Creating tech co-working spaces in San Francisco is not a novel idea, but a tech campus spanning an entire square mile in the middle of the city certainly was. That is what Solaris, a project that received media attention in the spring, proposed for the Hayes Valley area.
Instead, after only six months, its founder announced earlier this month that it would close on Jan. 1, 2025, well short of its vision. The one-square-mile campus never grew beyond a co-working space of two floors in a four-story building at 1680 Mission St, — on the Mission District side of Market, rather than in Hayes Valley.
“When I started Solaris, the ambition was to turn a square mile of SF into a campus for people to build things,” founder Thomas Schulz wrote on X. “But sadly, we couldn’t turn it into a growing business.”
Solaris is one of three organizations that comprise City Campus, a proposed tech-focused zone officially launched on May 11 with plans to include Hayes Valley, Alamo Square and the Lower Haight. Although it attracted some early media attention, and some tech workers lamented its demise on X, it found less enthusiasm from financial backers from the start. An April 20 GoFundMe campaign to raise $50,000 for City Campus raised $0, a GoFundMe employee confirmed. It’s unclear how much was raised from major donors.
The Solaris coworking space featured 16 offices and 70 desks in a 20,000-square-foot space, with a floor dedicated to “focused work” and another to “serendipity,” according to Schulz in his May 1 X posts.
With the demise of Solaris, only one entity associated with City Campus remains: The Commons SF, a nascent tech social club at 540 and 550 Laguna St. that continues to hold events. The other associated group, Neighborhood SF, a 2023 nonprofit that creates co-living communities, according to its founder Jason Benn’s X account, has been on an indefinite pause since September.
Schulz did not return requests for comment.
The City Campus concept got some attention earlier this year because of its association with the Network State movement, a controversial idea to create sovereign and tech-governed territories around the world. The movement’s leader Balaji Srinivasan, a Bitcoin guru and former partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is listed as one of Solaris’ main investors.
Indeed, Schulz wrote in his remarks on Solaris’s closing that he would “learn from others working on Network State adjacent things, and try again.”
As dystopian as the original idea sounded, Solaris was essentially a real-estate business. “To be clear, I don’t think it necessarily involved buying a square mile,” said Neall Seth. He’s a user of the Solaris space and a partner of Schulz, who is also a co-founder of DirectorySF. Instead of finding AI talent office space, DirectorSF is a housing platform that helps people with similar values to live together in the Hayes Valley area. Seth said Schulz worked with him in building DirectorySF.
“It’s just a community thing,” he said.
But that community never came to fruition. The vision for Solaris emerged as many AI enthusiasts moved to the city last year and settled into Hayes Valley, or Cerebral Valley, as new tech arrivals called it. The idea was to create a space for thousands of tech builders to work and live next to each other. Ideally, it would have also become a space for their children to grow up around inspiring adults.
“People pay to learn something, the housing is secondary to enable learning,” Schulz said on X earlier this month.
Members of Solaris were selected through a form that asked questions about the applicant’s current project and the stage of their startup. Compared to other co-working spaces, such as WeWork, Solaris ended up as a “more selective” community that had one of the highest densities of AI talent, said Seth.
“In between work sessions, [you’d] have a conversation or two in the lunchroom, and they’re always of a really high quality,” he said.
Seth, who still works out of Solaris, said some 30 to 70 percent of the 70 desks remain occupied, depending on the day. The building is now covered by two huge blue advertisements featuring brokers’ contacts and the phrases “Affordable AI space” and “For Lease.”
All 20,000 square feet of the space will be available after Jan. 1. The fully furnished spaces are listed for $17,000 per month for 10,000 square feet, or $8,500 per month for 5,000 square feet.
The demand never grew as hoped. There was “limited demand for early stage startup working space at any given time,” and those who paid for office space didn’t stay very long before they moved to a different city or left for bigger offices, Schulz said in his closing announcement. But maybe it was just the space — not quite in Hayes Valley. Just around the corner from The Commons on Linden Street, a realtor is offering semi-enclosed workstations for $575 a month, and all but one of the stations have been leased, according to Erik Olsen, who manages the property.
Membership at Solaris went for $400 per month per desk, user Rahul Chhabra recalled. In comparison, WeWork charges $199 per month for a basic membership to access its coworking spaces. And The Commons SF, another project under the aegis of City Campus, charges $200 for a monthly membership. The difference for Solaris members was that they had a fixed desk — whereas at WeWork or the Commons SF, members float among desks depending on what is available.
Chhabra leased a desk from May through July until his startup, Neuralace, left for Bangalore for data collection. Compared to WeWork’s often-noisy shared space, Solaris gave him not only a separate full-fledged standing desk, but a keyboard, chargers, and a shelf. Moreover, a rule at Solaris forbids people from talking in the work area. “Everyone is so insanely focused,” and “that unlocks so much productivity,” said Chhabra.
Apparently, so much creativity was unlocked that early start-up companies, like Chhabra’s, moved on after a few months.
“It specifically targets people who are very early in their [startup] journey,” said Chhabra. “Once they have more money, they have to move out to their own separate offices.”
Seth estimated that hundreds of people have used the Solaris space since May.
It almost became “a default space” for AI-related happenings in town, including bigger AI events, tech demos and presentations, hackathons and fireside chats, according to Seth. “I think everybody who has been involved in Solaris … probably didn’t feel great about it [closing], just because it's such a gem in the community,” he said.
Solaris’ closing is “a disappointing loss for the Mission and AI startup community,” tech founder Joseph Nelson wrote in a message to Mission Local. Nelson’s startup, Roboflow, which just raised $40 million in Series B funding, moved into the space early on and stayed until it outgrew it. “I’m confident Thomas will create another powerful community for SF startups soon.”
Solaris “had the cool ‘AI is happening here’ vibes,” said Chhabra. It’s “very aspirational, in the sense that you want to do great work over there.”
Schulz, for his part, left a simple message in his X bio: “Will be back.”
“sovereign and tech-governed territories around the world”, where they go claim how code rules, when really they’re just throwing a smokescreen for stealing other peoples’ money by the billions.
If they were half as smart as they think they are, they would, and probably will, go to Mission Bay where they can have all their gated communities and intensely focused whatever, relatively cheaply, and basically stay out of the way of the rest of civilization.
“Solaris” is the name of a sci-fi novel wherein waking dreams torture explorers like a bad trip, leaving them delusional. Sounds about right.
Yall Techies are embarrassing and sucky. Like human Waymos.
-A Tekkie.
Cerebral Valley … good riddance … nothing “cerebral” about your will to power