Was mentioned in 'Show Your Work' but I missed the reference

A lot of overlap with Mastermind concept - mastermind is more relatable.

Like the distinction though - scenius moves beyond the group to influence society

Some examples of startup cities

Great Notion read about creating a category around a new product

Tim Ferris talks to Balaji about a range of issues including network states

Interesting counter point about the downside of artificial scarcity and the environmental impact of NFTs

The OG article coining this term by Nick Szabo

Good post explaining the topic in more detail

Nice snippet from JC on this topic:

“I personally am a perennial optimist; a paranoid optimist. I have visions of everything going wrong but I’m an optimist in the end. Most people in the world are relatively sceptical; they are not wrong — most things don’t work. Most people are correctly sceptical. So how do you cultivate unusual optimism? You need to foster a sense an ethos, even given all the iterations, and [ask yourself]: where can this go?”

Another nice note on writing simply

Love the comment here around YC interviewers changing their decision from default no to default yes

"If I had to decide whether to fund startups based on a single question, it would be "How do you know people want this?"

The most convincing answer is "Because we and our friends want it." It's even better when this is followed by the news that you've already built a prototype, and even though it's very crude, your friends are using it, and it's spreading by word of mouth. If you can say that and you're not lying, the partners will switch from default no to default yes. Meaning you're in unless there's some other disqualifying flaw."

Great breakdown of the current landscape for charter cities