Claws Out Summit | Xenofon Kontouris - Frontier Tower

All right, welcome back. Next, we have Zenapon from Frontier Tower who's going to talk to us about the Intercity Network Society. Welcome up, Zenophone.

Hi, everyone. Uh, I hope you guys can hear me. I'm Zeno. I'm part of Frontier Tower. I am the tower lead and I'm here to talk to you about what we are as Frontier Tower.

Uh, quick question. Who here has heard the Frontier Tower before? I see hands. That's great. Who here has been to the tower before?

I see also some hands, which is really good. We're going to make them more and more hands in the future. So, when people ask us what we are, um, we are not an accelerator. We are not a coffee shop. We are not a co-working space.

We are not a restaurant. We're not a third space. We're not a co-l livingiving space and we're not a library. We are a vertical village for 14 technologies, arts, music, culture, and of course, community. And here's a quick video introducing who we are and why.

This is what our cities are looking like right now. Buildings are empty shelves filled with desks, leases, and silos. Instead of connecting people, they're [music] separating us. See, the way we occupy space hasn't evolved in a century. It's still separate where we live, work, and create.

And that separation has fragmented our community, stifled our collaborations, and drained the energy of everyday life. But the world is shifting and people are longing for change, for community, building, and thinking. And that's why you see a massive boom in these temporary communities and pop-up cities. It's time to make it permanent for culture, technology, and serenity to evolve in place. A vertical village, 16 floors in the heart of San Francisco, build the people advancing AI, biotech, robotics, [music] decentralized technologies, and let's not forget art.

Here we have robotic founders building the UFC of robots, neuroscientists building our brain house, [music] philosophers, musicians, makers, all co-creating for a new kind of city. The Frontier Tower is the first known of the Intercity Network Society, a blueprint [music] for how the next city will be built. So come join the Frontier. You're invited.

So just like Rihanna was saying, we are a 16th floor building in downtown San Francisco on Market and Sixth Street. We have 12 thematic floors, five event spaces, three labs, one gym, and over 660 citizens. We have communities for Ethereum, for AI, for heart and robotics, for longevity, biotech and neut, a maker space just like the one that you have over there in the corner, an arts and music and culture floor, a fitness and wellness center, uh a floor for human flourishing, and of course, venture capital. And in the last few months, we've been quite busy. You may recognize some of our events.

So, let's do a quick review. Uh late last year, we had the Chinese peptide race in the basement of the tower. Um it went quite uh viral. We This is just a quick uh taste of what it was. We were creating paratites and raving at the same time.

Also earlier in the year, we also had some robot fights, the first of their kinds, also in the basement of San Francisco. This also went kind of viral on uh X and we hosted Marian Godell who is the CEO of Burning Man. Fun fact, the tower is actually the old headquarters of Burning Man. And of course, we have the Ethereum house, which is the first physical node for local Ethereum builders in the world in the heart of San Francisco. We have a whole floor for Ethereum.

We've had Vitalic in the tower with his favorite dog. We had a party for the 10 years of Ethereum that involved the executive director of the EF, which was Tomas. And we will continue to support Ethereum in the Bay. We have fun in the commons on uh March 14 and 15th and right before that we have ETHF both at the tower. In short, if you're a builder for Ethereum and you're in San Francisco, come and say hi because we have a place just for you.

But of course, AI, this is the AI stage after all. You may have seen this uh another one that went viral a couple of weeks ago. The first open clo happened at the tower and we went quite viral including in China. Pete was there, Ashton Kutcher was there, a lot of great builders were there and as you will see in just a few seconds we had lines all across Market Street and people were waiting to come in for quite some time and you'll see all of this was clock on. It was all over Red Note.

Um, so you see the line, it just goes on and on and on and you can see so many more events about the tower. This is a link to our calendar that's on Luma. Uh, every single event you see here is uh, sourced by the community. It's not organized as a top-down entity, but it's done by the community. And you had people here participating on many of these things.

For example, Sophia and Gage over there are part of the arts and music floor that were right here a couple of uh minutes ago. Sophia also, who was right here before me, is at the tower every day. If you want to do events, if you want to find your tribe, then check this out and come and join some of these events. But the tower isn't only for work, it's for fun.

Who here knows Manu from Love Punks? We had a beautiful little like rooftop [music] rave happening at the tower. A lot more of those to come. It was It was really fun. I invite you all to come.

[music] But really, the most important thing of why we're doing this is because San Francisco is the blueprint for an inner city network society that's going to span across every major city in the world. By the end of next year, we want to be in 10 locations with 10 towers. By the end of the decade, we want to be in a 100 cities with a 100 towers. Want to have 10 million citizens adopting for tech through our society and through our community. But there is no vertical village.

There's no society without co- livingiving. So I also want to introduce to you

about the hotel,

the hotel that we bought recently.

Excited.

Yeah. Finally happening.

Is it weird? It's kind of weird.

Yeah, it's kind of weird to sleep alone in a big hotel.

This building [music] has been here since the 1920s, previously known as the Commodore Hotel. And when we found out it was standing still, empty the place to myself.

Kingsiz beds into the co- livingiving place. Hell yeah. But yeah, this is going to be amazing. exhausting, but

no need to be sad anymore when you're leaving the tower because you're all heading to the same place and no more eating on floor 11 because there are sensational [music] restaurants just around the corner. You're in very close proximity to the Frontier Tower. You can fly just 10 minutes [music] down the road and you will be at the door. And the most important thing that I'd like to share is the fact that we are trying to combine co-l livingiving with frontier technology in ways that has never been done before. This is another snippet from the biotech floor that is doing a residency with a residency leveraging the tower in our community.

This group of biotech founders will cure aging faster than any institutional lab out there. Welcome to the biopunk house. The Biopunk community and the residency are opening up the world's first [music] biotech residency program at the Biopunk House where you'll have access to cutting edge equipment at a premier biotech lab here in San Francisco. We got bio printers, fully equipped tissue culture room, [music] a fully equipped chemistry lab so you can stitch together molecules, a fully equipped lab here at Frontier Tower to give you everything you need to build your proof of concept. Companies here work on everything from [music] menstrual stem cells to synthetic blood to cellfree reagents.

All kinds of different things. Imagine [music] working and living next to 20 other builders in biotech carrying out experiments [music] that matter for people's health and the planet. Go online to sign up. Applications are open for one week only. Apply to the biop house.

[music] And of course that's only the beginning because I think the most important thing for this crowd right now is the introduction of Frontier OS and the Frontier dollar. Uh this is the onchain infrastructure for all towers in our network society. Uh the Frontier OS is going to allow for identity to take place in the tower using account obstruction. This is going to allow us to pay for some of the fees for many of the things that we're doing at the tower with members. The dollar is a stable coin programmable money that can be used for the community to ensure that we keep the economy within our society moving forward.

And very very soon you all will be able to build on this hopefully using some of the AI tools being developed in the bay. So apply to be a citizen, come and visit or participate in allowing us to buy more property. We will be expanding rapidly across the world. So be part of creating the first self-governed vertical village in every major city in the world. This is my telegram.

This is the application for you to become a citizen. And as we end the presentation, I want to show you this little snippet for what's to come.

London is the the best place on earth.

Yeah, that's what he said. And when you think of London, you probably think of the London Eye, red buses, architecture, fish and chips, probably the Queens and British tea. But we're trying to close that gap.

But London isn't just tradition. People work hard here. It's one of the biggest tech and startup hubs in the world. We've seen what happens in San Francisco when builders, founders, and creatives are in the same space building together, learning from each other, and forming a real community. And that's the same energy we want to bring to London very, very soon.

So, with that, my presentation ends. I'm more than happy to answer some questions. We have roughly four minutes left. I want to give a huge uh props to the guys at the art floor as well as the Ethereum floor that were here. Uh, and I'm here to answer any questions you may have.

Anyone? Go ahead. The question was whether it's uh mainly like co-working area and labs uh or living spaces. So, the tower doesn't have living spaces. it.

We did go for permits to convert it to residential or part of it, but it's full, so there's no point in us limiting that. So, we bought a second building like you know, everyone should do, I guess. Uh, and that's 112 room residential that's 10 minutes away. That's a hotel that I showed earlier, and we are pushing to make it for month-long stays for many people in the future. So, if you want to come to the tower and you are part of the community, you'll be able to find the better rates than anywhere else for month-long stays.

So, yeah. Any other questions? So, I think we're going to be going the question was what other cities we want to expand to. Uh, we are definitely looking into London like very seriously and I think we're going to have progress there in the next few weeks. Um, we will then look in New York City as another hub in the United States.

And then we're gonna most likely look into China and Asia. Um, after that, I also expect that we will focus on LA, Austin, perhaps Boston, perhaps DC and Buenosire, Mexico City, Barcelona, Paris, every major city in the world. So consider us to be something in between burning man, zuzalu, we work and saw house if that makes sense. Any other questions?

Great question. The question was about what our plans are for tokenizing the property. Is that correct? So, we have a commitment that we're going to tokenize all of these buildings into a portfolio, but we don't really know exactly how that's going to work yet. Much of the reasons why we're not we've not done that yet is because of regulations.

We got to be careful both about what we say publicly and about what we pledge and promise. But there is a pledge that we want to see this happen and we want the community to own the properties. This is a new model for for all of our generation to recapture urban environments have become largely unaffordable for many people who are under 30. Any other questions? I have one and a half more minutes.

Well, oh Sophia, that's a great question. The question was why we did it in San Francisco? Well, as you may have seen, we're not just web 3. And when it comes to Frontier Technologies, there's no place better than San Francisco. It still remains the pinnacle of innovation across the United States and the West, one could say.

Besides that, there's also a strong history of community housing, hacker houses, and many other communities of the technologists that allowed for this concept to translate very, very quickly. On top of that, San Francisco's commercial real estate has been in a slum for half a decade now since co and we were able to buy the property for $10.5 million. The same property was sold to Weiwork for $70 million 10 years ago. So we were able to buy a property that was making already so much money that would allow for us to build a model that was revenue share because none of these communities pay rent.

They all revenue share with membership fees that are part of their floor. This provides us a model that is significantly more scalable and allows for a much lower barrier of entry for any communities looking for lab space and office space and community space. And we are very good at finding these deals across the globe. The ones we're looking at in London and New York are insane, insane deals that I'm super excited for. And I hope to see you either in San Francisco or in London or in New York very soon.

with that. Thank you very much.