 Cool, let's get started. So we're Andrew and Priya Rose and we're the organizers of Fractal. Fractal is a walkable campus full of friendly, ambitious nerds in New York City and it's an example of how you can physically gather your online network over just a couple of years. We're still early but we wanna share our story as a case study for those of you who out there dream like us of one day settling down surrounded by a dense network of friends who inspire you. But of course, like all interesting projects, Fractal is iterative. Organizing Fractal was an iterative process and we'll walk you through our cycle so that you can get a feel for it yourself. Starting, of course, with a vision. Isolated by typical working life and a pandemic, we dreamt up maybe a somewhat typical utopic vision of raising kids in a multi-generational village of the future. We would blend technology, urbanism and networked community to create a new kind of life. We would be economically powerful and sovereign but it would be built by and for our friends, not faceless industries. We would mentor each other's kids. We'd create a solar punk library, a coffee shop, a cafe. We would start companies and friendly rivalries. We'd build a university, we'd dance, we'd sing together. But we're not delusional. People have been dreaming about fairytale utopias for generations and utopia doesn't exist like that in reality. You can't just create a new society whole cloth. You have to inherit and build on one that you were given. We believe there's no secret sauce, no magical governance structure, no economic system that solves all our problems. Community organizers have to incrementally slouch toward utopia like everybody else. That being said, you should still write your manifesto but I'm getting ahead of myself. After we decided to take the project seriously and enter execution stage, we did three things. We wrote our manifesto, we started a research project and most importantly, we started our first project in New York City and we had to do that to learn everything that books couldn't teach us. So it's been about two years since then and while we don't have our solar punk utopia yet, we do have a campus of 36 residents that serves as a shelling point for over 400 people. We have a third space where we co-work and we host events, we teach classes, we run a civic boot camp where you learn all about the history and governance of New York City and we run art residencies. So what does a typical week at Fractal look like? Let me show you. A movie night, a silent reading and writing night, a machine learning class, a demo day for a community building class, a music jam, a trash pickup and lots and lots of spontaneous hangouts. So how did we go from nomadic to network village in two years? Well it was pretty simple. We had three key ingredients and these ingredients helped solve the cold start problem. So once the neighborhood is successful then it becomes self-propagating. But how do you get a neighborhood begun in the first place? That is the cold start problem. So the first thing we did is we planted the flag. So essentially our friends needed to believe that we were committed to being in a particular place before they uprooted their own lives to come live with us. So essentially we chose a neighborhood in East Williamsburg in Brooklyn, New York and we wrote up our vision and then we posted it online and we sent it to our friends. Then we started hosting weekly so that our community could come together. So we essentially just hosted a dinner party every Sunday night and our friends knew that they were always default invited and that they could bring a plus one. And so in that way our network started to grow and to densify and become a community. And we also offered short term stays. So many of our friends had this paradox of choice. They essentially had remote jobs and they could live in any city that they wanted. And so post-pandemic they were living nomadically but they knew that they wanted to settle down somewhere they just didn't know where. So we give our chance, we give a chance to our friends to stay with us for a couple of days or a couple of months before they sign a lease in our building. So what can you learn from our story if you wanna build a campus with your friends? First of all, we recommend that you keep it simple. When we first had this idea of living in a neighborhood with our friends we were told, ah, my friends and I have been dreaming about doing that for years. But there was this consistent feeling when they said that that the talk was just talk and that coordinating friends and timelines is impossibly complex. But we don't think so. We think the reason is because people have bloated plants. They have these massive pie in the sky visions and they try to execute on it all at once and they aren't willing to accept a piece meal or shallow version of it. Our friends would say, first I'm gonna get rich and then I'm gonna get land and then I'll get 20 of my friends and family to all agree on where to live and then I'll build a village. But we weren't rich. We didn't put any money into fractal beyond paying the rent on our own apartment. Friends who wanted to move near us simply signed their own lease in our building and we think because of this that building a neighborhood is a coordination problem. Not a money problem. To reiterate, we didn't need money or land or dows or software or governance to build our neighborhood and neither do you. That's not to knock any of these things though. They're important technologies and they should be used when appropriate. But when appropriate is not when you're alone in your apartment dreaming of a community, we believe that you should add these things on top of a community that has already shown its ability to coordinate and trust each other. In other words, network first, then state. So remember, incrementalism wins. Everybody wants to be Lady Gaga performing at the Super Bowl. But it's easy to want something so glamorous. The truth is Lady Gaga had to play at small parking lot concerts for years before she became that famous. Similarly, the very beginning of a network village isn't that glamorous. It's not that sexy. It's sexy maybe 10 or 20 years down the line, hopefully. So when we first moved into our apartment building, it was just three of us, three of us with a dream. And you have to enjoy being three people starting to build this in the same way that Lady Gaga enjoyed playing concerts in parking lots. So perhaps we should be up here trying to convince you why our project is special and irreplaceable and why we are such important and valuable founders, but I hope to do the opposite. I want you to walk away thinking, that doesn't sound so hard. Maybe I should be up there. I want you to go home and host your first weekly event. I want you to go home and plant the flag that you know you should be planting and share an imperfect but obviously better vision of what life could be with your friends. And if you don't know who to send that vision to, send it to me. I love reading that stuff. As for us, when we get home, we have new visions to execute on and we could use your help. So first, we're going multi-generational. That means researching and experimenting on homeschools, community nursery and library designs, technology for babies, childcare, temporary baby apprenticeships for our baby curious friends. We're also building a network university. World-class knowledge is already free, which is something I find quite interesting and we basically believe that networks of friends will take advantage of this first by offering cheap courses to each other and to the public. Our mission is to be some of the first people to do this, to prove the model works and then open source it so that people like you, people like us, can build it all over the place. Finally, we're planning a rural village within driving distance from our current community. This one's obvious enough. We want a retreat center to escape the city when things get kind of crazy and a place for parents to build a life that's a little bit slower. Maybe eventually a proper campus for the university project. If you find yourself excited about any of these, please reach out to us. We could use all the help we can get. That being said, we're all gonna make it. Thank you very much. Enjoy the Network State Conference. Thank you.