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 incubator’— a lab of experimentation for new ideas, tech, culture, and organizations, all dedicated to accelerating human flourishing.

The 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, and Governance. Edge City is part of and contributes to the Zuzalu ecosystem.

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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.

Our process is threefold:

1. We gather groups of 150+ people—each pushing the frontiers of tech, culture, or society in their own way—in a multi-week 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.

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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.

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In 2024, we’re doubling down on what worked with three core villages: one in Denver, one in the Bay Area, and one in Southeast Asia—each gathering 150+ frontier tech leaders and helping to incubate novel frontier projects.

In 2024, we will create three main gatherings:

• A week-long gathering during ETHDenver [Feb 26th - March 3rd]. We are partnering with leading organizations, including Stanford Blockchain and Uniswap Foundation, to host programming on topics ranging from protocol governance to decentralized AI. This will be a soft-launch event to introduce more folks in the community to the concept of popup villages. We expect over 1000 participants throughout the week.
• A one-month village in Northern California called Edge Esmeralda in June [June 2nd - June 29th]. This event will help us expose top builders and funders in the SF tech scenes to the movement we’re building with Edge City. We will have 150 full-time residents and ~400 visitors. We will tap into the SF tech scene and create an incredible experience to inspire our attendees to help build the Edge City movement as it grows internationally. Read our welcome letter here.
• A 6-week village in the fall in Southeast Asia [approx mid-Sept - end of Oct]. We will bring 300 people together for a longer-term innovation village. We want to create an environment for global innovators 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.

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

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The resident experience entails:

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• 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.

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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.

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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 high-leverage individuals who are brilliant, curious, and kind.

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Record your interest in getting involved in Edge City this year

Edge City creates impact in three key areas:

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1. Accelerate Resident Impact
   We fill our villages with brilliant, 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.

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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.

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Timour Kosters brings 10 years of experience building startups, including Artsy, the largest online art marketplace; Kama, a leading health-tech app; and Impact, the largest social-justice-focused social media 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.

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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.

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If you’re interested in attending, funding, or collaborating, please fill out this contributor interest form!