About Edge City

Edge City convenes people working at the frontiers of tech, science, and society in popup villages across the globe.

We aspire to be a ‘society and culture incubator’— an IRL lab of experimentation for new ideas, tech, culture, and organizations, all dedicated to accelerating human flourishing.

Our 'popup villages' last 1-2 months and are perfect environments to live, learn, and experiment with frontier projects. The participants are leaders from diverse fields, including Crypto, AI, BioTech & Longevity, Philosophy, Culture, Hard Tech, Governance, and more. Edge City is part of and contributes to the Zuzalu ecosystem.

‍

We believe the best opportunity for positive impact comes from multidisciplinary collaboration. Our gatherings are perfectly designed for this, with longer durations and structured community design that foster deep connection and partnership between attendees. Edge City is an ideal setting for innovators to work alongside their peers, tackling major problems focused on enhancing societal prosperity and individual fulfillment.

‍

"Edge City is unparalleled in its ability to cultivate multi-disciplinary ecosystems that accelerate progress in frontier industries” — Juan Benet

Our process is threefold:

‍

1. We gather groups of 300+ people—each pushing the frontiers of tech, culture, or society in their own way—in a multi-month coliving environment.
2. We co-create an exceptional experience designed to foster learning, growth, and collaboration. These are the most productive and healthy weeks of the attendees’ lives.
3. We build and ship. Theory is important, but we aim to actively implement the best concepts in the real world, creating tangible impact.

‍

In 2023, we helped organize two high-profile popup villages, Zuzalu Montenegro and ZuConnect Istanbul, with over 1,500 total attendees. The feedback we received was overwhelmingly strong: participants loved these experiences and they want more.

‍

In 2024, we’re doubling down on what worked with four core villages.

In 2024, we have four main gatherings:

‍

• 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 are advising this initiative, which is the beginning of a long-term movement of founders, builders, investors, regulators, & government building crypto-enabled solutions to transform Argentina into an international startup & crypto 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 will bring 300 people together for a village in beautiful Chiang Mai, Thailand. It will be an environment focused on human flourishing, for folks to come together and explore multidisciplinary and multicultural collaboration. This event will be similar in style and structure to Zuzalu Montenegro but with an even greater emphasis on health and making it accessible to folks with children.

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.

‍

Check out the gallery of our past popup villages here.

‍

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

‍

The resident experience entails:

‍

• Being surrounded by passionate, curious peers.
• Facilitated sessions with leaders of frontier tech and science fields.
• Fresh, high-quality meals every day.
• Mini-conferences 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.
• Comfortable lodging.

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.

The villages are invitation-only and serve as the foundation for a global community of founders, researchers, engineers, scientists, and cultural figures. Our attendees are all curious, kind, and high-agency, working on something impactful in their field.

‍

Edge City creates impact in three key areas:

‍

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. These villages included a two-month experience in Montenegro with 200 full-time residents and 1000 visitors, as well as a two-week gathering in Istanbul with 400 residents.

‍

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 also a strong local leader in Austin, where she lives.

‍

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.

‍

In 2023, we proved that these types of gatherings are incredible accelerators of positive impact. We invite you to be part of the next steps in our journey.

‍

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