Title: "(76) 02 - The Network State Conference 2023 - Jason Benn - The Neighborhood SF - YouTube" Transcript: "hello everyone I'm Jason Ben founder of the neighborhood and I totally did not realize to cut off for submitting slides so we're going to Freestyle the visuals here a little bit um just ignore the breadcrumbs they're going to be all wrong uh okay so the neighborhood is a 1 square mile campus in the middle of San Francisco and we help start autonomous communities and hangout spots uh we are Grand funded for the next two years uh we that gives me time to build up uh sustainable uh Partnerships with real estate providers uh and that'll be our business model um as for this kicked off of movement piece um I basically just drew a circle on a map and 20,000 people saw it and it turns out when you spend an absurd amount of effort justifying why one square mile on the Bay Area is the best in the whole Bay Area and people are already willing to live in the rough vicinity they are totally down to move there uh and so it does feel like a little movement um we we've also inspired uh at least 150 people to move I have kind of lost count uh We've also inspired communities like hfz uh which is an AI accelerator and Solaris and mats maker space to start here um so that's really cool uh okay so mainly what I spend all my time doing is trying to create truly excellent co-living communities uh that is the foundation of the neighborhood co- living is where 10 to 20 adults usually live in one big house and share a kitchen uh and if you're familiar you might be skeptical it's it's like kind of a niche subculture and it's like really popular in San Francisco but not as much elsewhere I was certainly skeptical too uh but for background my first co- living experience started in 2016 when I co-founded a house called the archive here uh in the beginning we were an ambitious but not obviously unusual group of friends and over the next six years the 15 founding teams in the house co-founded companies that have now raised $1. 1 billion and co-author gpt3 which none of us would have ever predicted amazingly a third of those teams said that the archive was pivotal to their outcomes look at this bunch of normal hippies I mean this is like very regular and uh those are amazing outcomes so the natural question is why don't more houses like this exist like there was 20x more demand for the archive than there was space so why are these transformative co- living communities so rare well the main problem is that you need some really great people like some of my housemates were just amazing uh but great people are really hard to coordinate so if they're charismatic they have Rich social lives if they're really interesting they spend their weekends building tentacle robots or hacking Afghanistan which are both real stories uh and so how do you start many new ones I uh it's hard to say so one key Insight came from the unconferences I've been going to uh an unconference is like a conference like this except it's much smaller and everyone gives an informal talk about anything they want and I kept noticing that these events these weekends kept producing really strong senses of community and there's a bunch of reasons for this but the main one is that when everyone has a chance to demonstrate their passion uh you're often bursting with conversations by the end of the weekend and you feel like you're part of a special group uh but unfortunately they always scatter to the winds after and so this is one of the key insights perhaps an unconference could be a kind of archive Factory and this could be the Keystone of the neighborhood strategy so I set to work and I hosted my first unconference in March of this year here yeah here's the right side uh and it was themed around climate so recruiting a great group is the central challenge of this whole project and so it's how I spend most of my time uh unfortunately in January I had all of five friends in climate right I'm on time uh so I told one of those five friends about the concept and she got really excited and she pulled out her phone on the spot and she went through three months of texts and she recommended 25 different uh of her favorite 25 of her favorite people in climate right on the spot and and that was when I realized that I could curate this whole event through chains of warm introductions uh which was great uh so I wanted the bar for a warm recommendation to be I want to be more like this person in some way but I also wanted an even gender ratio and I wanted everyone to be at least curious about co- living in the Bay Area and while I'm at it I also wanted there to be representation from all the different skill sets that are relevant to climate and I wanted it to be mostly Builders and at most 15% VCS uh and those were a lot of constraints for someone who's outside of the industry so I built a tool to help uh I made a live updating dashboard that predicts the expected number of attendees for each category given our funnel metrics and conversion ratios between funnels and I scraped people's LinkedIn and I wrote I used GPT to predict which categories everyone was in and then I would send people this document this live updating dashboard before asking for their recommendations and they would see that our goal for non-male attendees was 40% but we're only currently at 33% or that we're looking for all these types of uh technical skill sets but we don't have any industrial Engineers or oceanographers yet and lo and behold when they see this document first 75% of their warm introductions would be for the categories we were missing and so recommendations became self-correcting and so over a period of two months I went from six friends in climate to collecting 300 Warm introductions uh my EA and I researched 206 we invited 152 92 expressed interest in attending 60 one ultimately attended and we hit basically all of our constraints almost exactly which was amazing uh we aimed for 40% non-mil and hit 37. 7% which is not bad for a deep Tech conference we wanted at most 15% funders and got 13.9% we want we wanted 19 skill sets and got 18 Etc and despite not explicitly seeking them 54% of the people that came were our venture-backed Founders which was interesting and It produced critical mass for a co- living house it it it seated a a medium size group that started meeting with me every week to recruit find a house and build the culture that we wanted to uh eventually start my sister even came and got a job it was awesome uh by the way event planning is a chaotic business my original venue was covered by six feet of snow 10 days before the event and so I had to replan the whole thing so we had to uh I I hit the original dates but we had new chefs new venues and staff uh however the new venue neglected to tell me that their Decor was like The Party Store vomited on Barbie's dreamhouse it was for a singles party for the owner's 60-some mom like the next nightow and so we changed the theme from climate to I love climate we made a few tactical updates of the decor sweet Earth always be mitigating your carbon impact it worked out great so it produced the chiness that we were hoping for um but 61 people are Sly too small and if you want to create a 15 person co- living house in one Fell Swoop you need to double or triple the size of the event but that creates a new problem which is that big conferences and maybe we can relate to this here uh make it really hard to connect with people which is why we're all here so there're mostly big group conversations and it's difficult to justify a one-on-one conversation when you're always being interrupted uh in a chaotic environment and so for my next done conference which was 3 months later and themed around Ai and Alignment I tried something different um the basic idea was to break up everyone at the conference into groups of four for every breakfast lunch and dinner throughout the weekend and then I would dispatch them to local cafes and restaurants within walking distance and now they have 90 minutes of quiet time uninterrupted to connect with three other people in their group and there'll be different groups all weekend now I could have matched people randomly and it probably would have been an improvement but I really wanted to find a way to make people to introduce people to others that they really wanted to meet um and so being being a former ml engineer for you know 9 years naturally I used AI so I asked everyone two questions uh during onboarding I asked what three questions would you love to talk about at this event and summarize your technical background and expertise in a tweet and then I asked GPT for every pair of people would these two people have a great conversation based on any of person A's questions based on person B's expertise and that produced a total preferences Matrix which I could feed to the state-of-the-art matching algorithm which is called the problem is called theate roommates problem the solution won in Nobel in 2012 and it outputs given a preferences Matrix for a group uh arbitrary subgroups of an arbitrary size and so now I've got my groups of four great uh and people really loved it uh I know this from my qualitative feedback but also because uh a research scientist leading a team that Deep Mind came up to me afterwards with tears in his eyes and said it would be hard to improve and so now I've got the beginnings of a repeatable machine that creates communities that are both both very well curated and very densely connected so the uh March climate UNC conference did produce the nucleus of a co- living house and after meeting with them weekly for almost 5 months we finally found a house and recruited the whole group and they signed leases in September last month they're called Treehouse and I'm super proud of them I think they're at least as warm and inspiring as the archive was when we started and I can't wait to do the same for AI for biotech for sci-fi storytelling for abundance policy for metascience for neurotech and for much more over the coming years The Vibes goal is to feel as cozy as a small town as Lively as a University campus and uh maybe the wild dream is to maybe have a little chance of kicking off a tiny Renaissance in the middle of San Francisco so if any of these tickle you're fancy uh I invite you to connect with the neighborhood of this URL and if you're curious about investing in a neighborhood real estate fund then you can shoot me an email organizers neighborhood sf.com and thank you so much"