About Edge City

Edge City gatherings in 2025:

(The second half of the year will be announced soon!) 

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• Edge City Austin [March 2nd - 7th] was a six-day unconference the week before SXSW 2025 focused on frontier tech for human flourishing. It was a microcosm of the Edge City experience designed for a wider audience: a space designed for meaningful connection, default-healthy living, and collaborations towards a techno-optimistic future. Read the recap here.
• Edge City South Africa [April 3rd - 13th]: A 10-day exploration of South Africa's tech and culture scene while spending time in beautiful nature. We’re inviting 50 frontier founders, builders, creatives, and researchers for this one-of-a-kind trip. Apply directly here.
• Edge Esmeralda 2025 [May 24th - June 21st]: We are returning to Healdsburg, CA, with a month-long popup village and prototype for a permanent new town nearby. Once again, we'll be focusing on building frontier technologies, healthy living environments, novel education models, and new ways of living and working together. This year will also feature thematic residencies, expanded multigenerational programming, and a focus on applied experiments to foster innovation across disciplines. Apply directly here.

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In 2024, we had four main gatherings:

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• Edge City Denver: A week-long gathering during ETHDenver [Feb 26th - March 3rd]. We partnered with leading organizations, including Stanford Blockchain and Uniswap Foundation, to host programming on topics ranging from protocol governance to decentralized AI. This was a soft-launch event to introduce more folks in the community to the concept of popup villages. We had 3,000 participants throughout the week.
• Edge Esmeralda: A one-month village in Northern California in June [June 2nd - June 29th]. This event helped expose the SF community to the movement we’re building with Edge City. We had 1,300 people visit, with 300 full-time residents, and 25 emergent programs. Read our welcome letter here.
• Crecimiento: A one-month village in Argentina this August. [Aug 6th - Sep 6th]. We incubated this initiative, which was the beginning of a long-term movement of founders, builders, investors, regulators, & government building crypto-enabled solutions to transform Argentina into an international technology hub that drives innovation and brings financial freedom and prosperity to millions of Argentines.
• Edge City Lanna: A village this autumn in Thailand [Oct 10th - Nov 10th]. We brought 700 people together for a village in beautiful Chiang Mai, Thailand. It was an environment focused on human flourishing, for folks to come together and explore multidisciplinary and multicultural collaboration. See the full recap here.

Past attendees include: Vitalik Buterin, Grimes, Laura Deming, Justin Drake, Devon Zuegel, Juan Benet, Emad Mostaque, Venkatesh Rao, Joscha Bach, Primavera De Fillipi, Eli Dourado, Illia Polosukhin, Julia Lipton, Tim Beiko, Nadia Asparouhova, Sandeep Nailwal, Nick White, Adam Marblestone, Allison Duettmann, Eli Ben-Sasson, Tamara Winter, Molly Mackinlay, Mike Johnson, and many more.

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Check out the gallery of our past popup villages here.

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We attract great folks by creating an amazing experience that makes it easy for them to live meaningfully and do their best work.

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The resident experience entails:

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• Being surrounded by passionate, curious peers.
• Facilitated sessions with leaders of frontier tech and science fields.
• Fresh, high-quality meals every day.
• Unconferences on frontier tech topics and self-organized knowledge-sharing sessions.
• Group fitness and health-tracking activities.
• Excellent coworking spaces with fast WiFi.
• A physical layout designed for creating Schelling points and collisions of ideas.
• Buildathons and constant experimentation with emerging products and ideas.
• Close proximity to nature.

Four key principles shape the experience of being at one of our events: we focus on health, multidisciplinarity, a culture of co-creation, and making sure that the events are family-friendly and multigenerational (we make it easy for folks with families to bring their kids). These aspects are critical because we know that if we actually want to experiment with building a better future, we need people to be able to live a holistic experience that combines the full variety of their lives. We’ve seen how a focus on these aspects creates a healthier, more productive lifestyle for the time that they are at Edge City. 

The villages take place around the world. We purposefully bring people to brand new environments that help them see beyond the ingrained patterns of thought and activity of their default lives. It also allows us to prioritize the diversity of participants by being able to invite people who may have visa issues in accessing traditional innovation hubs.

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Our attendees are all curious, kind, and high-agency — working on something towards a brighter future.

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Edge City creates impact in three key areas:

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1. Accelerate Resident Impact
   We fill our villages with curious, kind, ambitious people who give each other the courage, education, and inspiration to apply their talents to do the most impactful work of their lives.‍
2. Incubate Projects
   We foster the development of groundbreaking technologies. Our community is keen to test out prototypes and give feedback, which is critical to helping beat the cold start problem for novel ideas. For example, we have seen how well-designed events like Zuzalu Montenegro and ZuConnect can incubate emerging technology like Programmable Cryptography and PCDS through community adoption, support, and development of products like Zupass.‍
3. Advance Governance and Community Models
   We will demonstrate new models for community living. The innovation playgrounds are in-real-life laboratories for new decision-making and organizational models, allowing us to try innovative governance and community designs.

Our team has extensive relevant experience, including helping organize several popup villages with Zuzalu, a network city concept started by Vitalik Buterin.

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The two cofounders of Edge City are Janine and Timour.

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Janine Leger was a driving force behind Zuzalu Montenegro and ZuConnect. Previously, she led the Gitcoin Public Goods Funding workstream and built multiple popup co-living communities. She is a community leader in Austin, where she lives.

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Timour Kosters brings 10 years of experience building startups, including Artsy, the largest online art marketplace; Kama, a leading health-tech app; and Impact, a large social brand. He is also an investor and was a partner at Seed Club Ventures. He has built multiple large communities and started the award-winning experiential agency Excetera.

We envision a network of interconnected communities, each a hub of talented people living and innovating together. We invite you to be part of the next steps in our journey.

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Follow us on Twitter to stay in touch. If you’re interested in attending, funding, or collaborating, please fill out this contributor interest form!

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