For the last two decades I've lived between festivals, pop ups, network-state experiments, and the global remote-work community. In each of these environments, I saw real glimpses of how humans want to live — community-driven, creative, collaborative, intergenerational, and free. The problem was always the same: none of them lasted long enough to become home.
And that led me to the first fundamental lesson.
1. Pop-ups are magical but ephemeral. Traditional real estate is slow, expensive, and often loses momentum long before it reaches critical mass. The missing middle is where society actually forms.
Festivals showed me that infrastructure can be deployed at unbelievable speed. A thousand tents become a town in forty-eight hours. Tens of thousands of people live together safely with shared purpose, rituals, marketplaces, and culture — and then it all disappears.
Pop ups and remote work communities showed me the same thing in a different way. You can gather incredible people quickly anywhere in the world. You can build trust, belonging, and creative energy almost instantly. But after a month or two the structures dissolve, the WhatsApp groups go quiet, and the magic evaporates.
Then I'd spend time in intentional communities or slow-build real estate projects, places that take 15 or 20 years before they feel alive. They reach permanence, but the timeline crushes the momentum. Most people lose interest long before the society emerges. If it does emerge it often stagnates with the second generation.
So the question that changed everything for me was simple:
What lives between a two-month pop up and a twenty-year city build?
That missing middle is where humanity has no proven model. And that's what led to the idea of the Minimum Viable Society.
Temporary infrastructure can give us speed. Modularity can give us adaptability. Iteration can give us resilience. And together they allow us to reach critical mass quickly enough for a real community to form.
But speed alone doesn't build a society. Which led me to the second lesson.
2. You cannot build a real society out of one type of person. You must cast the net wider. Much wider.
Pop ups attract one demographic. Crypto communities attract another. Nomads attract another. Intentional communities skew to another. And almost every attempt at alternative living fails for the same reason:
it becomes a monoculture.
A society is not a curated cohort — it's an ecosystem.
A real society needs:
- parents and teenagers
- founders and service workers
- farmers and chefs
- healthcare practitioners
- engineers and educators
- local residents
- artists, operators, builders
- elders, youth, families, skeptics, newcomers
- people who love crypto
- people who've never heard of crypto
- people who want adventure
- people who just want somewhere stable to raise their kids
Every place that inspired me — Zuzalu, Prospera, Noma, festivals, eco-villages — had brilliance in one dimension but lacked the diversity of roles required to become a functioning town.
The insight became clear:
If we want to build a society, we must bring together dozens of already-existing communities and industries, not just one.
But a federation of different communities, professions, and skill sets who choose to co-create a shared vision.
MVS exists because society is not built from similarity, it is built from interdependence.
But once you gather enough people, with enough diversity, and enough commitment, something else becomes possible. And this is the third lesson.
3. With a large enough community committing to the cause, you can apply venture scalability and SaaS economics to solve the housing crisis and give people ownership.
This is the piece I couldn't ignore.
If you gather a big enough group of aligned people, you unlock a new economic engine:
- economies of scale
- group purchasing power
- recurring subscription revenue
- shared infrastructure
- compounding membership
- distributed ownership through land credits
- reinvestment loops
- modular scaling
- governance that evolves through data
- the ability to negotiate with governments as a bloc
In other words: you can finance and build a town the way you'd scale a startup — fast, iterative, capital-efficient, and with a path to ownership for the people who live there.
Not ownership of 0.5 percent of a giant pie. Not a speculative token. But ownership of your own lot, earned through your contribution, while the commons are held in a trust.
A place where:
- housing becomes affordable through scale
- land appreciation benefits residents
- community life is financially sustainable
- families can put down roots
- members can move across multiple MVS sites like a global federation
- governance is transparent and participatory
- and the people who build the town own the town
This is not just a different way of building real estate, it is a different way of building: Society as a Service.
The Synthesis
These three lessons converge into one vision:
Minimum Viable Society is the missing middle between a pop up and a city — a fast-built, modular, multi-community, co-owned town that can reach critical mass in months instead of decades.
We use what festivals taught us about rapid, temporary coordination at scale. We use what digital nomads taught us about demand aggregation and location flexibility. We use what network states taught us about jurisdictional leverage and governance as infrastructure. We use what communities taught us about trust, social cohesion, and long-term participation. And we use what startups taught us about scale, iteration, and capital efficiency.
The result is a place that is not temporary and not slow. Not a monoculture and not a utopia. Not a villa project and not a crypto project. But a real society, built quickly, collaboratively, and owned by the people who choose to live in it.
A Minimum Viable Society.
The first of many.