Four physical anchors. No headquarters.
alphabell has four physical anchors — small co-located workspaces in the Bay Area, Colombo, Hong Kong, and Bali. None is mandatory. None is a headquarters. They exist because some kinds of work benefit from in-person collaboration, and because the lab wants to maintain a physical foothold in regions where its contributor base is dense.
Bay Area
The founding anchor. A leased workspace in the East Bay shared among Bay Area contributors. Roughly 24 long-tenured contributors are based here, including most of the contributors involved in the lab's 2017 founding letter. The anchor hosts the only synchronous lab-wide event held in person — the annual Cell Convergence, which roughly half of long-tenured contributors attend in any given year.
- Steward
- Mira Holloway (rotating; current term ends 2026-Q3)
- Long-tenured contributors
- 24
- Workspace
- Reservable, not assigned
- Funded via
- Lab operating budget
Colombo
Sri Lanka was added in 2019 partly because of the density of contributors already there, partly because of a strong sovereign-research relationship with a Colombo university cluster that contributes compute to the federated pool. The anchor is the second-most-used after the Bay Area; roughly 14 long-tenured contributors are based here.
- Steward
- Dineth Karunaratne (current term ends 2026-Q4)
- Long-tenured contributors
- 14
- Local partners
- Colombo university cluster (compute), local research-funding bodies (training)
- Notes
- Hosts the lab's contributor-cohort onboarding program in alternating years
Hong Kong
Hong Kong was added in 2021 to provide an anchor in East Asia and to leverage the regional academic cluster's compute contribution. About 11 long-tenured contributors are based here; many are involved in the lab's relationships with East Asia and Greater China contributors. The anchor's steward is Cheung Wai-Lin.
- Steward
- Cheung Wai-Lin (current term ends 2026-Q1)
- Long-tenured contributors
- 11
- Local partners
- Regional academic cluster, language-research partner
- Notes
- Hosts the axis-stewardship rotation review for the agentic axis
Bali
The newest anchor, ratified in 2025 through a proposal motivated by the under-representation of Southeast Asia outside Singapore-Hong Kong. The Ubud anchor is small and recent; about 7 long-tenured contributors have committed to be based here, with the expectation that the number will grow. The proposal includes a sunset clause that triggers a re-vote in 18 months.
- Steward
- Yusra Habibi (term ends 2027-Q2)
- Long-tenured contributors
- 7
- Sunset
- Re-vote required 2027-Q1
- Notes
- Designed deliberately as a small, low-key presence
Where the rest of the lab is
The other ~96 long-tenured contributors — and the broader ~280 pre-tenure contributors — work from wherever they live. Async-by-default is the operating mode for most of the lab. Time-zone overlap is treated as a constraint, not a coordination strategy.
A full breakdown of contributor locations is at /people. The lab's contributors are distributed across 31 countries; the densest concentrations outside the four anchors are in Tokyo, Berlin, Bangalore, Tel Aviv, Paris, São Paulo, and Lagos.