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A meta introduction

This is the first post in a series. I take notes constantly, physical and digital, that I collectively refer to as my scratchpad. Here, I’m going to grab some highlights from the past week-ish, expound for an hour or two, and post whatever I end up with.

For the uninitiated, this is in contrast to the “Founder Update,” a writing format I picked up in the tech industry. Those were basically a vehicle for founders to share private information with investors. Bluntly, I always found them soulless and performative—precisely what good writing isn’t—which offended me in a way that investors were unlikely to grok.

Another lens: you are investing in New Athens by reading this. So this is for you. And while I’m at it I’m going to have some fun.

Time to hit the phones (does anyone say that any more?)

Now that the New Athens website is live, I’m due to radically shift gears. Apart from calls with team members and a user feedback sessions, I’ve spent much of the past month heads-down. By contrast, in a past life I lived by my calendar and would regularly grind through 8–10 meaningful calls in a day. For better or worse, the pendulum is about to—and must—swing.

More complexity than I bargained for

The New Athens website is as much a writing project, as an information architecture project, as a staffing model, as a bet on particular global outcomes over the next few years. A city is many things to many people, but candidly I did not see this level of complexity coming. It took me longer than I anticipated to tease apart audiences and clarify the use cases of pages on the site. But what’s there is decent, I have a roadmap for further improvements, and, most importantly, in user research sessions nobody is getting lost any longer.

All at once, the process was exhilerating and I’m proud of the work…and I’m not sure I’d have taken it on if I knew what I was getting into. Checkpoint passed! Whew!

Who doesn’t love configuring SaaS products?

Over a three day stretch last week I poured myself into tooling. In some ways this was a good sign—I’d successfully put it off until I had enough information to do it right—but still, what a slog!

A partial list (skip ahead if you care for your sanity): I opened and/or configured accounts for Google Workspace, Fillout (forms), Notion (website CMS), Super (website host), Airtable (waitlist database and automations), 1Password (password management), and Missive (shared email imbox for the team). Add in a half-dozen domain name configuration tasks. And then securing social handles/pages, setting up profiles, and configuring notification settings on Substack, TikTok Instagram, X, and LinkedIn. (Are your eyes bleeding yet?) And then configuring notifications across tools and social platforms to flow into Missive (email tool), so everyone on the team can see and respond to activity in realtime.

Looking back, I think this was my fifth rodeo getting a basic ops stack off the ground. Every time I’ve done it, including this go-round, I have the thought, “Dang I’m pretty good—I should write a book on this!” but the closer I get to finishing, the more desperate I get to stop thinking about this crap and do something meaningful again.

I must not Slack. Slack is the mind killer. Slack is the little death…

I’m intentionally avoiding team chat apps (for now). We’re covering the base with text messages. I’ve got a lot more to say here, but for now I’ll note that Slack, Discord, and other chat apps put teams on a particular cultural path that I increasingly recognize as, at best, fraught.

Copywriting Center for Kids Who Can’t Read Good

In the run-up to publicly launching the site, I must have proofread the thing at least five times. I find this rather enojable, which is good because the site clocks in at 5500 words. That’s maybe not so much for an article, but it’s a lot of web copy. It all brought me back to my copywriting days. Oh, the memories!

…And the knowledge must not be lost! I can see it now, future me sitting the boys down, maybe they’re in middle school, dad passing on the essential distinctions between ad copy, brand marketing, conversion landing pages, audience segmentation... Eh, I can feel their eyes rolling already. Nevermind.

Until the next round, y’all. —JCS

The vast majority of feedback has been positive, in the “Looks cool!” and “Nice work!” vein. I’ll never turn that down, but a handful of comments went deeper or were constructively critical.

I have every reason to consider every reaction I can get my hands on, even from trolls. Reactions are gifts, at least in this early stage of the game. I’m also keen to grapple openly with what I hear. That’s how problems get solved—so we’ll just start doing that today.

If I responded meaningfully to the original comment I’ve included that here, too.

Last bit: If a comment was relayed to me privately, I’ve removed identifying information. I’ve also fixed the especially gut-wrenching spelling and grammatical errors. —JCS

“Smartphone-free utopia? Take my money.”

From a woman who has worked in tech for the last 15 years.

“I don’t know how I feel about no smartphones. I have family overseas and I don’t think they’d be happy if they couldn’t reach me quickly.”

From a graduate student.

“I changed to black and white for a while on my phone. I want those lawsuits showing how addictive social media and cell phones are to make some kind of difference, but I’m not sure what will happen.”

From a mom who moved from California to the Midwest to be closer to family and childcare.

“Does new Athens have a health commissioner yet??”

From a public health research scientist. Edging for the job right off the bat. Nice.

“What a shithole.”

From a thread on Hacker News, a forum popular in the Bay Area tech community.

My response: “It might be. Or it might not be.

I mean this in all sincerity, if you’re having that reaction, I invite you to join the waitlist to move to the city.

I’ve come to believe that people are mean and dismissive online (as you just were) not because they, and you, are mean and dismissive people, but because at a fundamental level there’s nothing to do on the internet. The few things we manage to do, or build, or change online are a whiff of shit on the breeze compared to the adventure, meaning, and risk of interacting with real people in physical reality.

You will benefit from moving to the city because building something in the real world with people you depend on, and who depend on you, will make you a better, happier human. Please consider it.

The waitlist form is here: https://newathens.fillout.com/waitlist

“This attempts to formalise a role for church/faith based enterprises in the welfare state. That’s political.”

From the aforementioned forum thread.

My response: “Yes, you’re right: it’s political. The whole thing is deeply political. I worked in tech in SF from 2010–2020 and one of the big mistakes of the era, IMO, was pretending that certain topics weren’t political. Or that they were no longer political because of “progress.”

In 2020 my wife and I moved to rural Appalachia, where her parents live, because they were excited to help with childcare. Without getting into the pros and cons of city vs. rural living, or blue vs. red culture, I can confidently report that many (most?) topics tech people consider non-political are all people here want to talk about—because here those topics are considered THE MOST IMPORTANT political questions of our times.

I don’t think I’m saying anything you don’t know. I guess I’ll just reiterate: You’re right, it’s political. And I’ll add: As it’s always been.

FWIW, my hope with New Athens is to strike a new balance that’s wild enough to cause hard-core partisans to pause and think, get everyone thinking from first principals again about big issues that got stuck in the culture war trap, and, at the very least, be transparent about what we’re doing so that people can self-select in or out in good faith.

“Many people with deep pockets have tried to do this and failed, from Sidewalk Labs to YC new cities to California Forever. Worth talking to all of them to figure out how you’ll best the odds and potential landmines along the way. Rooting for you!”

From an investor based in San Francisco. This last comment came my way pre-launch, but it’s good so I’m including it here.

My response: “My strategy is to start by building massive traction with boring, normal middle class Americans and use that as leverage to get over political and regulatory hurdles. No fancy renderings, no billionaire backers (yet), no promises of Smart City Utopia or not having to pay taxes or any of that. AND you’re right that I need to talk to others.

This team is setting out to build a new mid-sized U.S. city—the first great American city for families. That sure is a nice tagline, and one day I hope it’s warranted. You can read about our plans at MoveToNewAthens.com. But while I’m no scrooge (quite the opposite!), my overall feeling in this moment is now the real work begins.

In lieu of a manifesto, I’m going to keep this intentionally short. As a team, we’re betting on execution. All of us have plenty to say, and we won’t shy from publishing long essays in the future. But right now there’s a whole lot to do off-screen, nobody follows this account yet (it’s brand new), so I’m going to cut this off.

In the version of the future where we’re successful, and New Athens is a thriving city anchored by thousands of young families, I hope this launch post can serve as an example: when the payoff isn’t clear, put down the screen and go talk to a real person. Which I’m about to do in 5, 4, 3…

Wish us luck, y’all. Onwards and upwards!

—JCS

Visit the launch website