Newsletter #1

We're officially sharing more details about the project!

Hey everyone!

Welcome to the Solaris newsletter. This is the first email I'm sending and I'm excited to tell you all about Solaris.

For those who don't know, Solaris is a community of friends who live in 6 neighboring apartments in Lower Haight. Our goal is to build a campus-like environment where friendships are part of daily life and you can explore your passions alongside others.

Solaris started from my previous project, Together Casa. It was an Airbnb for coliving where we connected young technologists with property owners. My aim wasn't to create a coliving marketplace, but to help people live in an inspiring environment with like-minded people and a shared goal to build meaningful projects. But, after trying for a year, I realized that coliving houses aren't designed for longevity, so in November 2021, I started exploring what could last longer. After some tinkering, I realized that what I was looking for was right in front of my face (I was visiting UC Berkeley) and thought building something like a campus could be the next step to making this dream come true.

Why a campus? Well, traditional college campuses bring people together with a common purpose through education and a community of peers. Both purpose and people are important to our well-being. I mean, my three best friends all came from college and many people miss those years. Sooooo.... why not have this experience throughout life? I initially considered building a small city on a fresh parcel of land, but after I learned about other ambitious projects like Praxis, it seems difficult. I looked into smaller scale operations near SF, but the red tape in California was a turn-off. That's when I stumbled upon Balaji Srinivasan's network state and the idea of using existing city infrastructure to coordinate people to live near each other caught my attention.

A few months later, I was renting an Airbnb in Lower Haight trying to figure out where to live long-term and Max Krieger suggested a coliving house, but I knew from Together Casa that I didn't want to manage one nor did I think it’d work long term. Instead, we came up with the idea of getting lots of neighboring apartments with 1-4 people each. You could have all the benefits of community, while still keeping a sense of privacy because not everyone shared the same amenities. This sounded cool, but seemed difficult. But, after a lot of effort, we ended up with two neighboring apartments just one block away from our Airbnb. Awesome, right?

Since then, Solaris has grown from two apartments to six and amazing relationships have formed, with great projects being built. We have a weekly accountability group, a daily workout group, a weekly dinner series, a coworking space, popup events, hackathons, people collaborating on projects, parties and more. It even surprises me at times. It's starting to feel like a real home and slice of Silicon Valley. But, it still feels like we've created the dorms, and not a place for people to learn and grow yet.

Fortunately, people come to SF to build things and that's what most events and activities revolve around, so at least people have outlets to do their learning. But, I find that many people are alone in figuring out what they want to create and don't have the freedom to do so. Young people have so much energy and it's a missed opportunity to require them to have financial independence before exploring. What if you could give people the time to explore? What if you gave 10 people that blessing and they lived a few doors from each other? These questions are on top of mind for me now and what will be guiding me throughout this upcoming year. I think figuring this out + bringing more people together & we'll have a small startup campus.

That's all for now! I don't know what future updates will look like, but I'll keep you posted. Let me know if you want to come to one of our dinners. They're every Sunday evening and it's a great opportunity to meet the Solaris community and learn more about what we're building here.

If you made it to the end, you’re awesome.  And if you have any questions or want to learn more, feel free to reach out.

Cheers,

Thomas