Fractal: The Book

I'm writing a book, and this is the introduction

Every day of my life is like an episode of Seinfeld. Friends drop into my house unexpectedly and say bold and bizarre things like we should run for city council or hey, how much would I have to pay you to rename your daughter to “Lambchop”?

You may remember a time when your life was like Seinfeld too, maybe in high school or college. And unfortunately, if you’re reading this, your life probably isn’t like that now.

This book¹ will teach you how to fill your life with friends.

I’ll share how my husband and I organized over 30 friends to move into our apartment building in Brooklyn, a project that we called “Fractal.” And then, when we had a baby, we moved to another neighborhood in Brooklyn and helped a dozen friends move near us. And then, uh…we moved neighborhoods again, but we still live near friends. It’s a long story. And then we helped groups all over the world coordinate to live near their friends. We want to share our story as a case study for those of you who dream of living among a dense network of friends who inspire you.

People often ask me “what is Fractal?” and I still don’t have a good answer. Usually I just give the most straightforward answer; I list a bunch of stuff that Fractal has.

We have an apartment building of over 60 residents that serves as a shelling point for hundreds of people. We’ve spun off eight more co-living houses across New York City, created by groups of people who became close through living together at the first Fractal. We have several living room third spaces where we co-work, host events, and teach classes.

We have a co-working space where we do our best work side-by-side (which is so much more fun than working at a corporate WeWork, sans community). We have a bootstrapped university where we teach over dozens of classes per semester. A coding bootcamp where students train intensively in community to land 6-figure jobs and to start their own startups. A civic school that has taught hundreds of citizens and dozens of government officials how to do politics in New York City.

We’ve run ambitious art projects like an immersive theater show with 29 performers that took place across 7 apartment units in a building that many of us live in. We have so many events that it’s impossible to keep track of it all, but it’s easily hundreds per quarter, and we’ve been forced to split off into many separate calendars and sub-communities because there are thousands of people in New York City that show up to all this stuff. It’s truly beginning to feel like a college campus. Oh, and our daughter loves all the activity - she’s a few months shy of two.

We didn’t expect any of this.

I mean, we wanted to live near our friends, but we were surprised that our co-located friend group was soil for so many other projects I never would have imagined. Living near your friends makes every other part of your life better, faster, easier, and more magical.

Started from the bottom…

We followed a simple process.

The first thing we did was we “planted a flag.” Essentially our friends needed to believe that we were committed to being in a particular place before they uprooted their own lives to come live with us. We chose a neighborhood in East Williamsburg in Brooklyn. We wrote up our vision and then we posted it online and sent it to our friends.

Then we started hosting weekly so friends from disparate parts of our lives would get to know each other, and become mutual friends. We hosted a dinner party every Sunday night. Our friends knew that they were always invited by default and that they could bring a plus one. In that way our network started to grow and to densify and become a community.

We also offered short-term stays to convince our non-New York friends to move. Call it the “Fractal Hotel.” Many of our friends faced a paradox of choice: they had remote jobs and could live in any city that they wanted. Post-pandemic they were living nomadically. They knew that they wanted to settle down somewhere, they just didn’t know where. We let our friends stay with us for a couple of days or a couple of months until they couldn’t imagine leaving, and signed a lease in our building.

Our project started small, in a three bedroom apartment shared with a close friend. Soon, we helped another friend rent a four bedroom apartment across the hall, and then another friend rented a three bedroom apartment one floor below us. From there we kept helping more and more friends sign leases, and sublet their extra bedrooms to other friends. Eventually, a flywheel effect was created and people kept moving in, hosting events, and launching spaces and initiatives. We could barely keep track of the chaos.

(In fact, we loved the chaos and there was no need to keep track of it all. We were too busy enjoying ourselves).

What can you learn from our story if you want to build a campus with your friends? First of all we recommend that you keep it simple.

When we first had this idea of living in a neighborhood with our friends we were told “oh my friends and I have been dreaming about doing that for years.” But the way they said it let on that they thought it would always remain just a dream.

Sometimes people would tell us, “first I’m going to get rich and then I’m going to get land and then I’ll get 20 of my friends and family to all agree on where to live and then I’ll build a village.” This never works. Putting off living near your friends until you’re mega-rich is not long-term planning, it’s procrastination.² And in ten years time, your friends may have kids or aging parents or more intense job obligations. Even if you have beautiful land to offer them, they might not want to or be able to move.

We weren’t mega-rich.³ We didn’t put money into gathering our friends beyond paying the rent on our own apartment. Friends who wanted to move near us signed their own lease in our building. Building a neighborhood is a coordination problem not a money problem.

You Can Do This

I want you to walk away from this book thinking that doesn’t sound so hard. I want you to host your first weekly event. I want you to share an imperfect but obviously better vision of what life could be with your friends.

I want you to experience the joy and wonder of life with dozens of your friends living across the hall or down the street.

This book is intended to be a practical handbook with just enough storytelling, examples, and philosophy to support the practice. I intend to publish supplementary materials, including community organization docs, financial spreadsheets, manifesto examples, and everything you’ll need to build a community like Fractal.

Our mascot, Mandelbro the friendly Fractal :)

Fractal: The Book (under construction 🚧):

Part 1: Living Near Friends

1. Intro ⬅you are here

2. How to Live Near Your Friends

3. Getting Started (Why You Don’t Live Near Your Friends)

4. The Makeshift Guest Room

Part 2: Learning with your friends

1. How to start a school with your friends

2. The Step-By-Step Guide to Starting a School With Your Friends

3. What I learned at FractalU by Elena

4. Why teach at FractalU?

Part 3: Fractal as Soil

1. Maximum New York

2. Merlin’s Place by Zu & Ulysses

3. Fractal Tech

Part 3: The Emergence of Neighborhood Campuses

1. Marry Your City by Daniel Golliher

2. The Story of Fractal Geneva

3. The Story of Fractal Boston

4. The Story of Portal Porto

Part 4: Philosophy

1. You can just do things

2. The Gardener Leader by Pav

3. Legibility

1. And by book, I suspect I am writing a collection of Substack posts that I may one day bind into a singular entity. Idk.

2. I wrote this introduction a few years ago, and now I find this sentence ironic because it uses the AI-tic “it’s not X, it’ s Y.” 🙈

3. Nor were we poor; we were software engineers with a few years of personal savings under our belt.