AI Summary
5 min readLiving Next to Your Friends Is the New Real Estate Trend
Michael Karnjanaprakorn noticed something strange when he posted a tweet about friends moving next to each other. He almost deleted it after a minute because it got no likes. Hours later, it had taken off. The tweet read: "I noticed a trend where friends are moving next to each other. It can be the same apartment floor, neighborhood block or hundred acre rural area dividing into lots. Weekly dinners and impromptu walks are more of the norm. We used to prioritize finding the perfect house, but now we're prioritizing being close to our friends and curating our own community."
The counterintuitive idea, Karnjanaprakorn explains, is that most people as they get older and start families move near their family. This is the opposite: moving as close as possible to your friends. He started seeing it happen in Austin, San Francisco, and his own neighborhood. A friend in San Francisco told him about a group literally taking over an entire floor of an apartment building—whenever a unit frees up, they grab it, and they maintain a waiting list of people trying to move in. It's about curating your own community rather than having a company like WeWork's WeLive do it for you.
The Spectrum of Intentional Community
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:04) **Holding Company for Productivity Apps** - Mike introduces his long-standing desire to build a holding company that rolls up dormant productivity apps into a single subscription bundle.
- 2 (01:15) **Trend: Living Next to Your Friends** - Mike shares a viral tweet about friends moving next to each other, a counter-trend to moving near family.
- 3 (03:44) **Business Opportunity: Curated Community vs. Company-Curated** - The hosts discuss the difference between a company curating community (like WeLive) and people self-organizing.
- 4 (05:50) **Business Idea: Building a New Town** - Mike pitches the idea of building a new, art-inspired town in Florida, leveraging the Brightline train and the loneliness epidemic.
- 5 (13:53) **Case Study: Summit Series** - The story of Summit Series, which started with events and evolved into buying a mountain and selling plots of land.
- 6 (15:36) **Trend: Cash Flow & Dividends for Startups** - A shift from venture-scale growth to cash-flow-positive, dividend-paying businesses.
- 7 (18:41) **Trend: M&A of Digital Businesses** - Mike predicts a wave of acquisitions in 2024 for digital businesses (SaaS, content, apps) in the $100K to $10M revenue range.
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Show Notes
I'm joined by Michael Karnjanaprakorn, former CEO of Skillshare. We talk about the biggest startup trends that will shape 2024: IRL community spaces, AI educational agents, and more.
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