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“Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”
Brian Eno
I went three years without earning a dollar, then made $100 in two hours.
The two hours started in a room at Atlanta Tech Village, the first mastermind I joined: a handful of founders meeting each week to say what they did, what’s next and where they’re stuck.
Trends.vc, my market research newsletter, was a few months old and the offer I sent for it got zero replies.
I wanted to wait a week and try again.
A member named Ash told me: “Pivot now. Be vulnerable. Send the message today.”
I did. The $100 came first. Much more followed from that one message.
I wrote Trends.vc in an Atlanta condo on the BeltLine, a walking and biking trail through the middle of the city.
The rent ran two to three times what the same place cost outside the city. I was paying for the environment.
Then I started nomading. Each new apartment lasted a few weeks or a few months. Countries changed too.
Spain, Turkey, Brazil, South Africa.
Each move started me over among strangers.
Each move reset the basics: where I worked, when I worked and where I trained. By the time a place felt normal I was packing again.
I call part of that stretch self-sabotage.
The same years taught me which environments I work in best.
Alfred Marshall studied how one trade clusters in one place. He wrote in 1890 that inside a cluster the secrets of the work stop being secret and hang in the air.
Economists call this agglomeration: you get more out of the same people and tools when they sit close enough to touch.
A room creates more connections than it has people.
- 2 people: 1 connection
- 5 people: 10 connections
- 10 people: 45 connections
A crowd in one place produces more than the same crowd spread across a map.
Andrea del Verrocchio took in a 14-year-old apprentice named Leonardo in 1466. Perugino trained in the same Florence workshop and later taught Raphael.
Iten sits at about 8,000 feet on the edge of Kenya’s Rift Valley, a town of roughly 42,000 people, most of them farmers. Eliud Kipchoge and David Rudisha trained there. Amateurs travel there to train alongside them.
Thin air is available on any mountain.
The runners beside you each morning are what the plane ticket actually buys.
Rex Sinquefield wanted somewhere to play chess in retirement, so in 2008 he and his wife Jeanne opened a club in St. Louis. Congress named the city the Chess Capital of the United States in 2014.
About 20 grandmasters live there now, which puts one Midwestern city alongside a handful of places worldwide.
Bell Labs stretched the main corridor of its physics wing to 700 feet. Walking it meant passing chemists, metallurgists and engineers.
A crew laid 827 miles of fiber from Chicago to a data center in New Jersey in 2010. The line cost about $300 million and cut a trade order’s trip from roughly 17 milliseconds to 13.
That gap is four thousandths of a second.
Distance costs money even when no one involved is human.
Each of those places has a price.
A membership, a flight or a move buys proximity to a crowd that already exists.
Buying your way in costs less. Building a scenius yourself is the other option.
Sinquefield took it. He wanted a chess scene and paid to assemble it.
The version I built is smaller.
Sitting in a room someone else built taught me what a few sharp people nearby are worth, so I still run mastermind groups today.
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What group could you join or start?
