Some projects begin with a product. This one begins with a territory. Montanha Encantada, the Enchanted Mountain, sits above the beach town of Garopaba in southern Brazil, and it is where Shama has spent years growing something slower and stranger than a startup: a living network of artists, land stewards, and neighbors who gather by the moon.

“Since 2001 I organized cultural events,” Shama says in the video interview recorded for this report. “But for 16 years I'm committed to just do impact projects.” That commitment has a lineage. From 2010 to 2019 it was called Novaterra, a decade of gatherings on this land that the pandemic finally paused. What regrew from that pause carries a bigger name: G.A.I.A, the Grand Alliance of Integrity and Autonomy, an attempt to weave regenerative projects, territories, and people into one connected system. The alliance's own field guide describes it as “not a company, an organization, a religion, or an ideology” but a living system, and asks a question that could double as its design brief: how might our governance function like a mycelial network?

The G.A.I.A Caravan is that philosophy on wheels. The plan is a traveling journey of thirteen gatherings, one each month and each tuned to the moon cycle, unfolding until the total solar eclipse of 2027. The caravan is literal: the crew already has two motorhomes, painted and draped and lived-in, and the intention to take what has taken root in Garopaba out to other territories. “Understanding the challenge of each territory and what's working over there,” as Shama puts it. Not a tour that extracts an audience from each stop, but a pollination route: arrive, listen, map, connect, move on.

Shama recorded the interview at home on the mountain, and the warmth is hard to miss. This is someone describing a garden, not pitching a company.

Shama on the caravan, in his own words.

A planting log

The season's progress reads like a planting log. Before the big journey began, the crew ran five smaller events to find their rhythm: silent disco nights where a candle-lit room full of dancers glows with red headphones, immersive sound journeys, guided meditations on the beach at sunset with a DJ mixing behind the speaker.

Twice they made land art on the sand, enormous mandalas and a raked map of the world, built precisely so that people walking the beach would stop, step inside, and ask what this was. “To call people to get involved in G.A.I.A EcoSystem,” Shama writes in the report, “the mother project that it is attached.”

Thirteen moons

Then the journey proper began. The first of the thirteen gatherings happened on July 25, the second on August 28, and the cadence continues month by month toward the eclipse. Around the events, the network is thickening in ways Shama counts carefully, the way a gardener counts what actually came up: about 200 people who now know and understand the project, roughly 15 holding its governance, and 40 to 50 more who show up active and often. “A lot of amazing artists already played with us,” Shama says. “Some spiritual leaders, ecosystemic leaders. And we want to gather them on different territories that we go.”

The crew around the caravan has grown too. Crystal Evans handles executive production; Jacob Huehn holds the role the project calls netweaver, which may be the most G.A.I.A job title imaginable: the person whose work is the connections themselves.

Thirty-five seconds inside a caravan gathering.

Where the resources go

Through Artizen, G.A.I.A Caravan has raised more than $50,000 to date across seasons, beginning with $4,000 in Season 6 ($2,000 in artifact sales matched by $2,000 in unlocked match funding) and growing many times over in Season 7. Against an original goal of $4,040, the project has already grown more than tenfold past what it first asked for. The resources go where the caravan goes: fuel and upkeep for the motorhomes, production for the monthly gatherings, and the slow work of mapping territories and the people tending them. “With the resource of Artizen we're going to keep evolving on this,” Shama says. “We're already on Season 7. Understanding the game, and bringing more people to play with us.”

There is an old tension in regenerative work between staying and going. Roots need you to stay; networks need you to move. The G.A.I.A Caravan's answer is to do both: keep the mountain as home soil, and let the caravan carry seeds. Thirteen moons from now, when the sky goes dark for a few minutes in 2027, the crew intends to be somewhere on that route, surrounded by the people they gathered along the way.

“If you guys would like to be part of some of these events,” Shama says at the end of the interview, “it would be a pleasure.”

The invitation is open. The van is running.

Support G.A.I.A Caravan on Artizen

Watch the caravan crew's events reel on Instagram.

There is a way of keeping history that does not involve a museum. In Abuja, a designer draws an ancient artifact by hand, digitizes the drawing, and prints it into a pattern you can put on your body and walk out the door in. The object stays behind glass somewhere, if it survived at all. The memory of it goes to a party.

That is the premise of the HERITAGE COLLECTION, a thirty-piece fashion line and live showcase by the Nigerian designer, fine artist, and musician who goes by Gneric. Each garment carries an ancient African artifact, hand-drawn and then digitized, and each design is minted on the blockchain as a permanent record of the story it holds. “It's a form of cultural preservation using the blockchain and using fashion as a medium to do that,” she says.

Gneric on the Heritage Collection, recorded for her Artizen impact report.

Gneric runs a clothing brand called Vibes & Styles, and the Heritage Collection is the brand's thesis stated at full volume. Africa has always told its stories through the way its people weave, carve, sculpt, and adorn. The collection treats those forms as source texts. Pieces carry names like Rhythms of Gabon, Woven Wisdom, and Echoes of Benin, and the studio describes them as time capsules: symbols and tools once used to create, protect, and celebrate life, redrawn stroke by stroke into patterns that can travel.

The Designer Who Sings

The Artizen project is not only a clothing line. It is a show. Gneric's vision folds fashion, live music, and blockchain education into one evening: models in the Heritage pieces, live instruments on stage, her own songs in the set, and the stories behind the artifacts told out loud between them. She has already hosted what she calls Abuja's one of a kind indie fashion and music showcase, co-hosted a skate and jazz event with a fashion show inside it, and thrown a listening party for her EP, I Found My Sound.

The range is the point. Ask her why she is the right person to make this and the answer is a resume that refuses to pick a lane: “Because I'm a fashion designer and I run a brand called Vibes and Styles Clothing, and also a fine artist.” The hand that drew the artifacts is the same hand that cut the garments, and the voice explaining the blockchain from the stage is the one that was just singing.

SuperBio, who walked in the showcase as a model, felt it from inside the room: “Being part of the Heritage Collection as a model was a great new experience for me. I love how Gneric connects fashion with culture. What stuck with me from the showcase was how powerful community can be when we choose to support and contribute to our cause.”

Sparks Music, the showcase’s official DJ, built the sound to match: “For the Heritage Collection runway I built a set that fused classic Afrobeat and Amapiano rhythms with deep electronic house and subtle traditional percussion. The room felt charged as the music and fashion locked into the same cultural pulse that night.”

The Digital Twin

Every physical piece in the collection has a double. When a collector buys a Heritage garment, the design's digital twin is minted on the blockchain as an NFT, which gives the owner proof of authenticity and a permanent link to the story of the artifact the piece is built from. Collectors join a community the brand calls Vibers. Some hold pieces of a collectors' scroll, an NFT edition issued alongside the garments.

This is where the project earns the word preservation. Fabric frays and museums burn, but a minted record with the story attached is designed to outlast both the garment and the marketing cycle around it. Those collectors, she says, “also have a digital twin of those pieces that are minted on the blockchain to prove authenticity, to prove ownership, and to also connect them to the stories of those ancient African artifacts.”

A Room at the French Institute

Since the project's last funding round, the collection has grown in both size and reach. Gneric has been researching and adding new designs, and layering in augmented reality, so a phone held over a garment can open the story behind the pattern. The work showed publicly at a digital art exhibition at the French Institute, where visitors moved through the pieces, tried the AR, and got a feel for what owning one actually means.

The research changed the researcher. What began as a way to preserve individual artifacts has become a map of something larger.

What the Money Did

The Heritage Collection has now raised funding on Artizen across three seasons. In Season 5 it raised $11,014.29. In Season 6, its breakout season, collectors bought $5,960 in Artifacts, and the project unlocked $24,630.59 in matching funds for over $30,000 in funding. Season 7 has added $16,380 so far, bringing the project's all-time total on Artizen to $58,014.90 as of August 28, 2026.

For an independent designer in Abuja, that is the difference between a lookbook and a live show with a band, between a sketchbook of artifacts and a thirty-piece collection with AR built in and its records minted. It buys the room, the stage, the instruments, and the time to keep drawing.

The Archive That Walks

The deep bet inside the Heritage Collection is that culture survives best when it circulates. A pattern locked in an archive is safe and invisible. A pattern on a jacket at a show in Abuja, with the story minted behind it and a stranger asking where it came from, is alive. Gneric's project moves African heritage into the second category and gives it a receipt.

Itohan Okoh, who photographed the collection, put it this way: “Photographing the Heritage Collection reminded me that fashion can tell stories without saying a word. The more time I spent capturing the pieces, the more I noticed how every detail carried a sense of history, intention, and identity. It felt like capturing something that was meant to be remembered.”

“This project helps people value African art, music, and stories,” she writes on the project page. “It gives artists a place to be seen, earn, and grow.” The show is scheduled to keep growing with the collection, and the collection, its maker promises, is still being drawn.

Support HERITAGE COLLECTION on Artizen

Gneric's quotes are drawn from her recorded interview and written impact report, lightly edited for clarity. The HERITAGE COLLECTION is raising on Artizen now. Explore the collection at Vibes & Styles, and follow Gneric on YouTube.

Halfway through the first chapter of the Shadowquest, a girl with flowers growing from her chest asks her armored friend why he never takes the helmet off. “It’s not to protect me,” he tells her. “It’s to protect others. My skin is made of shadows. Shadows scare people.”

Fantasy has always been literature's way of telling the truth at an angle. Name a wound too plainly and it flattens into case study; circle it too vaguely and it disappears. The Shadowquest, a hand-drawn comic book by the Spanish artist Miranda Marquez, walks straight at that problem in black and white ink: a fantasy about trauma and healing told through two characters who have to decide whether being seen is survivable.

“I am making the Shadowquest, which is a comic book with two main characters,” Marquez says in the interview she recorded for this piece. “Fauna, a fauna-like being with flowers in her chest, and Hombra, whose skin is made of shadows. It’s a fantasy setting with deeper symbolic meanings and a distinctive black and white style with psychedelic elements.”

Miranda Marquez, who wrote, drew, and printed chapter one herself.

A story told at an angle

Ask Marquez what the book is about and she does not reach for plot. She reaches for the reasons people armor themselves: “the fear of being seen for who we truly are,” she says, and its inverse, “how our shadows might actually contain hidden power.”

That is the engine of the story. Fauna sees in the dark and is not afraid of it. Hombra has spent so long convinced that his true face will scatter anyone who looks at it that he has built a life inside a suit of armor. Their friendship, drawn in inked panels threaded with symbolic detail, moves toward a single question, and the first chapter builds to the page where it gets answered.

The pages themselves carry the argument. In one early sequence the two race across a field, all speed and joy; a few pages later the same lightness turns careful, as Fauna asks about the armor and the panels slow to hold the silence between her questions.

From hand-written pages to print

Marquez has been building the Shadowquest on Artizen across three seasons, and this is the season it stopped being a promise. “The project moved from pure storyboard into real, physical form,” she writes in her impact report. The entire first chapter is finished, printed, and bound, in two editions: Shadowquest in English and Buscaombres in Catalan.

The remaining chapters exist the old way, as a hand-written draft awaiting formatting and lettering. There is something fitting about a story on trauma and healing being drafted by hand first: slow work, done at the speed of the body. “It’s a labor-intensive process, page by page,” she writes.

She is candid that drawing turned out to be the smaller half of the job. “The biggest thing I’ve learned this season is how to plan and manage a project with this many moving parts: from thumbnails and page layout, to inking, lettering, print imposition and binding, all the way to distribution.”

Illustration is a skill; a book is a system. Learning to run the system without losing the hand that draws it is the unglamorous growth that separates projects that stay dreams from projects that reach readers. The printed chapter now has a job to do: Marquez is sending it to small independent publishers, and reorganizing her life to give the book the full-time attention inking a comic demands.

The engineer who draws

Marquez came to comics sideways, which may be why the book feels engineered as much as drawn. She holds a degree in Multimedia Engineering from La Salle in Barcelona, trained in comics at Escola Joso, is a certified 3D printing technician, and spent seven years working as a fashion model. Her interactive installations have shown at Sonar+D, the art-and-technology wing of Barcelona’s Sónar festival. “I have a really unique style and a really unique narrative pattern,” she says. The psychedelic riso-printed covers and the stark interior ink are not borrowed from anyone.

Christopher Rose, project backer and one of the book’s first readers, puts it plainly: “They’re an amazing artist and also technologist, working in many interesting ideas to boot.” Rose sees the printed chapter as an entry into something larger. “The local zine scene has always been an amazing distribution network for underground and unfriendly artists, and here in Europe there’s a lot going on, so I’m excited to see where it all evolves.”

The book was also built to live in more than one language from the start. Mireia Ibáñez Cid, the professional Catalan translator behind the Buscaombres edition, describes the work this way:

It has been a delight to be part of Miranda’s project. The Shadowquest pairs imaginative, eerie illustrations with the big, thought-provoking questions layered beneath the surface of so many children’s stories, and it has been an honour to help Miranda convey this into my own language, Catalan.

What the community unlocked

“The first chapter has been sent to over 12 people that had already supported me,” Marquez says, “and the first reads had really good feedback. I’m really happy about it.” Those readers are the same community that funded the book into existence.

That money bought real things: a printed chapter, printed backer rewards, and the breathing room to restructure a working life around finishing a book. Comics are among the most labor-dense art forms per finished page. Community funding is what lets an independent artist choose depth over speed, and Marquez is clear about where she wants it to lead.

The helmet comes off

The page the whole first chapter builds toward is the one where Hombra finally takes off the helmet. Fauna looks at the shadow-face underneath, the thing he was certain would drive her away, and says: “How could I ever be scared of you? You’re so beautiful.”

That is the wager of the Shadowquest: that healing is not the absence of shadow but the willingness to be seen holding one. Chapter one exists now, in print, in two languages, in the hands of its first readers. The rest of the story is waiting in a hand-written draft, and its author is reorganizing her life to ink it.

The armor, page by page, is coming off.

Support the Shadowquest on Artizen

Explore the Shadowquest on Artizen, see more of Miranda's work at mirandamarquez.es, and follow her on Instagram. Interview answers lightly edited for clarity.

At the heart of Artizen sits a machine that sells ART, the token that grows our endowment for human creativity. The machine never haggles, never runs a promotion, and never takes a meeting. It does one thing: you put dollars in, it hands ART back. And it has one striking habit.

Nobody decides this. No executive board votes. No DAO proposal squeaks through. Nobody reads market conditions, runs a complex economic model, or tips off insiders. Each doubling is simply the rules of the machine, running exactly as written.

In the stage running as we write this, in late August 2026, the machine issues 625 ART for every dollar it receives. At the next cut, that becomes 312.5. On December 27, 2026, it becomes 156.25. Every 120 days, half as many ART per dollar. Not a price hike anyone announces. A dial that turns itself.

Predictable, reliable, auditable, automated. Artists with projects, Artizen staff, capital allocators: everyone can focus on the mission of funding breakthroughs in human creativity, with incentives that stay aligned because nobody can bend them.

So it is worth breaking down how the machine works and why you might want to feed it.

The vending machine

Think of ART as a digital vending machine. Longtime readers know we have reached for this image before; it keeps being the right one.

1. You put digital dollars in.

2. The machine dispenses ART back at the current best rate, minting new tokens or buying them from the market if someone is willing to sell more favorably.

3. 60% of the ART goes to you. 40% flows to the splits that sustain Artizen: the endowment that funds creators, plus operations and safekeeping.

4. Your dollars stay locked in the machine, backing the value of ART. The only way to get them out is to cash out ART or borrow against it.

Every dollar ever paid in sits there backing the tokens: about $131,000 in USDC on Base as of late August 2026, across 316 holders. You can audit it yourself, live, onchain.

If you have followed our work, you might notice a gap: Artizen’s full endowment holds about $23 million as of late August 2026, while the machine currently holds about $130,000. The gap is worth explaining, because the full endowment is not yet backing ART, and the plan is for it to as the revnet engine matures.

Crypto is in a strange moment as strong AI comes online. Open source smart contract systems that run on their own using blockchains, like revnets, are juicy targets for hackers because the code is open and there is digital money in the system – revnets are only great if they work. The white-hat researchers at Trail of Bits, using Anthropic’s most powerful model, Mythos, discovered a critical vulnerability in the Revnet contract in March of 2026, which has since been fixed and funds safely transfered to the new version.

Right now, a lot of bugs are being discovered across crypto, and it is the only way for these systems to be considered truly safe. When the revnet vulnerability surfaced, we kept the endowment where it was and spent more than three months throwing millions of brilliant AI tokens at the smart contracts to find every bug and vulnerability. Today, we have high confidence in the smart-contract infrastructure the revnet is built on, and the endowment will move into the machine as this confidence continues.

The price rises on a schedule

Bitcoin has 21 million coins and a halving roughly every four years: the same amount of work issues half the coins. The numbers themselves barely matter. The predictability is everything. Everyone knows exactly what is going to happen and can plan how they want to play, with no middleman able to tamper with the game.

Every revnet has its own issuance schedule, and ART’s is easy to hold in your head:

1. Genesis: 10,000 ART per dollar at launch, halving every 35 days.

2. Growth: 1,250 ART per dollar starting January 1, 2026, halving every 120 days.

3. Scale: 10 ART per dollar starting April 20, 2028, halving once a year, forever.

The result: the people who funded ART first, when it was least proven, hold the most ART per dollar contributed.

The schedule also turns fundraising into seasons with a shot clock. “Fund before the cut and get twice the ART” is true for everyone on equal terms. Every 120 days there is a natural moment to tell the story again, show how far the money has gone, and invite the next cohort in at a price that reflects the risk they are taking versus the risk the last cohort took.

And the machine keeps compounding: Artizen’s platform revenues flow into the revnet as they are generated, so future profits keep funding ART through later stages, growing the value of the network for everyone already inside.

What your ART gets you

Every ART is a censorship-resistant claim on the digital dollars in the machine.

As of late August 2026, 957 million ART are outstanding against roughly $131K, which puts the floor near $0.00014 per ART. In the current stage, the machine is minting new ART at $0.0016; at the next cut, $0.0032. And the floor only rises: every cash-out pays a 10% fee that stays behind, lifting the value of every token that remains.

But a claim on a treasury is only half of it. ART is also fuel inside Artizen.

Holding ART recharges your Boost Points at the start of every Fund Drive, based on the current value of your ART. Boost Points are how you throw weight behind the projects and funds you love and steer money toward them. Donate once, hold, and the machine hands you fresh fuel every single week.

The clock

Here is the mission underneath the mechanism. Artizen exists to fund breakthroughs in human creativity: films, open source tools, living villages, scientific instruments, the weird and wonderful work no committee would ever approve. The endowment is the engine that funds them, and ART is how anyone can grow that engine and own a permanent stake in it, in the same motion.

That is also why we refuse to rush. As we grow, we believe the majority of the endowment’s value will live in the revnet and the ART token. But moving an endowment onchain is like crossing a frozen lake: step gingerly, test the weight, then take another step. We believe over the next 18 to 24 months, ART and the revnet will take center stage.

Head to artizen.fund and donate to the Endowment in the Fund Drive section. Pay with crypto (your Artizen wallet is the easiest way) and every dollar mints ART at the current rate, plus Boost Points. The earlier in a stage you arrive, the more ART each dollar mints, and the machine treats everyone at the counter exactly the same.

No board meeting will change that. No insider will front-run it. The vending machine simply does what it was built to do.

Predictable. Reliable. Auditable. Automated.

Love,
Jango, Venus, and René

Fund the Endowment

The dream came three times over six years. One of the founders of the Embodied Mastery Fund kept dreaming about a Chinese kung fu lineage he had trained in for years, about the person carrying it, and about what happens when that person dies. “We aren't people who take instruction from dreams,” Guillermo Machado writes. “But the third time, we stopped pretending it was nothing.”

The fund that grew out of those dreams exists to do one thing: keep the last living carrier of an art from having to choose between passing it on and staying afloat. Sometimes the master is old and the art is, in Machado's phrase, one funeral away from being lost. Sometimes the master is teaching well and teaching often, and simply throttled, reaching a fraction of the students they could reach if their time were not spent keeping the lights on. Either way, the fund's aim is exact: “What we're funding is not the school around the master. It's the master.”

What a Book Cannot Transfer

By embodied mastery, Machado means something narrower than the phrase suggests. He means “the kind of knowing a book can't transfer, no matter how well written: someone who has spent decades inside a single practice, corrected by hand, until the craft has stopped being something they do and become something they are.”

What such a person passes to a student is not a curriculum. It is “an entrance into a world with no end to it, a world where you find out who you are by working on the same thing for the rest of your life.”

Inside a candle-making master class from the fund's community: wax poured by hand, then checked degree by degree. Naphisa, one of the fund's first projects, crafts memory through scent, one poured candle at a time.

That is what dies when the last carrier dies. That is what this fund exists to prevent.

The Right Place to Be Frustrating

The fund says no to most applicants, and it is unapologetic about where the line sits. Not schools. Not centres. Not festivals. Not institutions. “Those are important and the world needs more of them,” Machado writes. But this fund routes around anything with walls, because a grant to a building arrives a step removed from the person the building exists to hold.

He knows the strictness costs the fund goodwill: “This is where we say no to most applicants and where most applicants find us frustrating. We think that's the right place to be frustrating.”

What the fund is for fits in a single sentence: “one person, named, carrying one nameable lineage, still actively working to put it into another pair of hands.” Identify that person, lift them out of the survival grind, and the job is done.

Why Now, of All Moments

Machado is candid that the fund is not being built in a normal moment. Machines are learning to imitate craft at speed and scale, and the temptation, for anyone, is to assume that if the outputs can be generated, the underlying knowing is now optional. “It isn't,” he writes. The distinction between a generated result and a lived practice is real, “and it gets harder to see the more capable the machines become.”

“The more they can do,” Machado writes, “the more it matters that some human beings are still doing what the machines are copying.” The fund's whole purpose sits inside that sentence: it is trying to keep those human beings possible.

The Lineages Already Arriving

The fund's first projects trace the shape of what it hopes to grow. A digital ecosystem that puts local teachers at the heart of yoga instead of replacing them. Handmade jewelry from Pilar Moreno Hernandez that holds up to sixteen meters of weave in a single piece. An ancestral healing sanctuary preserving traditional medicine and birth wisdom. Memory crafted through scent, one poured candle at a time. Different continents, different materials, one common thread: a practice alive in a particular pair of hands.

The photographs Machado sent with his essay put faces, hands, and places to the word lineage: the people below are part of the community his fund now serves.

Behind them stands a $52,252 matching pool. On Artizen, every artifact a supporter buys from a project in the fund is multiplied by that pool, so a small purchase from a fan becomes a larger stake in a lineage's survival. The mechanics take a sentence; the consequences take decades.

The Someone

If this works, Machado writes, then in ten years several lineages that would have ended will still be here. Several masters who spent their fifties scraping by will spend their sixties and seventies teaching properly. And it will be obvious to anyone paying attention that this kind of knowing is “not a museum piece, not a nostalgia project, but a living inheritance a young person can still walk into.”

The essay Machado sent us ends with a single sentence that could serve as the fund's entire charter: “A tradition is carried by someone, and this fund exists to support that someone.”

A fund like this grows from two directions at once. Patrons water it: sponsors who deepen the matching pool, and supporters whose purchases it multiplies. Practitioners fill it: if you are that someone, a lifelong practitioner still working to put your art into another pair of hands, submit your project on the fund page. And if you are neither but know the person who is, the teacher whose knowing lives nowhere else, send them this essay and tell them to submit. The hands that hold these traditions are still warm. That is the whole opportunity, and the whole deadline.

Support the Embodied Mastery Fund on Artizen

The Embodied Mastery Fund for Living Lineages is live on Artizen, curated by Guillermo Machado. Creators can submit projects directly on the fund page; sponsors can grow the matching pool there too. Words in quotation marks are Guillermo's own, from the essay he wrote for this piece. Photographs courtesy of Guillermo Machado.

There is a species of tree in southern Brazil that spends most of the year quietly gathering strength, then erupts, all at once, into a canopy of gold. People plan trips around the bloom. Photographers wait for it. But the bloom is not the tree’s life. It is only the part you can see from a distance. The ipê grows all year.

The community named after it works the same way. Ipê is a global frontier tech community with its first permanent hub in Brazil. Through the year it runs monthly workshops, meetups, and buildathons out of a hacker house in Florianópolis, training builders, testing tools, gathering energy. Then, each April, all of that stored growth bursts into Ipê Village: a month-long pop-up city in Jurerê Internacional, a beach district where hundreds of builders, researchers, and artists live together and test, on themselves, how a city native to the internet might actually function.

Jean Hansen, the founder, calls it Brazil’s largest social experiment. That is a bold claim for a month. The numbers behind the second edition make it harder to dismiss. 535 participants took part in Ipê Village 2026, across 35 events held in three Hacker Houses plus the Artizen-sponsored residency. More than 20 scholarships brought in builders who could not otherwise afford to come. Sponsorship revenue grew 600 percent over the first edition, and the sponsor list grew from three to eight. And when the month ended, the community did not dissolve. It went back to the hub and kept building.

Jean Hansen, in his recorded interview for this essay.

Why Brazil

Hansen came to this work through the front door of the movement. He has been in crypto since Ethereum launched in 2015. He spent two months working directly with Balaji Srinivasan in Singapore, produced The Network Society documentary series, and spoke at The Network State Conference. He could have prototyped an internet-native city almost anywhere that movement congregates. He chose home.

“That’s because I’m Brazilian, and Brazil is still an emerging country,” he says. “There are a lot of problems with governance, bureaucracy, corruption. But it also has an amazing culture, amazing entrepreneurs, a lot of natural resources.” In his telling, that mix is precisely the point: a place with real problems worth solving, enough institutional and legal stability to experiment safely, and the culture and talent to make the experiments worth watching. “The upside here is great.”

This is what separates Ipê from the more escapist corners of the network-state conversation. The aim is not to exit Brazil but to upgrade it: to show that updating governance for the internet era can generate prosperity for the local communities that host the experiment, starting with Florianópolis and radiating outward through Latin America.

What a Month Can Build

The first edition, in 2025, drew more than 170 residents from over 10 countries and seeded the village’s first set of city apps. The second edition scaled everything: the population tripled, and the programming grew into a full calendar of workshops on AI, crypto, privacy, and robotics, a startup society conference, and a month-long build-a-thon that drew roughly 60 builders.

By Demo Day, 24 builds had been catalogued for presentation. At the Town Hall that followed, exactly seven of them received grants, among them Ipê Hub, Ipê Protocol, and Ipê Mind Tree. Zoom out one level and the compounding is visible: the village’s active set of city and governance apps grew from roughly eight projects to more than 30. Most of what gets built here are coordination tools, software that uses AI and crypto to help a community govern itself, which is exactly the category that cannot be tested anywhere else. “It’s very hard to replicate in an environment that is not a pop-up city,” Hansen says, “because everyone there is aligned in frontier technology. It’s easier to get them adopting, building on top of that, and experimenting.”

Artizen was in the room for this. A cohort from the Artizen community spent a week of the month embedded in the village as Artizen House, the Artizen-sponsored residency, and its residents presented their projects at Demo Day alongside the builders. The overlap is natural: both projects are betting that new funding and governance rails can grow culture that the old rails starve.

The Roots Between Blooms

The hard question for any pop-up is what survives the teardown. Hansen’s answer is that nothing needs to survive it, because nothing stops. The village is the most visible moment of a community that never goes dormant. Between editions, Ipê hosts monthly workshops, meetups, and buildathons, training local builders and testing the next round of tools, a year of learning and gathering energy for one month of full bloom. “To prepare people for this new reality,” as Hansen puts it, “to prepare them to build in the frontier.”

That rhythm now has a fixed address. The community has a permanent hub in Florianópolis, a hacker house where most of its activities happen. What began as an ephemeral pop-up has become a permanent frontier tech community with an annual festival of itself. And every edition compounds the platform underneath: the apps, the reputation systems, the operational knowledge that let each year begin where the last one ended. “Even running two editions, we already have a very solid platform, very solid infrastructure, very promising apps on top of it,” Hansen says.

The Money, Plainly

Ipê Village has raised $64,248 on Artizen against a $70,000 goal, about 92 percent. That breaks down to $22,010 in direct artifact sales, $27,948 in matching from Artizen’s curated funds, $14,250 in boost awards, and $40 in prizes. The project drew backing across the Artizen fund ecosystem, with support from curators including Juan Benet of Protocol Labs, Kevin Owocki of Gitcoin, and Lenny Rachitsky.

Those dollars have a visible shape: scholarships that brought more than 20 builders to Florianópolis who could not have paid their own way, the seven grants awarded at the Town Hall, and the operational floor under a month of free-to-attend workshops. For a project whose entire thesis is that better coordination tools produce broadly shared prosperity, the funding model is a proof of concept in miniature.

The Long Game

The startup-cities movement produces a great deal of theory. Ipê is one of the few projects producing residents, and now a permanent address. Its wager is patient and specific: that governance innovation, like the tree it is named for, needs real soil, real seasons, and a community that keeps growing between the moments anyone is watching. Two editions in, with the population tripled, the sponsors nearly tripled, and the roots in the ground year-round, the bloom is getting harder to miss.

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Support Ipê Village on Artizen · ipe.city/village2026 · 2026 after movie

There is a kind of fear that does not announce itself as politics. It shows up as a timetable, a conductor’s uniform, a carriage window full of snow that never ends. FRUSTRAIN, a narrative XR game produced by Georgy Molodtsov and the Film XR team, lives inside that fear and, more importantly, moves through it.

The premise sounds like a thriller: five strangers trapped overnight on a train cutting through endless snow, a bizarre accident, a pursued journalist. But Georgy is direct about what the game actually is. “It’s kind of a personal reflection on the situation we as creators have been through the last four years,” he says. “It plays with the subject of the inability to leave the place that you want to leave, and how you are still connected to the system even if you are trying to get out of it.”

Georgy Molodtsov interview for Artizen Impact Report.

Scattered Across Europe

That reflection is not a writers’ room conceit. Georgy and his collaborators are among the many Eastern European artists who have been dislocated, exiled, or scattered across Europe since 2022. FRUSTRAIN is produced by Film XR, now based between France and Estonia, and the team’s own displacement sharpened a project that began five years ago as something more philosophical. “It sharpened itself through the last few years of us being scattered around Europe and around the world, trying to look for what could be better for us,” he says. “So I think we have some expertise on speaking on this subject.” He means it dryly, and the dryness is the point: the expertise cost them their homes.

The Conductor Who Never Left

The game refuses to depict authoritarianism as headlines. Instead it renders it the way it is actually lived: as dream logic. The protagonist, a refugee fleeing home, falls asleep on a train, and the player navigates the disjointed, surreal fragments of a frightened mind, gradually piecing together what happened and reclaiming an identity eroded by fear and repression. The first playable episode, FRUSTRAIN: TRAINMAN, follows a weary conductor trapped in his carriage for decades, reliving a single crime he once chose to ignore.

For all its darkness, Georgy insists the project’s center of gravity is the opposite. “It’s a message of hope we are sending in the final message of the work.”

The People on Board

FRUSTRAIN is not Georgy’s first rodeo. The project was initiated by Pavel Pavlyukov, the Webby and European XR Award winning artist whose visual style sits at the heart of the experience; his FRUSTRAIN concept art is what got the team invited to build OXYMORE, the Jean-Michel Jarre virtual concert world that has drawn over 350,000 visitors in VRChat. Georgy himself is the founder of Film XR (MormoVerse, Best Immersive Narrative at Raindance Immersive 2023), an XR director and producer on OXYMORE, and a festival curator who has sat on both sides of the selection table.

Around that core, the season pulled in real reinforcements, the kind you can name. Djordje Djordjic and his Pixels2Pixels studio in Serbia contributed their team’s time to help deliver the SXSW build. Feeling Digital in Poland supported the early WebXR version. The soundtrack comes from the industrial group REUTOFF, turning the clatter of wheels into what the team calls a peculiar industrial opera. And Michele Zieger, executive director of the NewImages Festival in Paris, selected FRUSTRAIN for the 2026 Worlds Competition.

150,000 Passengers

The work is already finding its audience. With support from HTC Viverse, the team released an early demo on the Viverse platform, and more than 150,000 people have boarded it so far. Georgy is careful not to oversell what they played: it is a demo that shows the artistic side and the overall tone, he says, “while the message and the story is what we are developing right now, and that’s what we want to finish.”

Play the free demo

At the start of Season 6, the team learned FRUSTRAIN: TRAINMAN had been selected for the SXSW 2026 XR Competition, and the season became a sprint toward that premiere. “The premiere went well, though the version was still rough to deliver,” Georgy writes in his impact report, with a candor worth noticing. Since May, the team has been reworking the release version: raising the quality of the art and storytelling, and translating a world steeped in Eastern European socialist-era texture so an international audience can feel it without a glossary. The public release is targeted for September, and the team hopes to land in the autumn wave of festivals.

FRUSTRAIN teaser. Video courtesy of Georgy Molodtsov.

What the Money Finishes

“If you want your project to be powerful, you can’t just make it for free. You are competing on the market with commercial projects, and you need to be competitive enough to be seen.”

Every dollar raised, by his account, goes into that finishing work: the difference between a rough festival build and a release that can stand in competition next to games with far bigger budgets.

The Wager

Plenty of games are about dystopia. Very few are made by people processing, in real time, what it costs to leave a country and what refuses to leave you. FRUSTRAIN’s wager is that the most truthful way to show totalitarianism is not documentary but dream: the suppression of will, the erasure of identity, and isolation, rendered as spaces you walk through and puzzles you solve until the fear becomes something you can finally face.

The full journey arrives this autumn, and it ends, its makers promise, with hope.

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Explore FRUSTRAIN on Artizen. Play the free TRAINMAN demo on Viverse (browser, mobile, and WebXR), and follow the project at frustrain.com or on Instagram.

The photograph looks like a still from a film that does not exist. Golden hour somewhere outside Abuja: a vintage red Mercedes parked in dry savanna grass, three men draped over it in hats and white agbada, nobody smiling, everybody certain. There is no such movie. There is only a photographer who believes his country deserves to be seen this way, and a generation willing to stand in the frame.

The photographer is David Sani “Enrico”, and the frame is THE NEW VANGUARD, his Season 6 Artizen project: a cinematic archive of Nigerian identity, built as a physical exhibition and a permanent onchain record, with workshops that teach the creatives around him how to keep what they make. His pitch calls it “a permanent historical record, built to keep our raw emotion and fashion safe in a digital space that lasts forever.”

He recorded his impact interview the way he shoots: in one take, no script. “I’ll just record this live so it flows as it is,” he says near the end, and it does. It is worth watching.

David recorded his Season 6 impact interview in one unscripted take from Abuja.

A Small-Scale Artizen

Ask David what he is making and he does not start with the exhibition. He starts with the machine behind it. “Think of like a small scale Artizen,” he says, “for photographers and creators first.” A decentralized platform where photographers “can come and study, share their work, gain visibility,” and, the line he leans on hardest, “not have to depend on doing the commercial aspect of photography… to be able to chase photography and creativity the way they want.”

That dependence is not an abstraction to him. It is the shape of his own career. He has spent more than five years inside the Abuja Photo Festival community, documenting Capitol Film Fest, AWG Fest, and the city’s creative scene, while working as PR officer and content producer for The Greatest Collective, the group that calls itself Abuja’s number one art community. It was the Collective’s founder, Crosswordz David Ikani, who introduced him to Artizen. “The whole thing felt so right to me,” he says.

He is candid about his qualifications in a way grant applications rarely are. “I might not be the perfect match, but I mean, I’m an experienced person, I’m here, I live here, I’m hands-on,” he says. “I’m willing to take the risk to solve these problems, to help my people, to help the younger generation coming up.” This is a generation documenting itself, not waiting to be discovered.

Portraits from a Film That Does Not Exist

The sample photographs David envisions for the inaugural exhibition read like production stills from a Nigerian film that does not exist. A couple in red and green aso-oke and coral beads, posed against still water. A studio portrait of a man with gold trinkets pinned to his cap and a red pipe in his teeth, lit like a Rembrandt. Two models standing in a maize field under a flat grey sky. A staged tableau of a warrior with shield and sword outside a thatched hut.

One of these images already lives on Artizen: “Pioneer,” his Season 6 artifact and one of the photographs envisioned for the inaugural exhibition. The rest are proof of a visual language, cinematic, saturated, formal, that treats contemporary Nigerian identity as something worth composing carefully rather than capturing incidentally.

The behind-the-scenes footage tells you what the finished frames cost. In one clip, two women wade waist-deep across a river, one balancing an upturned red plastic stool on her head, carrying the set to the shot.

Carrying the set across the river for the aso-oke portraits.

Everybody on Set

Season 6, by David’s own account, was the season THE NEW VANGUARD stopped being an idea. He traveled to the IRIN AJO exhibition in Abuja and documented it, studying “how immersive cultural experiences are designed, presented, and experienced” and meeting its organizers, curators, artists, and set designers. He scouted locations, drafted the platform blueprint in his notes, and consulted his cousin, web developer Sani Collins, on what it would take to build.

He kept photographing: festivals, album covers, other creators’ Artizen projects, including HERITAGE COLLECTION, whose founder encouraged him to bring his own project to the platform.

“We’ve made progress,” he says. “I’ve made networks with the creators, set designers, curators, everybody that’s on the sets and everybody that’s putting the whole thing together. So once we are ready for the next phase of production, we go straight into shooting.”

The community is not set dressing. Beke, who bought his first camera and speedlight in 2020, then returned five years later to make THE NEW VANGUARD’s first artifact purchase; Earl Joey, who backs the project with money and ideas; the Collective that gave him a role and a room.

The biggest lesson of the season, he wrote, is that “meaningful cultural projects are built through consistent engagement with people and communities.”

What the Money Builds

For a self-funded photographer in Abuja, that is not a rounding error; it is the difference between an idea in a Notes app and a production calendar. The money buys the next phase he describes on camera: the shoots, then the exhibition, then the workshop where attendees learn to mint and hold their own work.

The Rock on the Horizon

There is a photograph in his set that carries the whole argument. Two young men in striped football jerseys and sunglasses stand on a highway median, and behind them, hazed by distance, looms Zuma Rock, the vast monolith that watches the road into Abuja. It has stood there through every empire, every government, every generation that forgot to write itself down. The two men in front of it will not be there next year. That is what an archive is for.

Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa, and its creative output travels further every year, its music, its films, its fashion. What mostly does not travel is ownership. THE NEW VANGUARD is one photographer’s answer at human scale: document the culture in real time, put the record somewhere it cannot be quietly lost, and teach the people in the pictures to hold the keys themselves.

The next phase is already cast. The networks are built, the collaborators “are in on my projects,” and the plan runs straight from shooting to exhibition to workshop. It started, he says, as a crazy idea in his notes. The notes have become real and beautiful.

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THE NEW VANGUARD on Artizen · Project pitch film · David on Instagram · The Greatest Collective

Today, we launch the Terminus Fund with $100,000 in support for sovereign communities and the tools that make them possible. Inspired by the Network State movement and the idea of Terminus as a civilization archive, we’re backing internet communities that materialize in the real world and grow into new societies. From monthlong villages and popup cities to permanent territory, we support opt-in experiments that can be shared, forked, and scaled.

We believe Artizen itself is core infrastructure for network states. To peacefully exit failing systems and build new ones, communities need a way to pool capital, coordinate priorities, and fund the creative work they depend on. That’s the layer Artizen provides: social technology—curation and game mechanics—combined with financial technology that lets communities fund what matters most.

My fascination with Network States traces back to a single afternoon in 2013. I was sitting in a cold auditorium at YC’s Startup School when a talk cracked open my brain.

Startup School was exactly what you’d expect. Smart people. Sensible advice. Nothing radical.

Then Balaji took the stage and gave a talk called Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit.

It hit me like a thunderbolt.

If you can start a new company, why not start a new country?

When a system is failing—whether a corporation or a nation—you have two options. Voice: reform it from within. Or exit: leave and build something new. Exit isn’t quitting. It’s creation. Forking. Founding. Opting out peacefully instead of fighting.

Just a few weeks earlier, my childhood best friend and roommate, Ross Ulbricht, had been arrested for creating the Silk Road. I was still reeling.

Inspired by the idea of what Ross had built—consenting adults trading without permission from the state—but heartbroken by the outcome. It felt like proof that trying to radically reinvent the system will end only in your destruction.

But Balaji offered another path.

Not through violence. Not through revolution. But by building new opt-in societies so compelling that people freely choose them.

That’s the promise of the Network State. Communities form online around shared values. If they’re strong enough, they gather in the real world. Most fail. Some persist. A few harden into institutions, territory, and eventually international recognition.

But there’s a piece of this story that often gets skipped.

None of it works without a way for communities to pool money and fund the work they care about.

Culture doesn’t appear by accident. Tools don’t build themselves. Experiments cost money. Creativity is the engine—but funding is the constraint. Without aligned capital, sovereignty stays theoretical.

That’s the problem Artizen exists to solve.

For a long time, I thought Artizen and the Network State were adjacent ideas. They aren’t. Artizen is core infrastructure for the Network State movement. We build the social and financial technology that lets internet-native communities coordinate capital and fund their own priorities.

That’s not just useful for artists or scientists or builders. It’s foundational for any sovereign community. If people are going to peacefully exit failing systems, the alternative has to function. Every real community needs funding that works.

That’s why we’re launching the Terminus Fund.

We’re already backing projects like Grandmatopia in Arizona, stewarding land and artists in a highland sanctuary; Ipê Village in Brazil, prototyping internet-native governance in a month-long pop-up city; Agartha, a solarpunk R&D lab mapping and incubating regenerative communities; and Regenera, a living systems laboratory launching experimental sites across Europe and the United States. Different contexts. Same pattern: organize online, gather in the real world, and test new systems.

In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, Terminus wasn’t about ruling the empire. It was about preserving knowledge, running experiments, and forking civilization when the center became too brittle to survive.

That’s why the Terminus Fund exists.
And why Artizen exists.

Not to fight the old system.
Not to reform it from within.

But to build something better.
Fund alternatives.
Make exit real.

Love,
René Pinnell
Founder of Artizen

Kevin Owocki sits at the fault line between idealism and infrastructure.

As the founder of Gitcoin, he helped turn a simple question—how do we fund public goods?—into one of the most important experiments in crypto. Gitcoin pioneered quadratic funding, moved millions of dollars to open-source developers, and proved that coordination at internet scale is possible when incentives are designed with care.

But Kevin isn’t interested in abstract theory. He’s interested in what works. What lasts. What actually gets built when hype fades and builders remain.

In this conversation, we talk about funding as a form of values, why public goods are chronically underfunded, and what it takes to design systems that reward contribution instead of extraction.

Here are the sharpest insights from our conversation.

1. Funding is a moral choice.

“Every funding mechanism encodes values. You’re deciding—explicitly or implicitly—what you want more of in the world.”

Markets aren’t neutral. Neither are grants, DAOs, or protocols. Every system rewards some behaviors and suppresses others. Kevin’s core insight is simple but uncomfortable: if we don’t like the outcomes, it’s because we don’t like the incentives we designed.

Public goods don’t fail because people don’t care. They fail because the systems around them don’t pay.

2. Public goods are everywhere—and almost nowhere funded.

“So much of what we rely on every day is maintained by volunteers, underpaid contributors, or pure altruism.”

Open-source software. Digital infrastructure. Cultural commons. These are foundational layers of modern life, yet they survive on scraps. Kevin sees this as a systemic blind spot: capitalism is good at pricing exclusion, terrible at pricing shared value.

Gitcoin wasn’t built to fix everything. It was built to test whether better funding primitives could change that equation.

3. Quadratic funding works—but only if people show up.

“Quadratic funding doesn’t replace community. It amplifies it.”

Math alone doesn’t save public goods. Participation does. Quadratic funding is powerful because it weights broad support over concentrated capital—but only when real humans engage.

Without community, even the most elegant mechanism collapses into abstraction.

4. Governance is a social problem before it’s a technical one.

“You can’t engineer trust purely in code. People matter.”

Kevin is blunt about this. Protocols can help. Smart contracts can enforce rules. But legitimacy comes from social consensus—shared norms, accountability, and culture.

This is why Gitcoin evolved beyond grants into governance experiments, reputation systems, and new forms of coordination. Code sets the floor. People set the ceiling.

5. Regenerative systems reward contribution, not extraction.

“If the system only rewards taking, that’s what you’ll get.”

Kevin distinguishes extractive systems—where value is siphoned upward—from regenerative ones, where value circulates back to contributors. The difference isn’t philosophical. It’s architectural.

Regenerative systems don’t just fund outputs. They sustain the people doing the work.

6. Builders stay when the hype leaves.

“The real signal is who’s still here when it’s not cool anymore.”

Cycles come and go. Narratives inflate and collapse. What remains are the builders who care more about the work than the spotlight.

Kevin measures success less by market caps and more by continuity—projects that keep shipping, communities that keep showing up, systems that quietly compound.

That’s how public goods survive: not through spectacle, but through persistence.

Closing thought

Kevin Owocki doesn’t talk about funding as charity. He talks about it as design.

Designing systems that make it easier to do the right thing.
Designing incentives that align individual action with collective good.
Designing markets that can finally see what matters.

If the future depends on public goods—and it does—then the real question isn’t whether we can fund them.

It’s whether we’re willing to build systems that mean what they say.

ETH Boulder is an experiment.

A small gathering—200 to 300 people—at the edge of art, science, and technology. No main-stage posturing. No corporate theater. Just builders, artists, engineers, and explorers who believe creativity is a contact sport—and that breakthroughs happen when strange minds collide.

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This is not for everyone. If you want polished booths, branded tote bags, and a calendar packed with sponsor pitches, you will be disappointed. If you’re curious, playful, and allergic to soulless conferences, you will feel at home.

ETH Boulder is about cross-pollination. Engineers talking to artists. Scientists trading insights with musicians. As Matt Ridley says, innovation happens when ideas have sex. ETH Boulder is a breeding ground. Bring your best ideas. Let them collide. See what new “baby ideas” are born.

My friend Kevin Owocki—founder of Gitcoin—and I have been searching for the right moment to bring our communities together.

The Artizen community: artists, storytellers, creators. And the Gitcoin community: engineers, scientists, open-source builders. Distinct cultures, but same tribe. Explorers at the frontier of innovation. People who care deeply about funding what matters most. People who believe creativity—whether expressed as code, art, or research—is how progress actually happens.

Back in 2018, Gitcoin gave me confidence I wasn’t alone. Kevin was taking a radical idea—quadratic funding—and turning it into real infrastructure. I didn’t want to build Gitcoin. But it rhymed with what I’d been working toward for years. We met. We became friends. Kevin invested in Artizen. Mostly, we kept circling the same question: when is the right moment to bring these worlds together?

That moment arrived when Kevin decided to fork the frontier.

ETH Denver began as something rare—grassroots, messy, alive. Ostensibly for Ethereum developers, but really a magnet for frontier explorers: artists, scientists, musicians, regen thinkers. A festival more than a conference. Famously, Vitalik Buterin once wandered the event in a Bufficorn suit.

But scale has gravity. Over time, ETH Denver became polished, corporate, and hollowed out. Last year’s “Year of the Regen” felt more like branding than belief.

So Kevin did something honest—and brave. He forked it.

When Kevin floated the idea, I texted him immediately. Artizen was all in. This was the moment we’d been waiting for.

ETH Boulder will be intimate. Experimental. A little risky. A robot Fight Club produced by theater kids. Sound journeys. Collective murals. Choirs built from the crowd. Tea ceremonies. Saunas. Open-source coordination sessions. Experiments in public goods, resilient infrastructure, and local community building. Serious ideas, handled playfully. Playful ideas, taken seriously.

It might be a disaster. First years often are. But building on the frontier requires risk.

ETH Boulder is a gathering of explorers in one of America’s great frontier towns. If you’re exploring the outer edges of art, the limits of science, or the future of technology—and you’re looking for your people—we want you there. Come help us see what happens when the right people show up.

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For years, Michel kept a sentence pinned in front of him at work: “I used to be normal, but it drove me mad.” It captured a lifelong instinct—to move away from conformity and embrace the unknown.

Michel Reilhac has a rare vantage point on creativity at the edge. A former contemporary dancer and longtime cultural explorer, he spent a decade as Head of Cinema at ARTE France, where he helped produce and champion bold independent films, including Lars von Trier’s Melancholia.

Drawn consistently to the frontier, Michel later turned his focus to immersive storytelling. Alongside his co-curator Liz Rosenthal, he founded Venice Immersive, now the world’s most important platform for immersive art. Today, he works as an independent story architect and mentor, helping creators navigate uncertainty, embodiment, and risk as new creative forms come into being.

Here are the sharpest insights from our conversation about how to live a creative life.

1. Being normal is a creative dead end.

“There is nothing more reducing, constraining, and reductive than trying to conform—trying to fit a mold that forces you to cut your wings.”

Normality doesn’t just limit creativity—it slowly erases it. The parts of yourself that don’t quite fit, that feel excessive or awkward or out of place, are usually the source of your originality. When you suppress them to be acceptable, you don’t become better—you become flatter.

A more creative life often starts by refusing to shrink yourself to match the room.

2. Embrace the Beginner’s Mind.

“You’re never as good as when you don’t know how to do something.”

Not knowing sharpens attention. Without a script, you’re forced into presence—drawing on intuition, curiosity, memory, and instinct all at once. Creative growth comes from choosing situations where expertise no longer carries you and awareness has to take the lead.

3. If it can’t fail spectacularly, it doesn’t matter.

“The most interesting things are risky and dangerous, but that is exactly why they matter.”

Safe ideas rarely open new territory. Work that can fail spectacularly demands more of you. The ideas that move culture forward often live uncomfortably close to embarrassment, rejection, and catastrophe.

4. Explore the frontier without a map.

“Creating is about doing something that does not exist yet—not referencing anything, almost starting from scratch.”

Much of what we call creativity is recombination—connecting familiar dots. That has value. But breakthroughs happen when you stop referencing what exists and step into the unknown without a map.

Exploring the frontier often feels lonely—not because you’re wrong, but because no one else is there yet.

5. Let go of the past.

“Things happen. People experience them. And then they’re gone. Holding on to the past takes up mental space that should belong to what’s coming.”

Michel isn’t dismissing experience—he’s resisting attachment. When identity hardens around past success or failure, it blocks new work from emerging. Obsession with preservation often comes from fear, not necessity. Creative longevity depends less on what you keep than on what you’re willing to release.

6. Seek creative collisions in the real world.

“Projects are born from people meeting people. Sharing the same moment, the same experience, in the physical world—that is irreplaceable.”

If you want to amplify creativity, don’t stay isolated or fully online. Put yourself in rooms where ideas, disciplines, and people collide. Proximity creates friction. Friction creates momentum. Shared uncertainty turns into shared movement.

Digital tools help—but creativity compounds fastest when people gather, experiment, and build together in the real world.

Closing thought

Michel’s line “I used to be normal, but it drove me mad” isn’t a rejection of discipline or rigor. It’s a refusal to let comfort, conformity, or precedent dull aliveness.

Normal offers safety.
Creativity demands risk.

And the work that matters most almost never feels normal while you’re making it.

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OBSESSED is a living memoir of my 17-year quest to build Artizen — from idea to escape velocity and beyond. New episodes every week.

Read Previous → Episode 7: Like a Phoenix, Motherfucker

Leap of faith

Our investor Dan Hill introduces me to Simon Corry—studied under Dieter Rams, founding team at WeTransfer, now a director of design at Facebook. We hit it off, and a few months later, he quits his cushy gig to join Artizen.

Together, we build the dream team. Eric Jacobsen, a front-end dev and lovable curmudgeon. Zsofie Tubel, a Hungarian who lives for death metal, tattoos, and crypto—perfect. Eric Katerman, my old co-founder at Hurricane Party. Dov Heichemer, a PM from SoundCloud. And Juju Parchimowicz, a creative force of nature.

With the crew assembled, we should be flying. Instead, we’re stuck on the tarmac. Meetings drag, decisions stall, launch dates slip. I hired insanely talented people—way more talented than me—shouldn’t I give them creative freedom? But the more I step back, the more progress grinds to a halt.

Desperate for momentum, we join SeedClub—a playground for internet cool kids—run by that tall guy Jess and that shorter guy Josh. They lean into Artizen like a stalled car. We use demo day as a forcing function: ship something, anything. Inspired by Nouns, we launch daily grants. Every 24 hours we fund new creators like Eddie Lee, Vladimir Storm, Mike Tucker, and Gabriela Arp. But the time horizon is too short.

The product flops.

We call an emergency summit. Simon takes charge: thousands of sticky notes, collaborative workshops, rapid prototyping, the full IDEO playbook. At first, it’s fun. By day two, I’m miserable. By day three, I snap.

This isn’t working. There are too many voices. Inspiration speaks in whispers. All I hear is noise. We’re burning money—only six months of runway left. We need direction. In my filmmaking days, I thrived as a micromanaging control freak—a true auteur. Now, I hesitate. My gut knows what to build, but I second-guess my instincts.

And then a moment of clarity: I am an artist, not an entrepreneur. I trust intuition more than metrics. I value improvisation over process. I love collaborating. I hate managing. I want to dance—wild and free, to the music of creation. I ask myself:

Can I run my company like I make art?

No idea, but I want to find out. The first step is painful: break up the band. Making art is too intimate for me. Requires too much trust. I only go deep with one or two collaborators, or work alone.

Saying goodbye to Ruben is the hardest. I’m not easy to work with—constantly change my mind, fixate, obsess. But Ruben put up with my autistic mania. For that, and so much more, I love him.

The next scene is unscripted. But as I climb back into the director’s chair, I feel at home.

Escape velocity

My ambition hasn’t changed: build a billion-dollar business that reinvents funding for creators. But pulling it off on my own? As a weird art project? That’s the trick.

About a year earlier, I met this kid Nate Van Cleve. He built a product called SproutUp—a donation tool for charities. I figured he had a team of engineers. Nope. Solo dev. Doesn’t even know how to code! He built the whole thing with Bubble. My brain explodes.

After the team falls apart, I call Nate. Could we rebuild Artizen—using Bubble as a web2 wrapper for our smart contracts? Nate is confident.

It feels insane. Deleting our codebase—again—on purpose!? But it also feels right. Bubble lets me move 10x faster at a fraction of the cost. It gives me the freedom to experiment, to play. With Nate as my Bubble shaman, the ritual begins. Summon the new Artizen!

To help conjure the magic, my friend Sven suggests Techstars—he knows the web3 director. By now, I’m addicted to accelerators: the structure, the deadlines, the intensity. At 40, it’s the best way to make new friends—people who get it, who know the struggle, who give a shit. I’m in!

Techstars delivers. Pete Townsend and Hugh McGirr dig into the business. Sean Lee drills me on sales; Audrey O’Regan lifts my spirits; Ben Jorgensen steps up with his own match fund; and Sam Williams, founder of Arweave—crypto OG with a 10,000-watt brain—jams on our tokenomics.

Things click. Nate and I find our rhythm, shipping product at a furious tempo. We’re inventing a new game—creators roll the dice on bold ideas, fans bet on projects they love, and brands ante up cash to grow their ecosystems. Everyone walks away a winner.

Riding high from demo day, we land sponsors like Filecoin, Juicebox, Cabin, Funding the Commons, MetaCamp, and the DeSci Foundation. Season 1 was a disaster—$50,000 raised. Season 2 showed promise at $100,000, but the product was a mess. Then, in Season 3, everything changes. Our game is finally fun to play! A hardcore group of Artizens emerge: Scott Murphy with Resonate, Omid and Anna with Tuner, Sven Hermann with Incented, Eoghan O’Keeffe with Locus, Tamara Montenegro with her Sound Temple, and dozens more. Their passion ignites the community, and creators raise over $500,000.

Now, in Season 4, Artizen is cooking. Our members cast 1.4 million votes to curate 158 remarkable projects like Echos of the Heart, City of Apparition, Futuro Nativo, synth-e-sthesia, Sexilio, The Land I Live On, Palestinian Lullabies, Flow, Social Layer, Inter-Woven, CharmVerse, Node Archives, Bone Conductive Instrument, Remembering to Forget, and Earths to Come. It’s our strongest lineup yet, and I’ve got a good feeling creators will raise over $1,000,000 by season’s end.

Artizen has left the launchpad, breaking free from the pull of gravity. Just me and Nate and a constellation of friends.

We might still explode, but the rocket is climbing, the heavens open.

Obsession wins

Obsession is a dark art. It unlocks superpowers. Beats talent and discipline. Overcomes failure and fear. Obsession wins—but it demands a high price. It’s a dance with madness, a fire that threatens to consume you.

For decades, I obsessed. Why do we fail to fund creators?

Artists, entrepreneurs, scientists, and builders—these are the people who drive progress, who fill our lives with beauty and abundance, who make the world rich. And yet, most creators are poor. Rage at this cruel irony fueled me.

Now, something greater fuels me—faith.

I believe in the power of human creativity. It’s the core of civilization—the true source of growth. I believe all problems are solvable with enough creativity.

I believe in a future that is bright and boundless.

Love,
René Pinnell
Founder of Artizen

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Danielle Strachman has a rare vantage point on creativity. As part of the founding team behind the Thiel Fellowship, she helped support people like Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum), Dylan Field (Figma), Laura Deming (longevity), and Chris Olah (Anthropic). Today she co-runs 1517 Fund and the Medici grant program, backing creative outsiders long before institutions recognize their brilliance.

Here are the sharpest insights from our conversation.

1. Creativity begins as irrational passion.

We look for the irrationally passionate — the ones who sit two standard deviations out on curiosity. The people who, like Vitalik, are learning Mandarin on their phone mid-conversation because they need to understand a community. It’s not hobby energy. It’s “I have to go all the way down this rabbit hole.”

This is what Danielle calls hyperfluency — a kind of creative intensity where curiosity becomes obsession. That depth — the compulsion to push further — is the fuel that separates average makers from outliers.

2. Childhood obsessions are the blueprint.

One founder told me he used to lie on his back at six, throw a wooden chair in the air, and catch it just to think. And honestly, that tracks. The intensity shows up early.

Childhood gives you the purest snapshot of a creative mind before school, fear, and conformity dull the edges. The strange games, the obsessive tinkering, an inner world that demands expression — these are early forms of pattern-making and problem-solving. If you want to understand a creator’s trajectory, look at who they were before the world told them who to be.

3. Curiosity only matters if it turns into making.

You can be incredibly curious and never create anything. The people we back have that itch — they have to put their hands on it and make something. Curiosity alone isn’t enough. It has to turn into output.

Reading, exploring, wandering — not enough. Creativity requires output. The transformation happens when curiosity hits friction and becomes real work.

4. The best creators live at intersections.

So many of our founders were artists first — painters, sculptors, pianists. When they finally show us their work, it just clicks. The creator–artist is often their first instantiation, the thing they were before the world turned them into technologists.

Painters become roboticists. Musicians drift into biotech. Sculptors become technologists. New ideas emerge when identities collide — not when people stay in a lane.

5. Creative practice strengthens perception.

When I draw, the phone disappears. I’m totally gone — lost in time, really noticing things. It’s deep focus, the kind that resets your whole system.

For Danielle, drawing isn’t a hobby. It’s a discipline of perception. It slows the mind to a pace where details come back into view — shadow, proportion, texture, meaning. That kind of attention is the root of creativity. When you train yourself to see clearly, you expand what you’re capable of imagining and making. Great creators don’t just produce; they observe.

6. Youth gives freshness. Age gives depth.

Young people bring this raw, unfiltered curiosity — but older creators bring depth. There’s a different weight when someone who’s been through a lot is still making things. The lived experience shows up in the work. It’s beautiful.

Young creators see possibilities without baggage. Older creators bring wisdom and emotional weight. Creativity doesn’t peak — it changes texture.

7. A fund can be a work of art.

1517 is my art. Human mindshare is scarce, so I’m always asking what happens if you put this person with that one and a whole new thing emerges. Making those connections feels like painting with people.

Danielle treats her fund the way an artist treats a canvas — not as an institution, but as a living medium. Creativity isn’t only in the founders she backs; it’s in how she pairs people, curates environments, and engineers serendipity. She sees relationships as raw material. And when they collide, new ideas surface.

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OBSESSED is a living memoir of my 17-year quest to build Artizen — from idea to escape velocity and beyond. New episodes every week.

Read Previous → Episode 6: Kaleidoscope

Canceled and broke

Rumors swirl. At our last event—Impact Reality in Seattle—attendees are getting sick, but we don’t know why. Then, two days before SXSW, the festival cancels. COVID is here. The world shuts down.

Events drive all our revenue. No events, no business. Desperate, I call my friend Robin Stethem, founder of the Museum of Other Realities—a stunning virtual space. “Wanna be the exclusive venue for Kaleidoscope?”

Next, I recruit Ana Brzezińska, a ferocious producer who takes no prisoners, always ready for a knife fight. Me, Ana, and Robin form a guerrilla squad: I run sales, Ana orchestrates the chaos, and Robin builds our exhibitions.

It works—on the surface. After hundreds of calls, I land deals with Tribeca, Cannes, NewImages, and VIFF. We produce jaw-dropping virtual events, showcasing stunning works like Minimum Mass and Kusunda. But behind the scenes, we’re bleeding money.

Turns out, high-quality VR events are a financial black hole. The demands are relentless, stretching us to the brink. Bills stack up as body bags fill the news. Oregon wildfires turn the sun into an orange haze. Portland riots. So this is the apocalypse?

Then, a flicker of hope: the Black Realities Grant.

A few years earlier, we launched a small-dollar grant program—$1,000 to $5,000. We expected a handful of submissions but got hundreds. The grants were wildly popular—even with established creators—but a nightmare to curate. I get buried in project proposals.

Maybe, the community can help? Let them pick the winners.

I hire Ruben Campos—a full-stack dev I met on AngelList—to hack together a prototype. We spend months iterating—one person, one vote; ranked choice; quadratic voting. We hit dead ends, break things, piss off the community.

It’s a wicked hard problem: how do you get a diverse group of creators—often in direct competition—to select the best projects? And how do you make it feel fair, so even the losers walk away believing in the process?

Then, in the summer of 2020, we partner with academy award-winner Viola Davis, to launch the Black Realities Grant. It goes viral, raising over $100,000 for black artists at the frontier of immersive storytelling.

I look at Ruben. This is it! The breakthrough we’ve been chasing!

Time to bet the farm. I invest my savings, then start taking on debt. I max out credit cards to keep the grants flowing. It’s terrifying but our growth engine picks up speed. More creators, more fans, more sponsors, more money. The day we hit $20,000 in monthly recurring revenue I text Lenny to celebrate. It’s working! We’re gonna make it!

Less than an hour later, we’re dead. I get an automated email from Stripe, our payment processor. Too many chargebacks. Our account is canceled. No warning. No appeal. COVID killed the old business. Stripe killed the new one. And now I’m drowning in $437,000 of debt.

No options left. Bankruptcy.

Like a phoenix, motherfucker!

Selena has every right to pack her bags. We’ve got a three-year-old and a mountain of bills. But she never wavers. Ride-or-die. And for all the pain, bankruptcy is survivable. A cheap lawyer, 15 minutes on the phone with a judge, and my sins are absolved. Tabula rasa. A clean slate—mostly.

Our creditors torch everything—the codebase, the product, the brand. But Ruben and I have got conviction. We’ve seen the future: crowdfunded grants. So I ask Ruben to be my co-founder, and together, we rise from the ashes.

Artizen is born.

But this time, we do it right. Never again will we build our home on shifting sands. Artizen will run on crypto rails—powered by NFTs, blockchain magic, and immutable freedom. Ruben codes like a madman while I hit the road to raise money.

Li Jin is my first pitch. I zoom in cocky, unprepared, rambling through the deck. Hard pass. The rejection wakes me up like a slap in the face. I grind through 100 iterations, fine-tuning the pitch until it sings. A few friends chip in: Elliot Cole, Brian Lio, Brad Weiers, Amy Zimmerman, Adam Myhill, and Paula Pettit. Just enough to keep the music playing.

Then crypto rages into a bull market, juiced up on stimmy checks. I parachute into Beyond Basel—an NFT exhibition hosted by Trippy—to infiltrate crypto culture. Someone hands me a Polaroid camera that spits out chocolate photos laced with psilocybin. Alex and Allyson Grey hold court. Asad Malik and Jake Sally glide through the crowd, fresh off Jadu Jetpacks—a metaverse play that raised $37M.

I walk through Central Park with Nick Ducoff—old friend from the Austin tech scene. “Apply to Tachyon,” he says. “I know the director.” Another accelerator? Really? But we get in. Day one, Gabriel Anderson tears us a new asshole for botching our elevator pitch. Oh shit. This guy’s for real. I’m hooked.

Gabriel whips us into shape. We raise a $1.2M pre-seed from Protocol VC , Animoca Brands, ConsenSys, Juan Benet, and Path.

We are so back. Like a phoenix, motherfucker!

Love,
René Pinnell
Founder of Artizen

Read Next → Episode 8: Escape Velocity

Investing in Your Community

Every creative community has someone who brings us together.

A person who shows up.
Who sends the invites.
Who makes the connections.
Who keeps the energy alive.

If that’s you, I want to help.

We’re investing at least $1,000,000 to launch new Funds on Artizen that support the creators in your community.

Apply today, and if selected, we’ll kickstart your fund with up to $50,000.

Apply to Launch Your Fund

Who We’re Looking For

Leaders rooted in creative communities, whether it’s basket weaving, biohacking, DIY robotics, or anything in between.

Maybe you run a writers circle?
Maybe you organize underground symposiums?
Maybe you lead a thriving Discord for AI researchers?
Maybe you’ve built a space—online or in person—where artists connect, scientists collaborate, or coders hack?

If you have the drive to bring people together and support work that matters, we want to hear from you.

Why Launch a Fund?

A community fund on Artizen is simply a pool of capital to support the artists, entrepreneurs, scientists, and engineers you love.

You define the mission.
Creators submit projects.
Your community votes.
The strongest projects unlock match funding and cash prizes.

And every $1 raised becomes $3+ of impact:

• $1 from fans

• $1 from sponsors

• $1+ from the Artizen Endowment.

Launch a fund to direct resources where they matter most — and share in the upside. It’s the most powerful way to support the people, projects, and causes shaping your community.

📖 Learn more about funds

Apply to Launch Your Fund

Applications are open on a rolling basis.

1. Submit a Fund Proposal
To be considered, submit a fund proposal. Tell us your mission, the creators you serve, and why your creative community matters.

2. Meet with René
After you submit you’ll receive a link to schedule a call with me.

3. Get Funded
If approved, we’ll kickstart your Fund with up to $50,000.

Apply to Launch Your Fund

Why We’re Doing This

Because creativity doesn’t start in institutions — it starts in communities. Because movements grow when people step up. Because every breakthrough needs a home to take root.

We want to invest in communities building at the frontier of creativity.

If that sounds like you, please apply to launch a fund to support the creators you love. Or read our Playbook to learn more about the process.

Let’s build something extraordinary.

Love,
René Pinnell
Founder of Artizen

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At Artizen, we’ve invested in thousands of creators across cultures and disciplines. Some succeed wildly. Some struggle.

But over time, patterns start to emerge.

You begin to see that breakthroughs aren’t random. Creativity flourishes when people have a sanctuary to quiet the noise, collisions that spark new thinking, and the tools to turn ideas into reality.

Sanctuary

Where the noise goes quiet.

Creativity needs space. Not metaphorically. Literally. Silence, wilderness, slowness, room to think — these are essential nutrients for a creative ecology.

You feel it at Grandmatopia, where a circle of grandmothers hand-built an earthen homestead and wildlife preserve in the Dragoon Mountains. Their descendants are restoring it now — opening the land to artists who seek a sanctuary shaped by reverence for the natural world.

And you feel the same vibrations at the Outer Echoes Artist Residency in Cascade, Montana, where regenerative agriculture and creative practice grow side by side. It’s a place to work, reflect, and reconnect with the rhythms that sharpen attention in ways no city can.

When the mind relaxes, creativity follows.

Creative Collisions

The spark of the unexpected.

Once you create space, you need collisions. New ideas come from friction — unexpected connections, cross-disciplinary encounters, cultural mixing.

You plug into that energy instantly with We’re Loud Africa, a roaming punk festival that picks a different country each year and drops musicians into the heart of a culture they’ve never played in before. In Nairobi, local bands shared the stage with international proto-punk legends like DEATH.

You sense a similar spark in DeSci Reviews, where collisions happen through ideas instead of sound. Traditional journals trap knowledge behind paywalls; DeSci Reviews turns research into portable, verifiable objects that circulate freely. Scientists keep their rights, peer review becomes transparent, and new fields take shape as ideas bump into one another in the open.

When ideas move, they transform. Collision is the spark.

Access to Tools

The means to make something real.

Inspiration is cheap. Execution isn’t. Every creative ecology depends on tools — the instruments, machines, labs, and materials that turn ideas into something real.

You see this clearly at Resonate, a recording studio and performance space in downtown San Francisco built to give overlooked musicians access to world-class audio engineering for free. Young talent can record, experiment, and be heard — not because they can pay, but because someone built the space for them.

You feel the same force at Make.DIY in Roatán, a biohacking and rapid-prototyping lab where creators get access to 3D scanners, cybernetics gear, and advanced fabrication tools. Artists, engineers, and curious learners build prosthetics, prototype inventions, and learn skills impossible to access elsewhere.

Tools change what’s possible. A creative ecology thrives when people can build.

Cultivating Creativity

Across all these projects — sanctuaries, festivals, residencies, labs, decentralized publishing networks — the pattern is unmistakable.

Give people a sanctuary.
Give them creative collisions.
Give them tools.

And creativity takes root. From that soil, new worlds can grow.

Love,
René Pinnell
Founder of Artizen

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OBSESSED is a living memoir of my 17-year quest to build Artizen — from idea to escape velocity and beyond. New episodes every week.

Read Previous → Episode 5: Risking Everything

It’s time. No more fucking around. Time to chase my dream. Time to recapture my spark. Time to reinvent funding for creators!

I quit my job. Clear the decks. Full focus. One, two, three—GO. But I got nothing. No product. No idea where to start.

Don’t panic. Stay loose. Smoke a joint. I pick up the Oculus DK1 my friend Mike gave me to try. It’s like strapping a brick to my face. I launch Titans, a virtual tour of our solar system. It’s rough—pixelated planets—but as I float past Jupiter, the universe suddenly opens. I am a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. Small, yet expansive.

And I know—this is the future of art and storytelling.

My bet is simple: if I want to reinvent how creators fund their work, VR is the place to start. A brand-new industry, wide open to new rules—the perfect petri dish. And if we crack the code here, we can scale it up to fund all kinds of art, science, and technology.

Selena and I start a VR meetup. She nailed every detail of our wedding, so I know she’ll crush it as an event producer. And she does. Every week at the old Mozilla HQ, creators show up. Dozens turn into hundreds, driving in from LA, flying in from across the country.

Tyler Hurd premieres BUTTS—two bald men pulling confetti out of their ass. It’s ridiculous. It’s genius. Skillman & Hackett demo Tilt Brush, the immersive painting app destined to be acquired (and killed) by Google. Tony Parisi, the godfather of VRML, drops wisdom. The air is electric. We’re giving birth to a new art form.

We want the world to see our baby. So, we launch a traveling VR film festival. Selena comes up with the name: Kaleidoscope.

We rent a U-Haul, cram it with hundreds of VR headsets, and hit the road on a DIY tour across America—scrappy, renegade, bootlegging the future. Every stop is packed. Lines snake around the block. People want to experience the transcendent beauty of Tana Pura and the haunting brilliance of Notes on Blindness. The press eats it up. The New York Times, LA Times, every major outlet covers the “first VR film festival.”

Somewhere in the Nevada desert, I get a call. My roadie—a homeless, schizophrenic I picked up at the last stop—pumps gas, muttering to himself. We’re on a brutal 43-hour drive from LA to Boston, halfway to nowhere, when Maya Draisin, head of marketing at WIRED, rings me out of the blue.

“Would you like to partner with WIRED on a world tour?”

A real tour. With a real budget. No more U-Hauls. No more wondering if my roadie will murder me in my sleep. “Hell yes,” I say.

My friends Anthony and Nev at Wevr kick in $500,000, and the Kaleidoscope World Tour sets sail—ten cities, four continents. It nearly kills us—arrested by the French, sued by the Israelis—but we meet hundreds of brilliant creators and learn two brutal truths. First, events are a shit business: high stress, low margin. Second, most creators suck at raising money. They hate pitching. They don’t know how to find investors, negotiate partnerships, or close deals.

But I do. And if I teach creators the mechanics of fundraising, over and over, maybe—eventually—I’ll figure out how to rebuild the whole damn machine.

Fame and fortune

I know the market—virtual reality. I know the mission—help creators raise money. Beyond that, it’s a blur.

I meet up with James Beshara, an old friend from Austin. Back then, we were both broke, chasing the startup dream. Now? James has raised $65M for his company Tilt from giants like Sean Parker and Alexis Ohanian. Silicon Valley is a thunderstorm—lightning strikes enough friends; sooner or later, it’s bound to hit you. Right?

“Apply to Y Combinator,” he says with relaxed confidence. “I’ll flag your app.”

Only the top 5% of startups get interviews, but we make the cut. On pitch day, Sam Altman hunches over a laptop, absorbed by his screen. Paul Graham—the prophet himself—stares through me. Desperate to break the ice, I turn to Jessica Livingston, the only friendly face in the room: “I loved Founders at Work. The Wozniak chapter is dope.”

PG narrows his gaze. “So, which Steve are you? Wozniak or Jobs?”

My soul hangs in the balance. Wrong answer, and it’s over. I freeze. “Both,” I blurt. “Got two Steves in me. Probably more. Steve Ballmer, Steve Case. Hoffman too. Just Steves all the way down.”

Rejected.

But Lenny—my old SXSW rival—believes in me enough to write a check. His startup, LocalMind, got acquired by Airbnb, and he’s ready to share the love. It’s his first investment—a far cry from the killers he’d later back: Figma, Anduril, Substack. Other friends step up. Aaron Koblin, Mike Lewis, Elliot Cole, Paul Kanyuk, Jonathan Rosenberg. My old boss Phil Soffer. My old co-founder Eric. Family chips in too—parents, aunts, and uncles. My in-laws, Mark and Kate, are the first check in.

With money in the bank, we’re off to the races. I team up with Selena and my friend Yelena to launch DevLab, an accelerator for VR films, games, and immersive experiences. Over the next three years, we work with hundreds of creators—visionaries like Josephine Decker, Cabbibo, Tender Claws, Funktronic Labs, and Marshmallow Laser Feast—and help fund breakthrough projects like Vestige, Mad God, APEX, Testimony, and Terminal 3.

I become a truffle pig, sniffing out money for our creators. Meta, Google, Samsung, Unity, HTC, Intel—any company dabbling in VR. Public funders in Canada, France, Britain, Taiwan—Arte, CNC, CMF, NFB, BFI, TAICCA. Private investors and random rich folks. If they’re funding VR, I root them out. Then drag them to First Look, where creators pitch and deals get done.

Curators tune into Kaleidoscope—Shari Frilot from Sundance, Blake Kammerdiener from SXSW, Loren Hammonds from Tribeca, and Liz and Michel from Venice. We become a feeder for the festivals. I live on the road, flying from one premiere to the next—a whirlwind of wild art, champagne parties, and high-intensity friendship.

I land the first 7-figure deal for a VR film: Spheres, a cosmic odyssey produced by Darren Aronofsky, starring Jessica Chastain, Millie Bobby Brown, and Patti Smith. We win the Grand Prize at Venice! We expand the frontier of immersive storytelling with Battlescar, a punk rock masterpiece about two runaway girls in the gritty streets of 1970s New York. And Evolver, a bold exploration of life itself, executive produced by Terrence Malick, starring Cate Blanchett, with original music by Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead.

All told, Kaleidoscope raised over $34M for creators and helped fuel the artistic renaissance of virtual reality. Trudging through the snow in Park City to pitch RZA a project for the Wu-Tang Clan, it feels like I’ve arrived. After a decade lost in the wilderness, the promised land is in sight.

Then the ground gives way. I slip, tumbling once more into the abyss.

Love,
René Pinnell
Founder of Artizen

Read Next → Episode 7: Like a Phoenix, Motherfucker

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Artizen invests in breakthroughs. But how do you spot one? What are the early signs of life — the tiny sparks that might turn into a blaze, the glitches in the matrix, the first hints of undiscovered land? After funding thousands of projects, we’ve learned that real breakthroughs — in art, science, or technology — always share three traits.

They’re weird.
They’re wonderful.
And they’re working.

That’s it. These three signals outperform résumés, credentials, and hype.

Weird

Breakthrough ideas never look normal at the start. They look off-beat, mismatched, slightly out of place. Embrace weird. It is a feature, not a bug. If your project feels hard to categorize — if people hear it, understand it, and then tilt their heads and lean in — that’s the signal. Not confusion. Curiosity.

The kind of weird that makes people say, “Wait… tell me more.”

Weird means original.
Weird means unclaimed territory.
Weird is where the frontier lives.

And one of the clearest examples on Artizen is iContact, the opera.

At first, it sounds simple: an opera about our evolving relationship with technology — the way it merges with us, mirrors us, and reshapes how we relate to each other and the natural world.

Clear. Understandable. Just weird enough to earn a second question.

Ok… tell me more?

Well, iContact asks what happens when technology isn’t something we hold in our hands, but something that presses back — like a robotic pet that learns your rhythms, or a digital spirit that behaves more like weather than software.

But what does that actually mean?

The opera answers by blurring the boundaries between bodies — human bodies, creature bodies, ecological bodies, robotic bodies — through sculptural fashion, projection-mapped environments, and experimental sound. Performers shift between forms. Audiences get pulled into inclusive choreography and collaborative arias.

And then you realize, this isn’t just an opera at all. It’s a tactile, immersive, ceremonial experiment about where technology ends and we begin.

That’s the right kind of weird.
Simple at first glance.
Stranger and more magical the closer you look.

Wonderful

Great projects spark something deep — a feeling that catches you in the chest. A widening of the world. A reminder that beauty and purpose still matter. Wonderful doesn’t demand attention; it invites it.

It carries a quiet truth you can feel before you can explain.

A perfect example is The FutureZoo, an immersive sanctuary where people reconnect with the natural world through virtual, augmented, and mixed reality.

FutureZoo is inventing a new kind of wildlife experience. Their team is building hyper-real digital twins of animals — not just how they look, but how they move, think, and behave. Using advanced simulation and AI-driven instincts, these creatures respond to you the way their real counterparts would in the wild.

They watch you.
They react.
They decide.
They feel alive.

You walk through forests of light, tidal shallows, and shifting ecosystems recreated with such fidelity that your body believes you’re there. It’s the awe of a David Attenborough documentary, but wrapped around you — intimate, immediate, and safe for every species involved.

This is beauty in service of something bigger.

Instead of caging animals for our entertainment, FutureZoo protects them — while giving humans a deeper, more meaningful connection to the wild than any traditional zoo could offer. It replaces harm with wonder. It turns empathy into an experience you can step inside.

Gentle. Ambitious. Transformative. That’s the right kind of wonderful: a project that fills you with awe — and leaves you caring more than you did before.

Working

Breakthroughs start messy, but they move. They gather momentum. They gather fans. They ship new code. They produce artifacts — things you can actually listen to, touch, or test. “Working” is not perfection. It’s evidence. Signs of life. Signals that the idea is becoming real.

One project that shows this beautifully is Mirroring by Summer Krinsky.

Summer is a rare combination — composer, performer, and engineer — now exploring the frontier of AI and music at Stanford. Her idea is ambitious: to build a machine-learning model trained on her entire musical history, then co-write an album with this “mirror” of herself. Not AI replacing the artist, but artist and algorithm learning from each other, shaping each other, and composing something new together, something neither could make alone.

Big idea.
Easy to dismiss.
Until you hear it working.

Every week she pushes fresh code to GitHub. She tests melodies with live audiences. She shares early tracks generated by the system — and they’re stunning. You can hear her progress. You can feel the momentum.

Her fans — myself included — are leaning in.

And beneath the album is something larger: a new way for people to make music. A new instrument. A breakthrough that changes how people compose and collaborate with AI.

Where breakthroughs live

These three signals — weird, wonderful, and working — are the clearest pattern we’ve seen after watching thousands of creators push the frontier forward.

Because that’s where breakthroughs come from.

If your work lives at the frontier — strange, beautiful, and in motion — you’re in the right place.

Love,
René Pinnell
Founder of Artizen

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OBSESSED is a living memoir of my 17-year quest to build Artizen — from idea to escape velocity and beyond. New episodes every week.

Read Previous → Episode 4: Bad Forecast

New lovers and old friends

Eric and I move to SF and start work at Hangtime, the company that “acquired” us. It’s run by Karl Jacob, a man with the Midas touch. Every morning, he sails from Marin, docks at the yacht club, then rolls into the office on a foldable bike. I’m impressed.

I get an apartment in Hayes Valley—hipster heaven—with a roommate named Joe, a good natured alcoholic working in enterprise sales.

To make rent, we need one more roommate, so I convince my best friend Ross Ulbricht to join me in San Francisco. We grew up together, skater nerds in the straight-laced suburbs of West Lake. He always saw the world different. Picking up on bandwidths of light invisible to most.

Ross moves in, and it’s the endless summer. We start our days at Ocean Beach, surfing before work. Ross is fearless—he paddles out past the break, diving under waves that crash like mountains.

Then I meet Selena. Her dating profile says she runs a Pilates studio in Oakland—stunning, fit, smart—way out of my league, but I yolo it. She responds! On our first date, we kiss before saying hello. Her skinny, wiry body hums with energy as we walk through a Buckminster Fuller exhibit, unable to focus on anything but each other.

Soon it’s the three of us—me, Selena, and Ross. Inseparable. Dinner parties, game nights, camping trips. We create alter egos, our names backward—Sor, Anelas, and Anar forever!

Selena asks me to live with her. I charter a private hot air balloon, and propose to her at the top of the world. We get drunk on champagne and crash-land in a cow pasture.

For a while, my obsession fades. This is enough. This is everything.

The last time I see Ross, he borrows the White Wolf—my old Toyota pickup—to gather wood for a bonfire on the beach. I say I’ll meet him there but never make it. I picture him surrounded by friends, flames casting shadows, howling at the moon, free.

Double life sentence

I wake up with a jolt. My phone is exploding. DING! DING! DING! Missed calls, messages from reporters.

Did Ross create the Silk Road? Was he the Dread Pirate Roberts? Care to comment on your best friend’s billion-dollar, dark web, drug empire?

Blood drains from my brain—I feel dizzy.

Throwing on clothes, I call Ross’s mom. He’s at the Oakland jail. I grab my keys, ready to head out. Then—a knock on the door. Two FBI agents. “Just here to talk,” they say, repeating it until it sounds more like a threat.

Ross is a currency trader. No, he never mentioned running the Silk Road on the side. No, I don’t use Tor. No, I don’t know his password. No, no, no. And it’s the truth. Ross never told me—or anyone—about the Silk Road. He knew it would put us at risk.

Selena and I race to the Oakland jail. Guards lead us through metal detectors and steel doors to a concrete hall of empty booths. Ross waits, alone, swallowed in an oversized jumpsuit. He climbs onto his side of the table. I do the same. We press our hands to the glass. No words. Just pain.

In the years that follow—through the trial and endless appeals—I watch the scales of justice buckle, crushed under the state’s fat thumb. Two life sentences plus 40 years—for building a website.

I think back to Costa Rica—years earlier. Ross took me on a hike upriver, to a waterfall. Without hesitation, he scaled the rocks and dove in from the top. I stood frozen, heart pounding. It looked reckless. But Ross never jumped blindly. He took calculated risks. Still, sometimes he got the math wrong.

Ross risked everything for what he believed. What was I willing to risk?

Love,
René Pinnell
Founder of Artizen

Read Next → Episode 6: Kaleidoscope

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