The new episode of The Engine is up! This week, we talk about startup cities.
At one point in our lives, we all face the question - where should I live? And it’s a complicated one. Conventional wisdom tells us that you want to be where the best are at what you aspire to be. If you’re in entertainment, you come to LA. If you’re in business and finance, it’s New York. If you’re building in tech, you come to San Francisco. Or at least it used to be so.
Things have been changing for a long time, but they have really picked up momentum since the pandemic, when so many teams became remote. Now, you could technically live in a remote ski resort or on an island in the Caribbean as you’re building your future unicorn startup and turning your sleepy village into a new startup city. But how realistic is it? And what goes into that?
This week on The Engine, my guests are Nick Smoot and Christopher Pennino. Both have a ton of experience in creating both startup communities and developing build environments optimized for startups.
Nick is an entrepreneur, investor, real estate developer, and ecosystem builder who has been executing the community-first, real-estate second thesis for the last decade. His work in startup ecosystems has been recognized by Google, Brookings, Milken Institute, and Bloomberg. He has spent time in over 200 cities in the last decade, working with government, education, industry, and community members. He is also the author of the book Better - How to Build Creative Communities that Transform The World.
Chris is an architectural scholar, designer, and consultant. His personal research focuses on Special Economic Zones, and how technology developments impact our built environments. He serves as the Head of Architecture and Urbanism at Vid Sertsya Budova, a startup city that's being built outside of Kyiv for internally displaced people. He is also the Chief of Research and Development at build_cities.
Nick explains the concept of transforming existing cities rather than building new ones from scratch, "I personally believe a startup city can be quite simply a city who's been in an industrial revolution malaise that finally decides they want to put both feet on the ground again and get out of bed and quit doomscrolling about their past."
Chris defines a startup ecosystem even broader as “any kind of pushback against perceived austerity or kind of staleness in one's perception of the built environment.”
If you find yourself in one of these doom-scrolling cities stuck in their industrial malaise, you may be in just a perfect place to get a startup ecosystem going.
YouTube link:
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