👋 Hey, everybody—Rae here, one of the co-founders of Freedom Village, a new real estate development for the startup community we’re building in New Hampshire.

Many of you found your way here through the State of Biotech Innovation event we hosted at Frontier Tower in San Francisco or last month’s Freedom Summit in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Very few projects anywhere in the world are attempting something comparable to Freedom Village.

Network School is in Kazakhstan (it relocated after getting kicked out of Singapore). Praxis is building in Uruguay. Próspera is in Honduras.

California Forever is not dead, but the original “build a whole new city of 400k people on farmland” dream has been significantly delayed and scaled back in the near term. The rumors of stalling are real.

All of these projects are trying to reinvent the wheel with new jurisdictions, governance, and currencies. While we applaud all efforts to create new startup cities, won’t be wasting our time with that.

Here in the United States, the only similar project to have made meaningful progress is ProtoTown in Texas, which Ryan and I recently visited.

That makes Freedom Village only the second serious project of its kind in the country—and we believe it has the ingredients to become the strongest proof yet that this model can work.

We’re building it because a serious cohort of New Hampshire founders & investors believe that San Francisco, New York, and Austin shouldn’t be the only places where ambitious people can build their startups.

And our ambition doesn’t stop with one community. Once Freedom Village is established, we plan to open-source the playbook—with the goal of inspiring at least 10 more startup communities to be seeded across the country.

The demand for something like this is real.

When I first tweeted the plans for Freedom Village, I got 5 DMs from founders in SF and NYC saying that if this is real, they will come home.

For Freedom Summit, we hoped 75 people would attend our inaugural event. Instead, 200 showed up—including Dean Kamen, Vikram Mansharamani, Manchester Mayor Jay Ruais, and New Hampshire Economic Development Chair Lucy Lange.

And we’ve already had top tier investors reaching out asking to invest.

Now, we’re entering the next phase of Freedom Village—and formalizing how people can become a supporter.

Subscribe by Fri, Oct 2nd at 2 pm to get the first members-only weekly update.

Thanks for being here! Read on to hear what’s coming next 👇

Freedom Village is moving from an ambitious idea toward a real, organized community & real estate development — and we’re formalizing how people can participate and support the work.

We now have three membership levels:

We will occasionally share major milestones publicly. But our regular updates, deeper content, community conversations, and most events will be reserved for supporting members. The people helping make this work possible should also have the closest view — and direction — of how it is taking shape.

Over the next several months, members can expect:

Freedom Village is about creating jobs, building new housing, keeping and attracting talent to New Hampshire, and giving ambitious people a place to build the future.

Almost no one in America is attempting anything like it. ProtoTown has gotten there first; our goal is to make sure it isn’t the last.

We will document what we learn and open-source the playbook so that communities like this can take root across the country.

But first, we have to get this one off the ground.

If you believe Freedom Village needs to exist, we hope you’ll become a member and help us build it. Subscribe by Fri, Oct 2nd at 2 pm to get the first members-only weekly update.

We hoped 75 people would attend the first Freedom Summit. Instead, 200 showed up—including Dean Kamen, Vikram Mansharamani, Manchester Mayor Jay Ruais, and New Hampshire Economic Development Chair Lucy Lange.

We will be releasing the talks over time.

Some talks will be publicly posted on our YouTube channel, while others (like unveiling plans for Freedom Village) will be for members only. Be sure to subscribe by Friday at 2 pm EST to get the first update.

Until then, we’ve got a couple of videos up on our YouTube channel you can explore:

We took an impromptu trip to Proto Town, a new hardware hub in Texas that hopes to reindustrialize America, and stayed in one of the casitas built by Terran Robotics.

It’s still very early days at ProtoTown and we learned a ton that has changed a few things on how we will approach our project. Will share in member updates.

We’ve officially commenced the process of buying the land. I’ll be sharing what we’ve done so far and weekly updates starting Friday, October 2nd with all the gritty details to supporting members.

Be sure to subscribe by Friday at 2 pm EST to get the first update.

The Phase 1 site design has been drafted. We’ll be iterating on these plans with input from members in the coming weeks (brunch anyone?).

Next we’ll be designing the club house and shared amenity spaces for members.

We’ll be hosting 2-5 gatherings per month (19 events are already on the calendar!). Some are public events Ryan & Rae are associated with, while most are members-only gatherings.

See and subscribe our event calendar on Luma →

Thanks for reading and being part of the Freedom Village community!

Become a supporter before Fri Oct 2nd at 2 pm EST to get the first detailed update (monthly insiders will not get historical updates).

Otherwise stay tuned for occasional public news!

✌🏻 Rae Lambert
Co-founder of DNNR & Freedom Village