(2021-05-04) Srinivasan Miami Tech Week The Start Of Startup Cities

Balaji Srinivasan: Miami Tech Week: The Start Of Startup Cities. With Miami Tech Week, that moment has arrived. A critical mass of technologists just left San Francisco to alight for balmier climes. The movement that Miami Mayor Francis Suarez and Founders Fund Partner Keith Rabois began just a few months ago has achieved escape velocity.

the implications of Miami Tech Week are much bigger than Miami itself. Miami Tech Week shows that politicians have a new path to power, demonstrates a new way for citizens to exert influence over governance, proves that Silicon Valley has finally achieved its destiny of decentralization, and indicates that the era of startup cities is now underway.

1. CEO of the City

Miami demonstrates a new path to power for ambitious young politicians.

What Suarez has tapped into is not just democracy, it's technology and capitalism and emigration as well — all of the fundamental forces, rather than just one by itself.

2. Crowdchoice: The Digital Selection of a Physical Location

Second, Miami Tech Week is also an innovation for citizens, as it gives them a new way to collectively express their preferences through something we've called crowdchoice

Miami may not be for everyone. Some people may not have visas to enter the US. Some people aren't cut out for hot locales. Some people have to be near certain time zones for work. We can collect all these preferences in an app, find the jurisdictions that are already closest to those (aggregate) preferences, allow users to nominate a leader, have that leader negotiate with the sovereigns of those jurisdictions, and then execute collective migration if the negotiation is successful.

Nomadlist.com and teleport.org are search engines for individual digital nomads. What does a tool for collective migration look like?

3. The Next Silicon Valley is in the Cloud

Third, Miami demonstrates that the tech diaspora is now fully mobile and can use the internet to coordinate a real-world migration. (cf Free-State Project)

Here's a graphic from a piece that accompanied my 2013 talk on Silicon Valley's Ultimate Exit ((2013-11-22) Balaji Srinivasan Cloud Exit):....

In the terminology of this chart, we can think of Miami Tech Week as a Cloud Gathering of thousands of people for a week, and the coming mass migration as a kind of embryonic Cloud City

4. Startup Cities are the Cryptocurrencies of the 2020s

Fourth, Miami demonstrates that startup cities are now starting. There are three definitions of a startup city:

• A city where startups happen, what San Francisco used to be prior to the current exodus.
• A city that acts like a startup, like Miami or Dubai.
• A city that is a startup itself, like Prospera, Culdesac, or Starbase, TX.
  These definitions get progressively more ambitious.*

All you need is a founding influencer and a bare piece of land. Identify a unique feature (like being vegan or car-free), design the city online, recruit a critical mass of people, then move there and build it de novo. And maybe issue a cryptocurrency to start giving an incentive for early adopters to build up their patch of earth — but do it in the form of a REIT so that they don't get too attached to a specific plot of non-fungible land, and instead have shares in the city as a whole.

It's not just about Miami or Austin anymore, but about Estonia, Singapore, Taiwan, Israel, Dubai, and New Zealand — and about Culdesac, Starbase, and Prospera.