Hello everyone. Another grim week. The plain truth is that we must stop selling weapons of war to random civilians.
The clear view
In 1727, 21-year-old Benjamin Franklin invited, as he put it, “my most ingenious acquaintance[s] into a club of mutual improvement.” He named his new club the Junto, after the Spanish word for ‘join’. On Friday night, Franklin and the twelve Junto members (all men, of course) gathered in a Philadelphia tavern to discuss topics of morality, politics, or national philosophy, and debated “in the sincere spirit of inquiry into truth… with no penchant for discussion or desire for victory.”
Nearly 300 years later, I zoomed in on a study group inspired by Franklin’s colloquia. It consisted of budding tech founders discussing Web3. All the virtual attendees were young and super serious, and they all seemed to have completed their assigned technical lectures on topics like token speed and liquidity mining design space. Although the meeting took place just as the Luna stablecoin imploded, the seminarians dismissed this crisis in the crypto world as a passing distraction. The most important thing, they agreed, was to create products that people want to use, not play growth games with tokens.
Sober, long views like these may be the defining feature of South Park Commons, an ambitious incubator program that has enjoyed this ongoing seminar and many others for seven years, including fireplace chats with tech celebrities, panel discussions, and demo days. SPC has had relatively little public exposure to date, despite launching more than 150 startups and investing in companies totaling $35 billion. The low profile ties in with the grandiose tone of the project: in a tech ecosystem where ideas and startup funding happen almost simultaneously, SPC focuses on giving its 450 members a thoughtful grounding in a specific domain, as well as an understanding of the social impact long before the first elevator pitch. “People come to SPC because they want to take the time to be sure of what they’re going to do next,” said Samantha Whitmore, a machine learning scientist who audited the Web3 seminar and is almost going to use that knowledge to help her develop her skills. start your own business.
The program’s creators are Aditya Agarwal and Ruchi Sanghvi, who met and married as early Facebook employees (Sanghvi was the original program manager for the News Feed) and later held executive positions at Dropbox. In 2015, after taking a breather, Sanghvi recognized a void in the high-octane startup world — a safe haven for talented tech entrepreneurs to gain deeper knowledge and domain expertise as they pondered their next business. The couple decided to start such a startup incubator. They regarded the Junto alehouse sessions as one of their models, as did Franklin’s warning that “great haste creates waste.” Other incubators take founders from zero to 60 in no time. SPC focuses on prequel territory, with members going from -1 to zero on their own time. Along the way, founders would acquire knowledge to make them better leaders, perhaps even less obsessed with being the next Travis Kalanick or Adam Neumann. It’s what Franklin would have set up if he were a venture capitalist.
“In the tech industry, basically everyone jumps into the next company or starts a startup and spins it in three months,” Sanghvi says. “But deep tech takes some time. Nobody seemed to have the time and space to build those kinds of businesses.”
