Matthias Bohlen

I have some hard news We’re closing the doors to Solaris In the last two years, we’ve helped hundreds move to Hayes Valley, opened a thriving office for early stage co’s, and our early members achieved a collective $1B valuation But sadly, we couldn’t turn it into a growing business When I started Solaris, the ambition was to turn a square mile of SF into a campus for people to build things That meant thousands of builders living next to one another and lots of places to live & work I believed the path to doing this successfully in SF would be to start an office for AI startups (core economy in SF) & housing directory, then use the demand from these to raise a real estate fund to open up many more spaces This didn’t pan out as expected. 1/ There’s limited demand for early stage startup working space at any given time 2/ Once we had demand for office space the margins were razor thin and we had constant turnover (people moving cities, startup growing, joining other startups, etc) 3/ Homeowners aren’t willing to pay for placing tenants, there’s tons of demand to move to Hayes These two paths (residential and commercial real estate) not working made a real estate business (and thus raising a fund) nonsensical. I feel grateful to have taken a stab at something ambitious and more importantly something that has made a solid impact on many founders’ trajectories at building something wonderful. Hearing people’s stories reminded me why I even wanted this for myself: to live in an environment that breeds greatness within yourself. Where you choose to live and who that’s around could mean all the difference. I’m immensely grateful to all of my investors, customers, and friends that’ve believed in me over the years. You all have meant the world to me. I’m also grateful to my co-founder @jacobshamberger who has done incredible work and none of this would’ve been possible without. Same with @neallseth who built directorysf with me. As for what’s next I’m going to take some time and evaluate my assumptions, learn from others working on Network State adjacent things, and try again. The way we live today is still too far isolated & filled with garbage to simply let go of because the first attempt didn’t pan out. Moreover, my shower thoughts constantly bring me to imagining what life will be like when AGI & ASI is here—a world full of people doing what they love enabled by labor value going to 0 will change everything. In the meantime We’ll be moving out of our office space on Jan 1, so if you are looking for a great deal on office space lmk. Here are some details: - $17K/mo for 10K sqft - $8.5k/mo for 5k sqft - Right across the street from Hayes Valley - Available Jan 2 - 1yr lease - Fully furnished Appreciate you all. Until next time 🫡

ppl in sf are nicknaming the SoMA-Mission-Potrero district "The Arena" because of all the Al engineers and researchers actually trying stuff down here @openai, @notionhq, @replit, @neuralink, @ycombinator, @AdeptAILabs, @replicatehq, @roboflow, @langchain, @trychroma, @newcomputer, @getlindy, @brevdev, @metaphorsystems, @flair_ai, @AviSchiffmann, @dwarkesh_sp, @morph_labs, @smolmodels bonus: we are mostly in San Francisco District 9, which was a scifi film about how humanity copes with new alien life forms among us (deleted previous version because got the district wrong and missed out my lovely darling Notion/Replit/Lindy)