builder culture and several cities where founders already cluster, Berlin most visibly in search results. That density is exactly why a one-week house is useful, and also why it is easy to confuse with other local programs.

If you are shipping from Berlin, Munich, Hamburg or elsewhere in the country, the usual options are a conference, a local meetup, or a long program that asks more time than you can give. A SOTI house is a fourth option. You do not have to pause the company. You do not have to join a batch with a demo-day script. You spend one week in a room of people who understand the pace, and you take the relationships with you.

SOTI has not announced a German edition, in Berlin or anywhere else. Other programs in Berlin are part of the market; they are not SOTI partners, and this page will not treat them as such. When SOTI has a public edition, it will be on the site. Until then, founders in Germany join a public house the same way everyone else does.

Public editions you can read about today include Barcelona 2025 and San Francisco 2026. The wider European context is in hacker houses in Europe.

SOTI has not announced a German edition. There are other houses in the country; they usually ask for more than a week.

Aurea is a Berlin group house for builders and thinkers. The official page invites people to apply to join; it does not publish a price or a fixed stay length.

BaseJump lists a three-month Berlin cohort for winter 2026. It is a traveling program, not a permanent Berlin address.

If you want a one-week house rather than a long residency, that is what SOTI runs. Founders in Germany join a public edition the same way everyone else does.

Request a spot in a SOTI house if the format fits the way you already work. Tell us what you are building and how you would contribute to the room. Acceptance is selective, because a house like this only works when the people in it do.