In a modest two-story house on Turk Street in San Francisco, a bunch of Russians, all in their 20s, live and work together to build an app they hope will change the way you choose a restaurant for dinner and, ultimately, the way customer service works.
The spacious living room of the house serves as an office; a whiteboard with a set of goals for the day stands beside the wall; laptops are often left unguarded on the table when members of team retire to their bedrooms to get some sleep. Up to 10 people live in the house, and most of them work at Luka, a startup building an app that recommends restaurants. The idea is that instead of sifting through ratings, professional reviews and other people’s recommendations, like on Yelp or Foursquare, you can have a nice chat with a robot who presumably knows everything about good food and good fun, and learns more about you as you type. Another guy, the founder of Stampsy, a publishing platform for “visual thinkers,” moved into the house recently.
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