Califlorence Climate (the invitation)
Hello! Califlorence is an invite-only, 3.5 day unconference for 40-50 top builders working on solutions to climate change. Each attendee was personally recommended by another climate expert using the rule of thumb “I would like to be more like this person in some way.”
**We’re delighted to invite you. **If you’re reading this, you’ve already been recommended and passed our selection process. Read on for more details about the event.
👉 If you’d like to attend, please fill out the form at the bottom of this page.
The future can be better than people fear. For a problem as complex, interdisciplinary, and time-sensitive as climate change, that will require that we build strong relationships and share ideas, especially across the arbitrary boundaries between fields.
Retreat details
Where: the 50 Years house in San Francisco (Thursday dinner and Sunday brunch) and the Butternut Mansion in Hillsborough (Friday and Saturday)
When: Thursday, March 9th at 7pm — Sunday, March 12th at 1pm. (Thu 3/9 7pm-10pm, Fri 3/10 9am-9pm, Sat 3/11 9am-12am+, Sun 3/12 10am-1pm)
Who: we’re building a diverse group of 70% founders and builders, 15% thinkers and community organizers, and 15% funders. You can see everyone else we’ve invited here, as well as our selection criteria.
Costs: $300, which includes all meals from Thursday dinner through Sunday brunch.
Process: after filling out the form at the bottom, you’ll receive an email with a payment link so you can reserve your spot, and then we’ll send you the calendar invite and more logistical details.
Transportation: we’ll help attendees coordinate Ubers to and from Butternut Mansion, and the 50 Years house is on Corona Heights in San Francisco.
Agenda: dinner and orientation Thursday night, unconference Friday and most of Saturday, happy hour and party Saturday night, brunch Sunday morning.
Amenities: the 50 Years house is 6 stories on top of Corona Heights with a sauna, meditation room, gym, guest rooms, and many gathering places, with breathtaking views over Noe Valley, Twin Peaks, the Castro, and the Mission. The Butternut Mansion in Hillsborough includes a tennis court, indoor pool, indoor hot tub, theater, wet bar, multi-level deck, and more.
Food: Thursday dinner and Sunday brunch will be prepared by Chef Andrew Ruiz, Friday night we’ll rent out a dim sum restaurant, and all other meals will be catered.
What’s in a name?
The camp is named after Renaissance Florence. Fifteenth-century Florence produced an astounding collection of scientific and cultural talent that is difficult to attribute to random genetic variation or people traveling, including Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Galileo. Being in the right place at the right time matters for doing great work, of course. But the lesson of Florence is that perhaps the right environment can matter *more *than talent. Or, as David Banks asks, “Does the social intercourse of good minds produce great minds?”
The genius of a scene is sometimes called scenius, and the long-term goal of Califlorence is to instigate a new scenius in central San Francisco called the Neighborhood.
Califlorence is meant as a great standalone experience. But we also hope that the community that inevitably emerges from this retreat will have a natural gathering place in the Neighborhood for years to come.
The inspiration
We believe this grander vision is possible because we believe we glimpsed a mini-scenius in a 20 bedroom coliving house called the Archive. We cofounded the Archive in 2016 as an ambitious but not unusual group of 10 friends that decided that living together would be fun. Over the course of a 5 year period, we grew from 10 to 20 bedrooms and had about 50 long-term residents and subletters. That group included 14 founding teams and 5 researchers. Between 2016 and 2021, those teams vastly exceeded all of our expectations by raising $859M in funding and co-inventing GPT-3, arguably a paradigm shift in AI.
There are many ways that the community living environment helped us. After moving into the Archive, we spent our free time differently. We spent one weekend building a meme stock hedge fund, for example, and another building a conveyer belt robot to handwrite letters — all it took was one enthusiastic instigator to upgrade everyone’s evening activity. Founders were supported by each other so that they persisted when they might have otherwise given up. We regularly raised each other’s aspirations, often accidentally.
I myself (Jason) would still be an ordinary software engineer at a startup if not for the influence of my housemates. Amazingly, one-third of these teams agree that the Archive was pivotal to their personal and professional outcomes.
All this begs the question: to what extent was the Archive an outlier? Is it possible to reproduce such an environment intentionally?
The Neighborhood’s 2023 plan
The Neighborhood is a multigenerational campus within a single square mile in the heart of San Francisco, and our next goal is to build a dozen themed Archives. Climate House will be the first. Each house will be themed and interdisciplinary. Our first house will be themed around climate change, of course, and Camp Califlorence is where you’ll select its two founders.
The strategy to build each of those dozen houses looks like this:
We host a Califlorence event. You are here! We’re looking for people that have been vouched for by other trusted individuals; that are admirable (rule of thumb: do you want to be more like them in some way?); that bring a different perspective (we measure diversity of background, function, and expertise); and that are at least curious about coliving in the Bay Area.
Attendees nominate the founders of Climate House. At the end of the event, you’ll nominate anyone you think would assemble an amazing Climate House. I’ll interview those nominees to set expectations and evaluate interest.
Launch the house. These two leaders will launch a house on May 1st. I’ll work extensively with them to start the house efficiently, including landing the house, negotiating leases, recruiting the first batch of housemates, extending a line of credit for up-front furnishing costs from my Schmidt Futures grant, and adopting the coliving best practices I’ve learned over the last 7 years.
Plan a housewarming party and Califlorence reunion. Climate House will hopefully become a Schelling point for climate talent, just like the Archive was for AI.
Rinse and repeat. Within a year, my hope is that Climate House could be across the street from Aligned AGI House, down the block from Healthtech & AI House, across the park from Abundance Agenda House, and next door to Education & Flourishing House.
Start a coworking space for residents. After our first few houses, we also plan to launch a large coworking space for Neighbors with a cafeteria, similar to how we launched The Commons in 2022 (which is now profitable). Instead of working from home, you’ll have the option to rent a permanent desk in a shared coworking space and enjoy wide-ranging discussions every afternoon over long lunch tables. Our hope is that this campus format will create serendipitous connections, similar to how physician Raymond Damadian accidentally stumbled upon the physics lecture that inspired him to invent the MRI. In a way, we’re building a university for adults.
Successfully launching a dozen themed Archives will give us a great deal of insight about whether the Archive was an outlier. We’re looking for data about the counterfactual impact of community living on quality of life and career impact. Any evidence, one way or another, would have important implications about how people might choose to live in a world that is increasingly free to work from anywhere.
And that begins with a fantastic retreat and unconference. We hope to see you there!
Warmly,
and increasingly so since the Anthropocene era,
— Jason and the organizers of Califlorence and the Neighborhood
In case the form is not visible, you can complete it through this link.
FAQs
Who are you?
How do you make money?
Who are these people that thought the Archive was pivotal to their success?
Can you tell me more about the Archive?
I’m skeptical of coliving.
I’m skeptical about choosing housemates on the basis of profession.
Tell me more about this new 13BR house.
Is this a cult?
How’s progress so far?
What are your longer-term plans?