Yea, the history is honestly pretty ugly. Lots of religious cults. And also billionaires with visions for a tech utopia of one flavor or another and, why, look at that—rich people won't have to pay taxes any more! I agree the Shakers are an exception though!
I think there are two ways to answer your second question.
Regarding people who entered the U.S. illegally, we won't be a sanctuary city.
Regarding who's allowed to join and what to do with "undesirable" people, the short answer is that anyone may move to the New Athens. Nobody is "undesirable" until they've been convicted of a crime. Then our justice system will determine the consequences, just like local justice systems do every day everywhere else in America.
I think the fact you asked the question is revealing though. Not of you, but of the kind of people who try to start cities. To be very blunt and just cut to the chase, a lot city startups, at least in American, are thinly veiled attempts by white people to get away from black people. And this isn't distant history: an article in the New York Times from less than a year ago covered a new housing development that's using clever legal tricks to only accept white residents—openly and brazenly. I know that some of my ideas sound right wing—marriage and children are themselves coded right-wing here in 2026—but it's not lost on me that many, many gated communities, and even non-gated suburban developments, if not the entire growth of suburban America in the mid-20th century, is just whites fleeing blacks.
At risk of leaping into 400 years of race relations in a comment to a comment in a small corner of the internet, my solution to "undesirable" people is the legal system. I'm sure there are billions of people on the planet who will roll their eyes and call me naive, including tens of millions of cynical white Americans, but count me a fan of the American tradition of assuming people are innocent until proven guilty. Due process, equal treatment under the law, the entire bill of rights—this is the way.
Insofar as groups of people in the U.S. are still trying to get away from other groups of people, I see that as a failure of the law and law enforcement. The obvious alternative to racial segregation is to make bad behavior illegal and put criminals in jail. Perhaps that means more people belong in jail? Perhaps. This is the path New Athens will take, not just because I personally like it and I'm kickstarting the city, but because the American legal tradition broadly warrants our gratitude, we should fight to keep it, and the best way to keep it is to invest in doing it well
Honestly, I'm a huge supporter of large-scale immigration. It just has to be legal. And I'd prioritize 2-parent families above everyone else. I can tell you're being snarky and maybe think I'm some Ultra MAGA character (I'd characterize the project as slightly center-right), but personally I think immigration is a fascinating topic and a powerful tool for social good (if done above board).
Also, I know some people on the right really are racist, but in my personal experience that's primarily a left-wing narrative. Most right-leaning people I know are not against immigration, nor immigrants themselves, and are not racist. They just want people to follow the rules.
And you may be reluctant to believe this, but from my experience living in a very poor, very white region of America for the last five years, right-leaning people actually do care about rules for rules' sake. Occasionally "law and order" is a dog whistle for racism or another -ism...but usually it's just an echo of a strict upbringing and a high value placed on respecting authority figures. Which might not be your cup of tea, but that's usually what's going through peoples heads.
I mean this in all sincerarity, if you're having that reaction, I invite you to join the waitlist to move to the city.
I've come to believe that people are mean and dismissive online (as you just were) not because they, and you, are mean and dismissive people, but because at a fundamental level there's nothing to do on the internet. The few things we manage to do, or build, or change online are a whiff of shit on the breeze compared to the adventure, meaning, and risk of interacting with real people in physical reality.
You will benefit from moving to the city because building something in the real world with people you depend on, and who depend on you, will make you a better, happier human. Please consider it.
Founder here. Just now seeing this made it to HN yesterday.
Yes, you're right: it's political. The whole thing is deeply political. I worked in tech in SF from 2010–2020 and one of the big mistakes of the era, IMO, was pretending that certain topics weren't political. Or that they were no longer political because of "progress."
In 2020 my wife and I moved to rural Appalachia, where her parents live, because they were excited to help with childcare. Without getting into the pros and cons of city vs. rural living, or blue vs. red culture, I can confidently report that many (most?) topics tech people consider non-political are all people here want to talk about——because here those topics are considered THE MOST IMPORTANT political questions of our times.
I don't think I'm saying anything you don't know. I guess I'll just reiterate: you're right, it's political. And I'll add: As it's always been.
FWIW, my hope with New Athens is to strike a new balance that's wild enough to cause hard-core partisans to pause and think, get everyone thinking from first principals again about big issues that got stuck in the culture war trap, and, at the very least, be transparent about what we're doing so that people can self-select in or out in good faith.
Ack, unfortunately not publicly. Confidentiality agreements :/ We are permitted to share work privately though. Feel free to email me: [email protected]
Good points all around! For the record, if you (or someone on your team) can write great posts quickly solo, that's awesome and I'd never dissuade it. But a lot needs to go right for that to be possible. For an individual to pull it off, IMO you need to meet these criteria:
- You yourself are doing something technically interesting
- You know enough about the project and/or topic to write on behalf of your team members and company. (Because posts on company blogs are perceived to represent everyone.)
- You need to be a competent writer. Sub-skills matter, too: editing, proofreading, creating visuals, and more. This simply takes practice, especially if you expect to move fast.
- It helps if you're a native english speaker, which many engineers are not.
- If you're truly doing it all yourself, you need to know your way around whatever CMS your company uses. Most engineers don't.
- You need to know enough to anticipate the repercussions. Love them or hate them, this is what Legal/PR/Comms are for.
If all this is true, yes, an individual can write a great post in a single day.
To answer your question directly, I was able to write my main comment quickly because:
- I was responding to something. I wasn't writing from scratch. Hot takes are easy ;)
- I'm a cofounder. AKA: I'm comfortable writing on behalf of my company. It's actually part of my job.
- HN comments are lower stakes than a blog post. No long-term SEO impact, for example.
- I've been doing this for 10+ years. And my 500 word comment still took me 90 min to write and edit.
- Yup, I'm a native english speaker.
- Probably some other factors I'm blind to at this point.
My company [1] writes technical blog posts as a service [2]. We mostly work with Bay Area startups. Some key observations and learnings:
- Many companies have tried to create engineering blogs, but you'd never know because the first post was so unpleasant to create that the whole effort got called off.
- If a company does manage to publish a first post, the experience is often so personally traumatic to the engineer that they never try again and/or tell their team members to avoid the process. This is especially true when PR/Comms insists on reviewing posts. (Legal review typically goes more smoothly.)
- Coming up with ideas for posts is WAY easier said than done. Nobody, engineers included, likes staring at a blank page. A significant part of our work is refining ideas and creating outlines.
- Lest you thought otherwise, company engineering blogs are almost always justified as candidate lead gen. Posts are frequently used by recruiters in outreach emails. When a post and email are well written, response rates can easily double—effectively doubling the candidate pool for a growing team. (This assumes that engineers aren't applying to jobs unprompted, which is true for about 80% of startups in the Bay Area.)
- In our research with job seekers, we found that when senior engineers research a company, they seek the company's engineering blog before they seek the careers page, let alone a job description. This is probably obvious to folks here, but in the recruiting world this blows everyone's mind.
- Technical blog posts are expensive whether you DIY or work with someone like us. A detailed post, let's say 1500 words, can easily consume 25 hours of time from everyone involved. 50 hours isn't rare. And this is when the process works well. (Our value prop: we shift time from engineers to our writers.) Here's the process we've found works best. Everything here happens in Google Docs.
1. One of our writers, all former journalists, sits down with an engineer who has an idea for a post. In a 1 hour conversation, they work together to refine the idea and create a bare-bones outline. Assuming you're doing this yourself, my point is that pairing is helpful. This conversation gets recorded and transcribed by a transcription service. (4 hours total time)
2. The writer reviews the transcript and fleshes out an outline. They note locations for graphics and code snippets. The engineer then reviews the outline and leaves comments. (4–6 hours total time)
3. The writer creates a complete first draft, with assistance from 1–2 editors on our team. They leave space for graphics/code for the engineer to add on their own. (8–10 hours)
4. The engineer brings in 1–3 other engineers to review the post. The team adds illustrations and/or code. More comments/feedback. (6+ hours)
5. Our writer incorporates feedback. An editor on our team proofreads the post for clarity, grammar, etc. (2–4 hours)
6. Legal and/or team leaders review the post. (2+ hours)
7. Whomever runs the blog puts everything in the CMS and hits publish. (1 hour)
End of the day, we've ideally consumed fewer than 10 engineer hours. The rest is on us—anywhere from 15–30 hours.
Feel free to email me directly about any of this :) [email protected]
I can add a few things here. (I'm a cofounder at Job Portraits[1], an employer branding studio in SF.)
In our experience, successful employer brands turn on a startup's willingness to be transparent. Everyone in the Bay Area (not just engineers) has a bloodhound's nose for bullshit. I can't overemphasize this—the norm is vicious, laugh-in-your-face skepticism.
Our best projects are with startups who get this, and the solution isn't rocket science: you have to address your struggles.
Marketing teams are most likely to balk at revealing their company's flaws, but what's surprised us is how often technical leaders also refuse to address their team's shortcomings. In part this is because technical folks are deeply skeptical of anything their recruiting teams want (that's another story), but it's also a function of embarrassment...or even outright shame.
The classic case is the eng leader at a small startup who was previously at a FAANG company. They've spent the last few years as part of a well-oiled machine—but now everything is broken! Processes aren't just inefficient—they don't exist! The mobile app doesn't just suck—nobody knows how to fix it because that one guy who built it ditched for a FAANG job! (Oops.)
A huge part of our job, as an agency, is coaching leaders to see transparency as a competitive advantage. We say something like, "This isn't about confessing your sins. It's about revealing challenges that the right engineers will be THRILLED to solve." It's not that [thing] is broken; instead tell candidates that "this is an opportunity to implement [thing] the way you've always wanted." It's not that your failure to build [blah] is hurting the business; instead tell candidates to "come build mission-critical infrastructure." And the more specific you are, the better.
This is a mindset shift more than anything, and when we're able to pull it off it opens the door to an employer brand that candidates will trust.
Oh, and a quick note for any product marketing people who are reading this: Jobs are not products. You can't return them to the store or ask for a refund. Every person your company hires is taking a huge gamble on you. If you only 'put your best face forward' with an employer branding project, you risk emotional apocalypse if, during the person's first 30 days, they realize they were misled by a rosy employer brand. Tread carefully!
As we like to say, assume your audience (candidates) is as smart, or smarter, than you are. Even if they don't trust you, you need to trust them to self-select in—or self-select out—and the only way they can do that is with the truth.
You're welcome! I talked with my dad last night and he's flabbergasted the book is now online (in blog form, at least). He still has all the original illustrations sitting in a flat file in our garage. We discussed what to do with them, if anything, and I suggested the Computer History Museum might be interested. He liked the idea, so we're going to reach out soon. If anyone knows someone there, please drop a line to jackson.solway at gmail. Thanks!
Side note: The illustrated portrait of Gates that accompanies this article was done by, drumroll...my dad!
In fact, my pops did the illustrations for the entire series. Microsoft Press was one of his favorite clients back in the day. Growing up, he'd tell me stories of disorganized secretaries at Microsoft sending him awful reference photos, so he'd look up the execs in the phonebook and call them at home. Sometimes he'd get their wives/husbands on the phone, and he'd nicely explain that he was an artist, and would they mind if he borrowed the family photo album? Many fine stories from those cases, too.
Somewhat ironically, my dad never learned how to do art on a computer. Now he's a commercial construction inspector in Seattle.
So I was just thinking: when was the last time a founder conducted a UX interview with a panhandler? Looking back on reporting this story, it strikes me that I don't know any startup people involved with the homeless community (besides the HandUp team). I hope I'm wrong on this, but I suspect it'll be a while before I see another CEO chase down a panhandler to talk about a text message user flow.
Stills are a little easier though, and probably more importantly, they're way less intrusive than full-on filming. There's just something nerve-wracking about knowing everything you do is being recorded. I wouldn't want to subject a team to that.
I'll also note that we nailed down expectations right at the beginning for what was on and off the record. I have a bunch of much goofier pictures, for example, that won't be getting out ;)
I completely agree it's not a long term solution, but I got the feeling from being with the team for two days that it might work in the mid term. The situation wouldn't be right for the vast majority of founders, but the team gets along better than any I've worked with.
The biggest downside is probably the impact on recruiting for senior employees, especially folks from academia. There might be bigger cultural issues with those types of people though.
I think there are two ways to answer your second question.
Regarding people who entered the U.S. illegally, we won't be a sanctuary city.
Regarding who's allowed to join and what to do with "undesirable" people, the short answer is that anyone may move to the New Athens. Nobody is "undesirable" until they've been convicted of a crime. Then our justice system will determine the consequences, just like local justice systems do every day everywhere else in America.
I think the fact you asked the question is revealing though. Not of you, but of the kind of people who try to start cities. To be very blunt and just cut to the chase, a lot city startups, at least in American, are thinly veiled attempts by white people to get away from black people. And this isn't distant history: an article in the New York Times from less than a year ago covered a new housing development that's using clever legal tricks to only accept white residents—openly and brazenly. I know that some of my ideas sound right wing—marriage and children are themselves coded right-wing here in 2026—but it's not lost on me that many, many gated communities, and even non-gated suburban developments, if not the entire growth of suburban America in the mid-20th century, is just whites fleeing blacks.
At risk of leaping into 400 years of race relations in a comment to a comment in a small corner of the internet, my solution to "undesirable" people is the legal system. I'm sure there are billions of people on the planet who will roll their eyes and call me naive, including tens of millions of cynical white Americans, but count me a fan of the American tradition of assuming people are innocent until proven guilty. Due process, equal treatment under the law, the entire bill of rights—this is the way.
Insofar as groups of people in the U.S. are still trying to get away from other groups of people, I see that as a failure of the law and law enforcement. The obvious alternative to racial segregation is to make bad behavior illegal and put criminals in jail. Perhaps that means more people belong in jail? Perhaps. This is the path New Athens will take, not just because I personally like it and I'm kickstarting the city, but because the American legal tradition broadly warrants our gratitude, we should fight to keep it, and the best way to keep it is to invest in doing it well