Building the first city from the cloud
Join us as we build a city from scratch
Bluebook Cities is building the first city from the cloud.
Today, cities are simply labor markets, and loneliness is epidemic. To end this malaise, we need to come together around a common cause: building the future our values demand. We invite you to join us on the frontier as we work to build the city of the future.
We are proud to announce that applications are open for Praxis: a society of founders, engineers, artists, researchers, investors, and young aspirants building towards a shared vision for the future through the pursuit of heroic projects. Many Praxis Members will compose our initial resident cohort in the city. If you have the will to build the future, we invite you to apply here.
We raised financing from Pronomos Ventures, Emergent Ventures, Byrne Hobart, and many excellent angel investors.
“Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Bitcoin investor Roger Ver [invested] in [Patri Friedman’s] Pronomos in 2019, a venture capital fund dedicated to building the next charter city. Pronomos is backing Bluebook Cities…” [Link]
“Emergent Ventures winners, seventh cohort [...] Dryden Brown, to help build institutions [...] through his company Bluebook Cities.” [Link]
“I’m very happy to say that I’ve actually put some money where my mouth is and invested in an early round for Bluebook Cities, a new charter city operator that will bring Shenzhen-as-a-Service to countries around the world.” [Link]
New Essays:
City from the Cloud
Shared values no longer bind cities. Cities are simply labor markets. Loneliness is malignant. People move to cities for jobs, and hope to find belonging online.
Today, we have an opportunity to reimagine cities. Software engineers built the infrastructure to support the migration of the knowledge economy from the office to the cloud. A virus catalyzed this migration. Now we can live and work wherever we choose, with whoever we choose.
With an abundance of choice, we choose to leave the metropole. We choose to build a startup society with those who share our values. Ancient Athens had 300,000 residents. Renaissance Florence had 80,000. Countless forgotten cities were far larger. The greatness of a city has little to do with its population, and everything to do with its populace. [...]
Return to the Future
In 2020, our society is divided. Technological advance has stalled. We’ve lost coherence and dynamism.
People born in the early 20th century saw the arrival of airplanes, telephones, cars, televisions, computers, and spacecraft. They expected continued progress. But somewhere along the line, reality went off-road. Man last stepped on the moon 48 years ago. The sci-fi futures our ancestors envisioned look as far in the future today as they did then. [...]
This is only the beginning. We are excited for you to take this journey with us.
Grateful for you support,
Dryden
CEO, Bluebook Cities