Newsletter #2: Dinners

Our weekly dinners are a melting pot for ideas, people, and tastes

Feb 16, 2023

Newsletter topics

After reflecting on my previous newsletter, I wondered how this could be a way for us to provide value to you all. As a reminder, our goal is to create a campus in Lower Haight/Duboce dense with people and activities that help you explore and build things that give you life.

Here are some ideas:

How to live near friends
Housing recommendations
Design layouts that create a thriving community
Events in Solaris/SF
Writing about productive exploration for those early in the idea phase

I’ll be exploring different formats over the next few weeks. Please let me know if you like anything from above or have other suggestions. Your feedback goes a long way:

The strength of dinners

Today, we’re talking about our community’s strongest tradition. Weekly group dinners. Every Sunday night, Solaris residents and friends gather in one apartment to enjoy a meal and engage in lively conversations.

The importance of the weekly dinner cannot be understated. San Francisco possesses the most productive culture in the world, so making time for friendships is difficult. A dedicated dinner sets a consistent routine for our community and friends to come together and catch up. The best part about Solaris is that residents live within a block or two of each other, so making the effort to come out is pretty trivial. Proximity unlocks rapport, and rapport unlocks all the wonders of human connection.

Our dinner starts later in the evening. It begins by hiking up our stairs, taking shoes off at our cubby, and walking down our long Victorian hallway to enter our unusually open space. When entering our kitchen, you’ll be greeted with fresh smells and forward-thinking ideas. Chances are you’ll hear chatter about GPT-3, GPT-4, embeddings, AGI, search, and Magicform—which our very own Will Brown is quite the evangelist for. You’ll also commonly hear conversation about all the week's happenings—products, news, ideas, progress, you name it, we’re probably discussing it. This week we talked quite a bit about the upcoming American Renaissance, and it’s creations like Cam Wiese’s World’s Fair and Mo Mahmood’s More Monuments.

The way we do dinners is collaborative. Each week, one apartment takes on the responsibility of preparing the meal. This means choosing the guest list, creating the menu, and setting the vibe. It’s cool because we get to experience the creativity and personality of a different Solaris house every week. It was Helios’ turn last week and they decided to host a Trader Solaris night. Max + crew decided to purchase lots of groceries from Trader Joe’s and turned the whole place into an ambiance of a market. We’ve done poke, barbeque, pizza, and Italian in previous weeks.

One of my favorite things from the dinners is seeing talented people cross paths. It’s amazing to watch when a new idea emerges, someone lights up with energy and jumps into work. This has happened at a dinner before, and it’s completely doable because we have a coworking space at the house, so when inspiration strikes, you can get building. Moments like these are so unique to the Bay Area because the excitement lies in the idea of going back into building as opposed to merely the outcome. I love living in SF.

Join us at the next group dinner by filling out this form and mentioning the Sunday dinner under “Anything else?”. We can’t promise a spot will be available, but we’ll continue to involve as many people as possible.

We want to help more builders live in community and create great things, so if you know someone looking for a place to stay or an environment to build in, please share the Solaris Newsletter with them. It will go a long way. I appreciate you for reading this all the way through.

Until next time,

Thomas

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Events

2/19 - Sunday dinner @ 7pm
2/17 - Friday Startup Salon @ 7pm

Specify what event you want to attend in “Anything else?”

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