tldr; we are community people who have already been doing this in our free time
When you sign up for our bootcamp, you’re really signing up for us: Andrew and Jake.
We will be your guide, your instructors, your role models, and, hopefully, your friends.
So why learn from us? Well allow our backgrounds to explain:
Andrew Rose (twitter, github)
Andrew is the culture and community side of the bootcamp.
He has a track record of building communities with an exceptional density of playfulness, curiosity, and ambition — especially Fractal and Fractal University. In his free time, he likes to research what makes historically great groups special. (playful trust + no bullshit.)
Fractal is a social movement, community, and co-living project with the mission to create a civic, economic, and socio-cultural Golden Age in New York City
In the last year alone, with no funding or institutional backing:
- We launched a co-working and community space at almost no cost
- We ran our first conference, which was oversubscribed
- We ran our first creative residency program, which was oversubscribed
- We launched a Community University program, oversubscribed, now has >25 classes
- Our viral tweet + substack piece on Living Near Friends kicked off a huge press cycle in The Atlantic, Bloomberg, Financial Times, and on Tiktok and Youtube about Living Near Friends -- and it inspired our friend Phil to build a successful app for living near friends
Fractal University is Fractal's community university program.
Since launching in August:
- We ran our inaugural semester with 4 classes: a coding class, an LLMs class, a community-building class, and a somatic movement class.
- We launched our second semester with over 25 classes including cooking classes, classes on New York City governance, coding classes, a painting class, and many more.
- We grew from 40 students to over 130 students.
Earlier in his career, he built car-free cities at Culdesac, and he was interim-principal of a Montessori school.
Andrew’s mission is to create a Golden Age of optimism, creativity, technology, art, politics, and culture in New York City. This starts with a definite optimism that code will be instrumental to the flourishing of artists, technologists, and visionaries. Hence, bootcamp.
Many things regarded by conventional wisdom as very low probability happen when a relatively tiny number of able people decide to change something — Dominick Cummings
At its early stage, any new paradigm will be represented by a network of seed institutions. Like biological seeds, what matters with these seed institutions is not their initial scale. Rather, what matters is that they are operating on and developing a genuinely better paradigm, and that they can survive and grow as the society around them falters and even becomes hostile to growth. — A New Golden Age of Governance, Palladium Mag
Jake Zegil (github)
Jake is the systems architecture, project management, and engineering side of the bootcamp.
We’re both software engineers, but Jake truly embodies the ethos of the 10x engineer. The man works smarter and harder — as Director of Engineering in 2023, he shipped 4,731 contributions, while managing multiple teams, onboarding and training 4 engineers, and interviewing more than 400 candidates.
How does he do it all? The same structure and systems engineering we will teach you.
Jake was self-taught, but developed a bootcamp system for his brother and childhood friends from North Carolina. He convinced them to drop out and become software engineers by following this program, now they make $150k and $110k respectively, and have time to build their own projects on the side. They hope to become founders.
All those with the potential to blossom forth must do so — Lee Kuan Yew