#141： Build_Cities, The Network State and Startup Cities Ecosystem with Angelo Alessio 49:15

Kia ora, ni hao and hello. Welcome to the Cherry Journal podcast. I'm your host, Camille Liang. My guest today is Angelo Alessio. He is the co-founder and protocol architect at buildcities.network, which allows anyone in Web3 to overlay their digital communities on top of existing cities.

In today's episode, we talk about Startup City Protocol, Build Cities, the Networked State, Startup Cities Ecosystem, and many more. I hope you enjoy the show.

When we met in real life in Lisbon, you just launched your project. Yeah. Like relaunched it or how do you describe it? It's like, because it's already been there when I registered. But when we met each other in Lisbon, you did a public beta launch.

Right. Okay. Yeah. Was it, so we had, you know, I'm, I'm kind of a, I'm not a huge believer in like launches. I'm more of kind of like, Hey, let's build, let's build the staircase to the, you know, to the moon. So I think it was probably, you know, we've had several big announcements over the last

several months but the the biggest one was uh we had i think it's about a month after i i visited lisbon when i saw you and um we just launched our public beta in the beginning of october so that was the result of two development cycles one failed launch with the product that just i knew wasn't going to work um but now uh since we launched the public beta about a month ago we've

We've had over 350 networks onboarded and crossed 50 of the different startup city chapters or kind of like the beta city chapters. But all of this is still very phase one. But yeah, we released it to the world about a month ago and it's gone really well so far. So now we're just looking to, now we actually have something to measure in an iterative process towards, you know, building the staircase, so to speak.

So for my listeners who don't familiar with the build cities, can you explain it for even non-tech people can understand what you are building? Yeah, sure. So the one-liner that we use is a protocol for startup cities, but I actually just did a great exercise the other day to kind of even condense that more. And it's really,

We are creating infrastructure for digital communities

to basically manifest their communities offline or in real life, so to speak. So almost kind of like translating those communities, the digital communities from the cloud to the earth. I don't like the word meet space. I know some people use that in crypto, but just, you know, in the real world. So that means, and that infrastructure includes things like facilitating meetups, facilitating meetings,

Actual crowdfunding of ventures in real estate is something that we're looking at for phase two. So it's really, you know, the main thing is just bridging this connective tissue between all of these digital communities that we might be a part of, or at least our favorite ones, and

and when i'm talking about digital communities the what we're what we're referring to technically right now is just discord communities so um people will log in they select their top three you know digital communities digital discord servers basically and then they overlay that on top of three cities that they are

are also strongly affiliated with. So they get to choose. So if it's Lisbon, Hong Kong, and London or whatnot, then they're brought to a dashboard where you would be able to see, hey, here's all my folks in 1729 that are in London, the ones that are in Lisbon, the ones that are in Hong Kong. And you actually start to get like a geographical vantage point of your digital communities. And so we view that as kind of like

the first wedge into introducing some of these future products. So we have a product that will essentially facilitate meetups of those communities or cross-collaborate between communities in those actual cities. And then further down the road, the big ideal would be to actually crowdfund ventures and real estate in those given ecosystems so that people have a shared space to

to collaborate, work on their projects and see where the logical road of that goes. It could go into residential, it could go into more commercial route, but that's what we're kind of measuring day by day to kind of make those decisions. Yeah, I think I mentioned to you when I moved to Lisbon, because I've already knew some Twitter friends online,

It's kind of a way we meet offline and a way kind of want to co-found the co-working or co-living space together because we got along so well. But there is no specific place in Lisbon that can facilitate our needs. So with your platform, I can use it to find more like-minded people from this course than

Once I find them in my city, I can get connected and do something together. Exactly. And we'll make that infrastructure as seamless as possible so that, hey, let's say you're moving to Lisbon for a year or whatnot, or to crowdfund a potential lease in a given area. And that goes across community as well. And what we've actually seen too is

is that sometimes it determines people, especially with like nomads, it kind of facilitates where they might be ending up next. So let's say we've seen some instances of like, let's say a user was like, hey, I'm looking to go to South America, right? Like where should I go? Should I just pick a place on a map? Or they can see on our platform, oh, hey, here's so-and-so that I've talked to in this given Discord community

and they happen to live in you know rio or buenos aires or whatnot i might as well go like we've had that relationship i might as well go there and so it kind of brings that context into focus a little bit more about geographical segmentation of our of our lives um and um yeah you can kind of start to like connect the dots you know i think like you mentioned before like

You mentioned how you met good friends from Twitter first and then met them prior to maybe arriving in Lisbon or I'm sure there's several places around the world where this has happened. And that, I think, that dynamic, we think and I think, and maybe you think or maybe you have a disagreement, but that's been very normalized post-COVID. Before it was...

Before, it was primarily like a dating app that you would do that online to offline, right? Or like more, you know, those kind of, yeah, that kind of stuff. But when it comes to like, you know, intellectual alignment or just, yeah, platonic relationships or professional relationships, like the online to offline piece, where I don't think it was as large.

prior to COVID. I mean, it was there, but now it's just like, I don't think people don't think twice about it. It's like, oh, cool. In fact, like a lot of the thesis out there, like the ideological alignment, I find to be pretty true. And I don't know, like, have you found that to be true as well? Like, you know, the online to offline relationships, like

finding that ideological alignment with people easier. Yeah, exactly. I wrote an article about 90% of my friends I met online. I proactively find them either read their content or listen to their podcast. I want to know them. For me, I move around a lot. So I feel like every time I move to a new place, I've already knew someone there.

because I know they're there and when I move there, I can have a conversation with them. And now with your products, maybe we can do some investment or do some cool stuff together. That's pretty exciting. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it probably feels like you're just picking up where you left off from those conversations, especially if you hadn't met the person before, you know, online first and then you meet offline. You're just like, oh, well,

We don't need to do the get to know you. Like we're just, let's pick up on the thing we were reading about, you know, three weeks ago in this channel or whatever. So,

It's cool to see. And I think, and I think even before some of like the investment, you know, some of the more like infrastructure, like investment pieces, there's still, there's still a lot of things that can be done that just facilitate that social interaction more. Like, you know, right now, Twitter and discord, you just kind of do it manually where you reach out or sometimes people will put like the city channels and discord, but

You can only put so many city channels and some people are living in more kind of Atlas Obscura type areas. And we want to have those. We want to have all of those where, you know, you can definitely, you know, there's still a lot to do on the social component first. And so that's what we're leading with and then bringing in the financial aspects a little bit later. Yeah, I see. You named your product.

build cities. So what does city mean to you? Why you don't say like a beauty countries like what biology? Well, I think a city comes before a country, right? So or just even and again, you know, as you mentioned to like a union comes before a city, right? Like every every city started with its first brick.

so it's kind of, you know, based on the, you know, I don't know if you've seen the Adrian Opal group, the three types of startup cities. Ah, yes. I've heard about that, yeah. Yeah, it's a good map, you know, if you want to put the link out there or whatnot, like definitely check it out. Yeah, I'll put it in the show notes. Yeah, I think if you just Google startup cities map, it's there. But anyways, so the three types, and I think they actually took the definition from Bology, maybe they're collaborating or whatnot, but so type one is ones that,

attract entrepreneurial activity or kind of activate it in their own ecosystems. So an example of type one would be like San Francisco or New York, Miami, Austin, et cetera. And that's just U.S. Lisbon is one. So yeah, they're all over. But type two are ones where the city acts like a startup itself. So they reference Miami, Dubai, Singapore,

That one is kind of inherently political, so we don't spend too much time thinking about those. It's kind of a, I don't know what we can kind of productize there. And then there's type three startup cities, which are

cities that them themselves are startups. So I think Cul-de-sac is referenced, Prospera in Honduras, and that's kind of the third type. And so for us, I think the prerequisite to all of those are type one startup cities. And one of the kind of just connecting the dots between these thought processes, there's a book by Brad

Brad Feld, he's one of the co-founders of Techstars. It's called Startup Communities. It basically outlines everything he did to make Boulder, Colorado, a startup ecosystem and activating the startup ecosystem and to make Boulder into what it is today. And so that's a type one startup city. He didn't call it that at the time, but he wrote this book several years ago. And it's kind of like, okay, well, that's the playbook. So

That's the kind of playbook we want to start with first, where I think, again, prerequisite to any of the more loftier ambitions just involves, first of all, a very innovative startup ecosystem where you have founders thinking about different problems, starting their businesses, and then the more you kind of have around that. So those are the prerequisites that we think about.

for any of those three types of startup cities. Like in order to have a city that is itself a startup, you need to have people there who are, you know, founders, you know, innovation minded. And, you know, because those are going to be the best possible audience or citizens of that potential community. So in a way, a lot of what we're kind of building out kind of

like looks to productize this thesis of like, hey, you can start up, you can activate a startup ecosystem anywhere in the world. It can be, and it can be on the longer tail of cities. And I think that's actually what's really exciting is like, you know, we kind of view, since a lot of what we're building is on crypto rails, it's kind of like this giant irrigation system of like technology

talent and capital where, you know, you had the arteries go into like the main, the main ecosystems, but now it's extended it out. Like the capillary glands going out to really much smaller ecosystems where you have brilliant people and, and, um, you know, can, who are able to work on hard problems. And, uh, and sometimes they just need the kind of connective, uh,

you know, be able to connect the dots, get access to capital, et cetera, et cetera, without having to like

you know no one no one should have to feel like they need to go to san francisco or go to a bigger ecosystem just to get their idea off the ground and so if we can meet these founders and these ecosystems where they're at and start to kind of activate them that's that's exciting to us and we where the platform we have we can start to even like start to measure that um

I mean, it's a digital product, so we're not, it doesn't cost anything for us to start measuring like, okay, this place is starting to get a lot of activity.

let's kind of you know put more resources towards there and um and uh yeah so it starts with that social network we were talking about earlier i know there are four phases you talk about to achieve your mission so can you elaborate which phases are you in now and what's your goal yeah in the future yeah so i i uh wrote in our latest newsletter like we went

we finally transitioned from the prologue just to chapter one, right? Like prologue, which is ideation and theory and kind of figuring out, okay, what works, what doesn't. But now we're in chapter one and I'll just call it phase one for now in that we have the product that, you know, you can go to it today, build cities.network.

and log in with your Discord and MetaMask and see how it works. So everything we were kind of discussing earlier with like the social components, that's all kind of phase one. So like we have a feature that we'll release for making meetups, facilitating meetups a little bit easier with community members in different cities. We even have a mobile app coming out right now. It's in private beta.

but that'll be that'll be um and that's kind of tech agnostic there's not really like a web 3 play there but it's um it's uh literally a design to basically like find people in your locality who have complementary skill sets to build new projects together so um yeah so those are kind of everything related to phase one you know obviously growing our own community and then phase two is is um

is the piece where we actually want to have community ownership of assets in the network. And when I say ownership, I mean full compliant, like people actually own a piece of the buildings that they're occupying. And so going back to the instance that we talked about in Lisbon, it's like, hey, let's say

you crowdfunded a coworking space in Lisbon, ideally to purchase, then that becomes one of the hubs in the network. Just as if, and then you would also have access to the hub. So like our first pilot hub is actually in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

And I'll send you a link after this. It definitely would be great to include in the thing, but it literally kind of shows the blueprint of the ecosystems that we're trying to build. So where it started with community and that started to actually, once the community is built, like the real estate gets activated. Like it was an old, it was an old, old,

old building that just had not been used for like 10 years. And once the community was built, they were able to activate this real estate and have day one, 100% occupancy and super high retention cohorts. And so, yeah, so the more we kind of

have in each city, those become kind of the semblance of this in real life manifestation where here in Hong Kong or Lisbon or Port Olain or wherever, you'll have a place to meet

not only your own communities that you know have high concentration in a certain area, but also kind of cross collaborate with other communities that are there or build zone community. We're more of an infrastructure play for existing communities. But yeah, so that's phase two.

Phase three is just kind of doing that in scale. So it's kind of like, okay, so in Coeur d'Alene, we're actually, we're actually, they're going to be opening a third real estate property already. And so it's kind of like, hey, let's thread these together. Like, let's say we have a property here and there's a certain demand in an area to do maybe a co-living.

a co-living space. We could either partner with orgs like Cabin or Cohere and figure out, hey, what makes sense where we can kind of be

joint owners or basically get capital going into this ecosystem to buy out and purchase residential units or having our own. So it's still a lot of gray air in that phase three, but that's what we call building cities. And that's literally just scaling up the process such that

You have more real estate, you have more leverage, you have kind of a bigger community in each space. And then phase four, I'll probably talk about the lease. It's build sovereignty. And that kind of plays in a little bit to the...

to the network state thesis. And while I definitely find it fascinating and interesting to consider, I'll fully admit we don't fully know what that path looks like, but it's interesting to think about. And I think it's a good North Star to get the community, you know, all these communities thinking that way, because I think it's definitely possible at some point in the future. Touching back on phase three, another interesting thing, like

I think one thing that differentiates us from maybe a lot of similar adjacent projects in this space is like we're operating in existing cities already, but there's no reason why this infrastructure couldn't be such that

somebody has private property and they give the GPS coordinates and they have a community that they can start to bring into that area, it'll pop up on our map and you can call it Camelliaville or whatever you want. And if you have enough people and capital going into that area, you could essentially launch your own city, which I think would be

Really cool, really fascinating, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there. I see. When I use your product, I see you use the current city as one of your features. When Balaji mentioned starting a new country, I was thinking you should disrupt the current one and build something new. What's your opinion on balancing the current city model?

landscape and build a new one. Yeah, well, so, you know, when I started this, I hadn't really thought enough or read enough about special economic zones, but I know that seems to be a pretty substantial unlock for thinking about new cities and

new economic primitives and just governance primitives and literally building a new city. So that's an interesting bridge that I think when we get closer to will be interesting to explore.

But I think why we're focusing on existing cities is because we do kind of generally get more excited about these longer tail cities or longer tail kind of overlooked cities that don't have mature startup ecosystems there yet.

So I'm in Jersey City, my co-founders in Lagos and our other co-founders in Coeur d'Alene and all of those are kind of like nascent. You know, Lagos is probably the biggest one by a long shot, like as far as population startup activity, but there's still a lot of infrastructure there. Capital access, you know, a whole series of challenges there that like,

could benefit from kind of a common platform to build those startup ecosystems a little bit more maturely. So I just think there's so much white space with existing cities and there's so many longer tail cities. And in a way, it's kind of like, you know, if we're also looking at decentralization being like a geographical phenomenon, like,

I actually wrote an article about this in 2018, like putting the venture into VC, which just talks about like,

you know literally all all the just got all the information from cb insights all the data to just do like seed funding and you can see where the concentration areas are obviously you know new york sf but there's so many cities that are getting kind of these smaller amounts and it's kind of like what if what if it was just more evenly distributed and um and you know i think there's more and more data points suggesting that it's going to look more and more likeless there was the

Twitter conversation or musing the other day about how Starlink is going to be repricing real estate, right? Now with Starlink, you can be an entrepreneur and you can go literally to the middle of nowhere and start whatever it is you want to start. And so I think you're just going to see more and more of that. And I think we want to kind of

It's definitely a tailwind. We want to make sure we have the sales up for there. I see. You mentioned that your co-founders all live in different parts of the world. So how did you guys come up together and start to build cities? Yeah, so the internet first. So we're eating our own dog food with respect to the thesis. And it'll probably be those three cities that we will actually... So each city on the map, on the app itself,

will be its own DAO, for lack of a better word. We may even call it a different name, but it'll be an on-chain entity where, I don't know if this will be the case, but the multi-sig essentially becomes the minimum viable city council in a way, right? But to answer your question directly, I met Ronald in Lagos first.

So after I read the white paper, he found us through after he just won a Citicoin tech-a-thon. So Citicoins was the project that generated funds on stacks that was built on Bitcoin to essentially generate, I think they generated like $25 million for the city of Miami. And so it was a really cool project that kind of penetrated the public conversation about like, hey,

Crypto can fund literally public goods, right? So it was very clear to me that he was very vision aligned and he won the hackathon. So just a great, great technical leader. And so met him first and then met Nick. A funny story there. I was writing in the white paper. I wrote the word innovation collective. And I was like, I should look at that domain. What is that?

you know what's is that is that is that for sale like what's that what's the domain and it turns out his org that's the oracle he's kind of started with and in court lane to kind of build this blueprint that we're working with um it's called innovation collective so i did a cold linkedin message which i i never do and uh and yeah it was pretty immediate the alignment that was like wow this is fascinating that you're literally doing what we're writing about

but like offline first. And so we just said, let's, let's digitize this thing and let's go. So that's how we all met. And, um, and, uh, yeah, all the contributors as well, uh, have, have all come online first. And, um, so it's, it's a slower process. It's one to get used to having only worked in places where, you know, we're all in the same place, but

It's cool, it's fascinating. That's cool. So I know Balaji mentioned cloud first, then physical second. I think it's cloud first, land last, but not never. I think that's the thing, yeah. I know he's one of the investors for your project. So what's your relationship with the network? Yeah, so I mean, it definitely crystallized a lot of things that I had kind of fragmented thoughts about, like,

I can't, so I know the network state, you know, I, I think I, you know, I think he came up with that several years ago. So I remember seeing it and I remember, I think I started reading, you know, started getting into this stuff, uh, like about six months prior to, um, prior to writing the white paper. So there's definitely a lot of, there's definitely a lot of

kind of, you know, thought filtration that, that a lot of his work really, really inspired. So, so absolutely. That was, that was, that was helpful. You know, there's, there's some things I think will probably take a little bit different approach from the book. Yeah. Probably the main one, the main one, I think, and Vitalik kind of covers this in his essay on, on, you know, what do I think about network states and, and,

I totally understand the voice versus exit dichotomy where people should have that freedom to have voice or exit in any given environment. But I think there's kind of a third dimension

I don't even know what to call it or if it's called conviction, loyalty or commitment or whatnot. But we... And I'm writing an article about this, so I'm going to clarify all these thoughts here. But I think we kind of are more on the element of like, hey, we need to have... The foundation of a network state still exists physically, right? You still...

Any citizen of a network state, even if you're able to move around, still needs to be in some jurisdiction or on land somewhere. So like that...

So, so the emphasis on that I think that's what we're prioritizing, even more so is like, hey, this needs to be a very localist focused ecosystem where, you know, we kind of operate in service of like the people who are like on ground in these cities that maybe have been there for decades.

for years, if not decades, like building out their ecosystem. So, and Brad Feld even mentioned this in Startup Communities book. He's like, if you want to build a startup ecosystem in a city, you have to be thinking on a 20 year time horizon. And that time horizon has to reset every day. Like you're basically always thinking 20 years ahead. And

And to build those lasting ecosystems, yeah, I mean, it's a lot of time and effort, just like anything else. And that's not to say that it's not complementary with that vision. I think a lot of what he writes about is kind of, as he mentioned, it's kind of like a framework for thinking about things. But I think that's kind of a core part of our approach is like,

we want to really make sure that the people on ground kind of like leading these ecosystems are very, you know, have the majority of kind of the local context and local commitment to the region. Yeah.

As the saying goes, Rome is not built in one day. So you need to have this long-term thinking to do something on a bigger scale. So when people claim for the city, is this one of the criteria you check?

the cities chapter, these people need to be very localized and make a commitment to stay there long enough. Yeah, I think for the folks leading those ecosystems, and again, this isn't like saying, "Oh, we don't want..." It's not to say we don't want... We absolutely want that. We absolutely want people floating through these ecosystems as well, but

you know, the leads should be like, you know, they, the leads should be kind of the ones that are more permanently based. But, you know, like, I think all of us, especially who are, you know, work in tech or just nomadic or whatnot, we've all helped clients or ecosystems like

in different parts that we've never lived or never have even visited. And that's totally possible today. But, but, you know, for the, for the broader ecosystem, yeah, I think that's where that, that focus comes in. And so for the claiming city feature, yeah, that's right now kind of primarily an application process to just see, you know, who's out there, who's on ground in these areas and kind of surfacing, you

you know, innovation-minded leaders in all these areas and the cities they want to see. And what we'll probably do, what it's looking to shape up as is we'll have the three, so the cities that will go kind of on-chain first will be the founders, the three founder cities. And then essentially, so we'll set a precedent and then those three will have the voting rights to basically bring on new ones on-chain.

And then as it grows, it'll just progressively get more decentralized because once you have a thousand cities voting on new ones, the original three are, you know, much, you know, they're just a smaller piece of that puzzle. So that seems right now to be kind of the most, you know, elegant solution that I think we're going to kind of go ahead and execute on. So is there any city blueprint in real life you would like to follow?

Yes, it's probably the work that Nick's done in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. So he's definitely, he's the real estate and community lead for the ecosystem. I'll send you the link after and you can post a video, but it's very evident to see. And having been there,

it's very evident to me that like oh wow like there's something really cool going on here um and it doesn't even like the space feels amazing they have like an underground bar and cigar lounge and co-working yeah no it's really cool the co-working space they have like this area for families a coffee shop all in the same building and that's just the building

So the population itself, like, I think it's like a 30% engagement rate with that kind of ecosystem of the population. Coeur d'Alene has two times more startups per capita than the rest of Idaho. They have two times nine figure startups. They've passed a bill that actually recognizes like

the rights of AI robots on public lands. Wow, that's cool. Yeah, and a lot of that's due to the work that he's done there. It's kind of like rallying, getting people kind of rallying around an economic vertical that, and in that case, it happens to be AI robotics. They have a

They have an electric boat manufacturer, like the Tesla of boats operating there on the lake. So yeah, that's definitely the blueprint. Wow. It's like already we're in the future after reading what you described. It feels like only happening in sci-fi story, but now it's real. Let's make it happen. Yeah. The future is here. I mean, you know,

you know drawing out like there is a video that elon posted a couple days ago and it's you know it's definitely like a promotional video kind of for spacex and starbase and whatnot but like it's essentially almost a city there like there was not much there before they had you know all the infrastructure there for launching rockets and whatnot and now it's kind of becoming its own

It's basically its own city or the city definitely revolves around that economic vertical. Similar to how cities of the past, they typically formed around some economic vertical, whether that be just like in Silicon Valley or commercial fishing, name on the New England coast. And again, I apologize. I'm kind of just...

speaking from like us knowledge context but since i see it i'm just going to speak on that but like yeah i mean so many you know you can draw that parallel for any given city that they first formed around some economic vertical now when it's when it's all tech based and software based like what is that thing to rally around when you don't need to be tied to the land and that's that's um uh

you know, that looks different, right? - True. I'm very curious about your career path. 'Cause you mentioned when we first met each other, you were served in the military. So what that helped you with building the project? - Sure. Yeah. So yeah, I commissioned it as an army, as an engineer officer.

And it was like 2012 now is when I started and I did it for four years. And, you know, for, so engineer in the, in the army branch, there's like 11 branches. So there's, you know,

There's Navy, Army, Marines, Air Force. And then even within those, there's actually a lot of different sub-disciplines. So engineer was one of 11 different sub-disciplines. There's artillery, infantry, aviation. Engineer is definitely the one that's-- is definitely the generalist branch. So when there's a certain mission and they don't quite know who to call on, they were the ones to figure it out.

It was definitely the best. I think it was just at the time just a really good decision for myself and learned a ton. I'm definitely a believer in public service. It was good. I think professionally what it taught me the most is how to just operate on and make decisions when you have incomplete data, which translates really well to startups, I think, because you're just

you have incomplete data, sometimes you have no data and you're just kind of like, all right, we have to make a decision that we have to keep moving forward. And so that's kind of what has resonated with me the most there. And then I've also just been always like very curious on like a very wide breadth of subjects. And so what I equated to that was like,

any given subject or interest in the world somebody is building a business out of, which I just thought was just intellectually fascinating. So those are the two kind of like aspects or attributes from my own

I guess, professional trajectory that kind of, you know, that have kind of like stuck with me, I think, or keep me driving forward. I noticed that there are so many projects in the network state dashboard biology listing and including your one, Build City. So what,

What other projects grabbed your attention? I know you were in a Street Legal and Cabin Dow podcast before. Yeah, you guys. Yeah, they're there. I mean, they're all fascinating. You know, I think, you know, I take this analogy to like, you know, if you look at the financial services stack, you know, there's hundreds of players, right? Like there's hundreds of companies doing different APIs, different widgets, different, you know,

credit cards, neobanks, you know, the whole, the whole stack is huge. And so if, you know, if we're considering the network state is like disrupting, you know, country APIs or country, the country stack, essentially, like there's going to be thousands of players and they're all going to kind of take a different shape. And I think that's, what's going to be kind of the most unique thing about it. So like, yeah, definitely, yeah.

I totally understand the, the Cabindal premise. And, you know, I think it, it definitely appeals to, to a certain audience. And, you know, I love nature. I love, I love, and I think that, that kind of like, you know,

you know, commitment to that, to that kind of domain is, is really cool. City Dow is, is obviously, uh, pretty cool with what they've, what they've, you know, they've actually bought the land in Wyoming. I like Kift. Kift is really cool. They have the, I used to grow up going, um, and doing a lot of, uh,

with my family. We did a lot of actual van trips around Mexico and kind of like the Southwest United States because that's where I grew up. And so their model is pretty fascinating. And then...

Yeah, Afropolitan. I haven't had enough time to dig into each and every one. I kind of understand what Jura's trying to do, but I'm really interested to see what comes out there. But yeah, I mean, I think anybody that's on that dashboard or thinking about doing this kind of thing is...

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a frontier emerging industry. So they're all pretty fascinating and they all kind of inspire a lot of our thinking. And I think we're all going to kind of learn from each other as we grow. Yeah. Last month I was in Italy. Then I met one of the early 1729 members, Gabriel. Oh, nice. Yeah.

Oh yeah, from Praxis, right? Yeah, I heard the pod, I was listening to the podcaster. Yeah, he's cool. So you got to meet him? Yeah, I met him in person in Milan. Yeah, we talked about the project he is involved with. They also purchase land, do something in America. So I feel like at the moment it's still very American-centric, like CityDoll, Cavendale, and Yoruba. Okay, yeah.

I think just very global first. We have the cities on the dashboard. We've let people claim them organically starting out and probably just by nature of being here.

the majority of them were claimed in the US first, but we had a lot of early activity in Brisbane. And so it's like, let's focus resources there. And of course, our co-founder in Lagos, that's one that we want to facilitate as much as possible. So I think there is that slant

which is interesting to think about. But yeah, I don't know. What do you think? Does that mean anything? No, I mean, I think it's a good thing because America is always like... When I grew up, I heard about American dream. It's like you always do the...

innovative things first so i mean it's a good example if you set up the examples then other places people can follow up later yeah as long as yeah i mean as long as it's like you know still very you know i like i think the best ideas come with like a lot of cross-pollinate cross-pollination so just like you know yeah i want to i want to see as much again like you know

Because just like that analogy, a founder shouldn't have to go to Silicon Valley to get funding. It's the same thing for jurisdictional barriers. A founder from Tanzania should not have to go to the US and then go to Silicon Valley just to get their idea off the ground. As long as these opportunities are getting evenly distributed, I think that's the most important piece. And whether there's...

you know, capital concentration in the US or Singapore, like that's great. But as long as that's getting that's as long as that's getting like pretty evenly distributed, I think that's that's exciting. And that, you know, that introduces a whole slew of legal challenges and compliance, you know, but but I think I think I think

I think crypto rails are the ways to kind of equalize that as best as possible. Yeah, that's why I found it why this is so fascinating to gather so many international peoples here. So we'll see what can come up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the biggest roadblock you think will

prevent you from achieving what you want to achieve? Oh, gosh, that's a good one. Yeah. So biggest roadblock. I mean, you know, I definitely think about, you know, not I don't want to bring up the boring stuff, but I definitely think about legal a lot, like

what does this look like to be able to operate legally and compliantly in as many countries as possible, as soon as possible, and not break the bank and not have some kind of, you know, leverage against us. So, you know, so that one takes a lot of time to think about. But, yeah.

I think that's going to be the biggest piece. I think there's a lot of de-risking that can be done there. There's a lot in the crypto industry that's like, okay, what do we have to do to appease jurisdictions or governments? It should be maybe potentially the opposite where it's like, hey, there's an enormous brain trust here of just really smart people from all over the world ready to solve problems. It should maybe look

And I think you can even see that you even see that more. And one of the reasons we're, we're kind of focused on like smaller, maybe smaller cities is like a lot of those are more willing to experiment faster with and, you know, they're just kind of want to, they're ready to try new things. And we've, we found that more. It's like, you know, if you told me I want to do a pilot project for,

um you know uh some kind of crypto initiative to fund infrastructure in a city and you told me i had the choice between new york city and coeur d'alene like i'm gonna go to coeur d'alene like like or or or reno or wherever you know a smaller a smaller city um because i know you'd just be able to just move quicker and at least get at least get uh yes no faster right like

as long as we're getting a yes, no faster from a local municipality or jurisdiction, that's fine because then we at least know how to move on and we're not wasting time trying to get all the buy-in that we would need from a New Yorker or whatever to get something off the ground. So I think I foresee that being

challenging as we go, which is why we're just focused on product first, have that moat, get that off the ground, and then be an interesting

Interesting as we go. That's good. Very looking forward to that. Yeah, I hope. We're going to do our best to get it there. Just to have those problems will be a privilege. Yeah, exactly. So if people want to get involved, if they're interested in building cities,

How can they do it? Yeah, so we have our website, buildcities.network or .com. They'll both go to the same place. That's probably the first place is to go there, launch the app, sign in with Discord and Metamask. We're actually going to remove the Metamask. It'll just be Discord shortly. But yeah, that's probably step one. And then, yeah,

you know, our social media, join build is Twitter, join build underscore. But, and then if you want to get involved, so, and so that app serves any community already. So like that product is for, for you, for the audience, for everybody. And then if you want to get involved internally with like, so we have nine guilds set up.

One for governance, treasury, legal, offline development. And we have an internal Discord for that. And you can access that through the app as well and get involved directly that way. And then there's a couple other things on the website that we kind of have some call-outs for, but that's probably the first thing, yeah.

Cool. Last question. Do you have any books and resources you can recommend if people are very interested in startup cities concept? Sure. Yeah. So I would definitely check out Startup Communities by Brad Feld. Just, you know, if they want to get the...

the kind of initial foundational thinking of what we're looking to tackle. It covers a lot in there. And then as far as something that starts to go beyond that,

Obviously, The Network State is a good read. Have you finished? I did. I finished it. I'll probably go back and check some notes there. Startup Communities by Brad Peltz is a great book. I heard Balaji is going to launch a V2 version of The Network State, which will be a double-edged

double size yeah we don't have a lot of works to do yeah yes we'll have to have a yeah you know study group and and and dissect it and put the pieces back together so yeah uh it's fun it's exciting times we're we're in very very uh

very eccentric times. It's exciting. I feel so lucky to live in the current moment to witness all the changes. Yeah, it's exciting. It's scary. It's interesting. It's changing so fast and you know, let's just keep moving forward.

Yeah, keep building. Exactly. Great. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Camille. And I look forward to meeting again. For sure. Go out for seafood.