The exponential benefits of finding the frontier of your passion

Many entrepreneurs move to the Bay Area with the passion to build world-changing startups.

It’s a smart step. But for those who’ve been in the scene a while, we know the Bay Area is a layer cake.

San Rafael is in the Bay Area. It’s hardly the helping scene for people trying to change the world. You need to be in San Francisco. And even then, there are founders grinding alone in a Pac Heights apartment, trying to keep up with the pace of the frontier, total outsiders to the people sitting in YC or the a16z Speedrun office two miles away.

The truth is, and the science from Harvard backs it up: to get the best of being at the heart of the startup ecosystem, you need to be within a mile of the core. For real knowledge spillovers, within 65 feet.

At VCity, our obsession is understanding that science. Why are people and startups a product of their environment, and just how big an influence can who you hang out with have on the trajectory of your company.

The answer is much bigger than people think.

I remember the early days of RocketSpace. 2011. The iPhone was changing everything. Every night we had demos and speakers on user behavior, iOS release features, coding hacks, surprise use cases. In the audience: Uber, Spotify, Supercell, Flexport, Intercom, and many more, shouting out ideas. Not the unicorns they are now. Sub-20-person companies. All pushing the frontier, together. Collective wisdom in a fast-moving market wins. Us versus them was the mentality.

RocketSpace, for a while, was ground zero for the tech revolution. Thirty-plus unicorns came out of one building in under a decade.

Fifteen years of studying later, we’re back to recreate the homophily. The purposeful serendipity. The scenius. Smarter. More driven. More prepared, for the technology wave of our generation.

You see these scenes for a burst. Twelve weeks at YC. A season of Speedrun. Then the room empties and the density goes with it.

What if you could stay in the scene for a year or longer? What if you could set your company cadence and mindset to extraordinary, constantly, not just for a program burst?

You see it in athletes. As they get better, they train harder and longer. It becomes addictive to perform at their best. The same thing happens to founders. Success is addictive. Effort is infectious. Find your people, and the frontier stops feeling lonely.

That’s VCity. Access to the frontier. Where your obsession isn’t weird , it’s the norm. Where the next company on the thesis sits next door.

If you’re building AI in San Francisco and you want the room, not just the zip code, get in touch