Distributing builder culture

Can bottoms-up communities recreate SF builder culture before it eats them?

I slightly cringe every time I hear the word “builder” but it represents a growing trend of people working on tech-enabled projects and side hustles. The term is tied to a combination of hustle, hacker, and startup culture, largely brought to life by the mystical ideal of the founders and startups of San Francisco.

At one point, this culture (and the success it created) was thought to only exist in San Francisco and to a limited amount in other “startup hubs” across the world. Many people still believe in this “SF or bust” mindset (they are largely incentivized to but that is a story for another day).

Fun fact: One of the most idealized depictions of builder culture, John Carmack in the early days of id Software, took place in Shreveport, Louisiana.

On the flip side, COVID broke a lot of the chains that tied builder culture specifically to SF. More and more effort has gone into distributing builder culture and its benefits to the rest of the world. This includes culture, ideas, meetups, hackathons, content, and more.

The question remains: Will it work? If you believe Twitter X, “SF is back.” Will distributed builder culture be able to take on SF builder culture and win? Does that even matter?

What are the best parts of SF builder culture anyway?

What makes San Francisco and builder culture so special? What are the characteristics that have helped create so much success?

• Speed: The pace is just faster. Move fast and break things. Many startups die because they are too slow. As Elon says “I have this mantra. It’s called, ‘If a schedule is long, it’s wrong. If it’s tight, it’s right.” Good ideas have competitors and they will try to defeat you in any way possible. Do things that don’t scale. When you aren’t around people working hard, it is very easy to underestimate how hard people are working.

• Experimentation: Validating startup ideas is a science. It helps when so many of your potential customers are so close to you. Building MVPs and trying to solve real problems. A/B testing, growth hacking. Less planning, more doing. Action reveals information.

• Acceptance of failure: Failure is part of a longer-term journey. Failures are not cut from the scene. That experience is seen as invaluable. Less tall poppy syndrome when a bunch of people around you are tall poppies.

• Ambition: The failures are paid for by massive successes, but for those massive successes to happen, people need to aim for them. When you see the current success of people around you and the past success of people in a similar position, you believe you can do the same.

• Openness: Detailing your journey is some of the best learning. Blogging, tweeting, sharing culture, advisors. Because there are many legit companies, best practices can spread by people moving between them.

• Extremely supportive: The rewards of helping someone are so high. They could be the next big founder, VC, hire, thought leader. Connecting and funding people is common. “How can I be helpful” is a meme for a reason.

Can the world steal the best parts of SF’s culture?

It takes a lot to build a culture. SF has benefited from 100+ years of culture building from the military, universities, semiconductors, computers, the internet, social media, YC, and now AI. All this compounds and the outcome is the startup builder culture it has now. The rise of AI in SF has shown just how “so back” builder culture remains.

Because of the amount of wealth builder culture has created, governments around the world have tried their best to copy it. They’ve created startup accelerators, hacker spaces, funding for AI, tech weeks, kombucha and cold brew on tap, tech conferences. In 2019, Sam Altman said there are 8,000 YC clones in China alone.

It’s not obvious any of it has made a big impact. SF remains the main draw to people who identify with this culture. Even if they don’t live there, the best founders, startups, talent, and VCs still spend a significant amount of time there.

Although the top-down government efforts aren’t seeing a lot of success (especially for the amount they invest in them), the bottoms-up community-led ones are punching above their weight and succeeding. They are doing this by creating pockets of builder culture wear it hadn’t reached before.

Examples of distributed builder culture

Small groups of people can create a culture of excellence regardless of their surrounding environment. This is proven by the many examples of scenes (or scenius) throughout history. Distributed builder culture is doing this.

The success rides on multiple waves like a community hole left by COVID, remote work, new frontiers in AI and crypto, and societal stagnation. From this, we are seeing a rebuild of these communities in new ways, empowered by new technologies, knowledge, practices, and distribution methods. Examples include:

• Buildspace: People bring their ideas to life over 6 weeks, sharing progress, and get support from a like-minded community of builders. Wraps with a 3-day final showcase that 1000s of people attend.

• Socratica: A network of weekly coworking sessions to work on your passion projects with like-minded people. Casual demos at the end of each session and linked to bigger demo events. Originated at the University of Waterloo but now has associated groups worldwide.

• Novus: An every Saturday builder meetup in Vancouver with demos at the end of each session. This is one I attend regularly. Also related is Minimum Viable Demos (which you should come to June 30th).

• Neo Toronto: Lumping together New Demos, 535, and the growing builder movement in Toronto.

• Grants: 1517 Medici Project, Slope (and Merge), Emergent Ventures. Low strings attached funding for ambitious people and projects. Often comes with encouragement and communities of others who received grant funding.

• Z Fellows: A community of determined technical founders with funding, guest speakers, office hours, mentorship, and networking.

• Pioneer: A now-defunct internet accelerator run by Daniel Gross. Created a community of 300+ founders in 50+ countries. Shared progress updates, pitched to experts, and got feedback.

• Indiehacking: Not exclusively indiehackers.com, but a group of people who combine startup building, geographic arbitrage, content creation, and solopreneurship. Trying to make money online and sharing their progress along the way.

• Verci: A second home and community for creatives in New York. Hosts workshops and shares weekly updates.

Each of these are relatively new creations that embody some of what made SF builder culture so successful while spreading it well beyond a single physical location.

How does distributed builder culture win?

Distributed builder culture has already done a lot to encourage smart, young, talented people to pursue building. It’s shown people are taking this path, creating support structures for it, and that it’s available to anyone. Spreading this to more people, no matter where, is extremely valuable.

Doing this requires communities to stay alive. This takes a large (and underrated) amount of energy. All communities have ups and downs, inflows and outflows, but need to continue to exist and create interactions between people and ideas. Momentum matters a lot.

To stay alive, communities need to focus on the right things. Distributed builder culture winning does not mean SF needs to lose. There is a lot for builders to learn from SF’s builder culture as well as other distributed builder communities. “Great artists steal.” Learn from startups and make something builders want.

Finally, building should remain the focus. “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” Every group of people will get tugged in various ways away from their defined purpose until that is lost. Builder culture is battling the status quo and needs to fight for a space for that culture to exist. You may not see them, but some people don’t want builder culture to exist, you can’t let them win.

If distributed builder communities can continue to stay alive and spread builder culture, their future is bright.