Vision, Capital, & Governance

Where do we want to steer the Neighborhood over the next 10-15 years? The Neighborhood’s goal is not to make money, but how might we make it at least self-sustaining? On the other end of the spectrum, if you had $100M, how would you spend it?

**We’d love to hear your ideas. **If you have Notion you can leave comments, otherwise you can email me.

The goal of this is to help contributors share context. This way, new conversations can build on old ones.

➡️ Email if you want to contribute! 🙏

Goals

Note that maximizing profits is not on this list. We are doing this because we want to build a community we all want to live in long-term. Trying to extract value from a community is nearly always terrible for the quality of the community.

The Organizers all have other jobs, and Jason will make his full-time work on this project financially sustainable by becoming a licensed Realtor.

Best ideas, by category

Ideas by date

2022-08-22 misc monetization ideas

2022-08-22 misc ideas for sourcing for houses

2022-08-22 misc ideas for identifying houses

2022-08-22 ladder of asks

Prefer to ask for one, high-priority thing, rather than all the things that I could ask.

  1. Reviewing applications for a program.

  2. Going through their entire network to source for a program.

  3. Ask them to attend an information session. Builds energy and allows to ask for more.

  4. Brainstorming for a few minutes for a program.

  5. Writing a testimonial of “high-impact coliving”

2022-08-14 themed residency programs that convert into autonomous coliving houses (and possibly the Arc Society)

The Neighborhood has an inclusive vibe, and this is a problem. It means that people that already live here expect to be added to our Slack, to be able to join our community, etc. This creates an unpleasant tension that will dilute the quality of our membership over time.

We can fix this by making the Neighborhood kind of a non-entity: you don’t join the Neighborhood directly — instead, you apply to join one of our member communities.

We’ll show a shortlist of recommendations on our landing page: Writing Club, The Commons, the Embassy, Moomin, ML Collective, Dialog, etc. Then we’d just link out to them and let them run their own processes. It’s much clearer this way that they’re partners, too.

Sure, you can sign up for a Neighborhood mailing list, and you can apply to be added to a database of people that can see each other in order to coordinate. You could show contact info if you were interested. Or should we have a Slack or Discord for anyone that wanted to join? I’d rather not - this would really increase prices, threaten gentrification, and we could be up-front about saying that’s the risk we want to defend against. OK - no Slack, no Discord. If someone else wants to manage it, they can and should. Maybe if I make a request to not have that, then they’d respect it. It should be on an FAQ, at least.

My concern: that TN will help too many borderline people coordinate and move here, and compete with us for housing.

Actually: I’ll tell people that if they check a box on the interest form, that they’ll be shown internally to community organizers of the Neighborhood, and if someone wants to step up and pitch a vision of a community they’d like help founding, they can apply directly to me, and if accepted, I’ll show them the database. Nice.

Meanwhile, I’d also start the Arc Society, a secret society will a small number of the absolute best people in the Neighborhood and San Francisco. The process would involve invitations to events that aren’t officially Arc Society events, but where half of the people are Arc Society and the other half are being evaluated. There would be no other official application process. It’d involve events like fantastic regular dinner parties and retreats, and it’d be small and highly exclusive. I think this would just be cool. It’d also provide a group of great, core people with a fantastic Neighborhood experience, which would propel the whole project forward. And because it’s totally secret, we can be maximally exclusive.

It wouldn’t have anything public-facing online, I’ll never mention it publicly, it’ll be location-agnostic, we’d have retreats, parties where we’re there in strength but nobody mentions that it’s what we’re about, pay for residencies, I could host dinners, organize circles, etc. That’s the community building I’d be down to engage in.

Another vision for a potential community I’d be excited to build would be invite people that expressed interest on our landing page to participate in the more sophisticated application flow that results in us adding the people with great vibes to an internal database, which we could use to procatively recommend amazing people into member communities. These are the people that I can invite into an online community (we’ll check for engagement this time instead of just sending them a random Slack link), and who we can also help self-organize into communities if they want. But this is totally optional and could be added later. It’s definitely nice to be able to avoid building the elaborate People Directory right now, even if it would be really useful: see this application flow.

And any part of this gets a bad rep for being elitist, then I can just shut it down, and the Neighborhood is unaffected.

Next year should be entirely focused on launching an amazing residency program.

YES. This could solve the problem, once and for all, of the Neighborhood’s exclusive vs inclusive question. It also means I can shut down our Slack, which I don’t like. It implies that my activities would involve the following:

  1. 25-50% organizing the next Neighborhood coliving house by giving my incredibly polished 30-45 minute talk to superconnectors in the spaces I’m interested in reaching, organizing residency programs (I might want an ops person / event planner), interviewing people and helping them produce low-stakes artifacts about their explorations and how their thinking is updating, organizing a workshops conference at the end of the program, and organizing the conference at the end of the program. The next one will be about AI, biology, chemistry, HCI, and tools for thought.

  2. 25-50% real estate. Helping Arc Society clients and community organizers buy housing. It’d be cool to be a realtor that only (or mainly, at least) takes Arc Society clients.

  3. 25% community building with the Arc Society.

  4. 25% proactive recruiting and outreach.

But the pure essentials are quite simple.

I don’t need to build a Neighborhood application flow.

I don’t need to start building a secret society or doing community building.

I totally could focus all of my time on real estate and “movement building” for our next house. Which would be delightfully focused and productive. It’d be all writing, expression, vibes, and would leave me enough slack to really invest in going deep on real estate.

I would want to help build an application process for this new house. Ahhh yes, and after doing this once or twice, I’ll be pretty good at generalizing this to a more general flow, which many communities could use, trust, and source from.

FUCK YES. THIS IS SO GOOD. I’m ready to fill out the Schmidt application.

Money needed: $500K.

$120K to hire an ops person like Santi.

$100K to pay myself for the next year.

$30K to hire designers, copywriters, and illustrators for a world-class landing page.

$50K to subsidize retreats: one at the beginning to bond the group and build hype, one in the middle to present work in progress and discuss strategies, and a workshop unconference at the end for presenting work.

$100K in residency stipends and startup costs for 2 of the following house themes, whichever resonates most and gains the most traction:

biology, chemistry, AI, HCI, robotics

climate tech, policy, housing, semiconductors, immigration, American competitiveness

education, AI, HCI, psychology, remote work, children, global poverty

What I hope to learn:

Does this movement-building strategy work for attracting world-class talent into houses? One problem is spreading awareness and knowledge, and educating people via a highly polished 20-30 minute talk seems just the ticket, and I can iteratively workshop the pitch (and the public-facing messaging).

Measure applicants per residency program

Measure average attendee referrals and conversions per pitch (per version of the pitch, as measures of how much the pitch is resonating)

Do residency programs convert into long-term stable coliving houses? Do later recruits to the house raise the bar and successfully integrate? Can we repeat a successful program after another year? Interact’s successful Residency Program converted several people that were on the fence about coliving in a low-commitment way. A related and key experiment: how healthy is a coliving house founded around a theme, instead of vibes or a group of friends? Do people want to live in a place where presumably it’s quite work-oriented? Do they collaborate or compete?

Measure conversion rate of residency graduates into people that sign 1 year leases (that convert to M2M afterwards).

What kinds of people get the most out of a residency program and out of coliving in general? Should they be at transition points in their lives, where we can potentially have a huge impact on them? Do people that are already enjoying some traction or that have conviction about what to execute on still benefit from this model?

Survey at opener retreat: what do you hope to get out of this program? What is the likelihood that you’ll sign a 1 year lease here after the residency?

Survey at midpoint conference: What is the likelihood that you’ll sign a 1 year lease here after the residency?

Survey at presentations workshop: how impactful was this on your personal trajectory? What is the likelihood that you’ll sign a 1 year lease here after the residency?

Afterwards, we’d sign master leases with house founders, who would be responsible for keeping the house full. Our Public Benefit Corp would ideally be the landlord but in the beginning at least a sublettor. Owning the houses allows us to expand.

How specific or general should houses be? Archive was probably too broad: some people felt they didn’t belong as it drifted more and more AI.

Risk: what if most of the house falls through, and there aren’t people that are willing to take on the master lease? Then we reclaim the house for another retreat and try again, or give up our lease.

Residency program should target 20 people, so that we can end with a house of 10-15, and overflow can move nearby.

Wow, I’m so excited about this.

Kicking off houses with the residency program ensures thematic consistency, differentiation, allows for resiliency and flexibility, bonds each house tightly while introducing them to the rest of the Neighborhood, builds an incredibly cool brand — I mean this is just so fucking awesome. What an amazing idea. And then when people want to move out of coliving, they just find private homes nearby — and we can help there, too, by assisting them in finding compounds. And once we’ve got this down to a science, we start to build daycares and schools. Wow. That’s it, that’s the formula. If we want to start something super innovative, like a third space, then we could complement/kickstart it with a complementary residency. We could launch each residency with an inspiring manifesto - a call to action. I should write these with Sasha’s help, or perhaps local experts, or copywriters. We could link to each launch post from the homepage. After the program, the house founders, in order to take ownership of the house, could write a followup summarizing what they learned, the impact they had and are exploring, and where they’ll go moving forward.

High level: