Welcome to Hillhouse!

Hillhouse is a San Francisco Bay Area social club of members with professional backgrounds (not necessarily a business networking club) who meet quarterly for breakfast to share good fellowship and to host guest speakers drawn from the diverse array of professional communities that serve our City.  The common theme to the speakers is that the topic is not focused on business or economics.

For more information, contact club president Austin Dean of Spinta Capital.

415.968.9773

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The club began in the fall of 2001, as explained by Hillhouse founder, Andy Bacas:

It began over breakfast one day in the late fall of 2001, when  I got together with Sam Wilkins, Brian Stapf, and Ed Schmults, all Yale buddies of mine.  We were all talking about 9/11 experiences and how much we liked getting together.  I mentioned that I had been part of a great breakfast club tradition in Houston, where I had lived from 1991 to 1997, and we should start a similar club in San Francisco. The Houston club was called the Costero Club – I don’t know how it got its name – and we would meet for speakers at the River Oaks Country Club.

We all agreed to try to bring in more people and round up speakers.  We knew we needed a name, so we decided to come up with something that had a nice ring to it, but did not too obviously smack of Yale for we knew it would soon grow out of our “Old Blue” roots.  Hillhouse Avenue is a short old street in New Haven that connects the Science Hill complex on the east end of campus with the main part of campus closer to downtown New Haven.  The President of Yale resides in a grand old house on Hillhouse Avenue, and in the 19th century, so did many of the top faculty and staff of the University.   Today, all these old Victorian mansions are used as office buildings, and a medical center has been constructed on one end of the old street.  It’s a street that goes nowhere except back in time, bounded on both ends by cross streets that it doesn’t cross, and few cars ever drive on it.  It is mostly for walking and reminiscing.  It made perfect sense as the name we picked for our club.

-Andy Bacas, Hillhouse club founder