Skill Share in the Kift Community — (18:29)

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https://www.kift.com/

Kift and Colin on Twitter

Hosted by @JacksonSteger

Sound Engineering by @Prodcolin

Videos and Clips by @McdonnellCallum 

Produced + Distributed by  @PhilippeIze

[00:00:00] Jackson Steger: Hi everyone. This is Jackson Steger, and you're listening to Season 2 of Campfire. Let's get it.

[00:00:09] Today's guest is Colin O'Donnell, Founder of Kift. Kift is a co-living company that brings together van life, clubhouses in unique locations, and community for a new way to live, work, and explore. So, we talked about Kift through the of how cities have evolved. After all, this season of Campfire seeks to understand how to build new cities.

[00:00:28] Each week we are joined by experts and practitioners from different startup cities who will share the stories and the lessons that they have learned from experimenting with radical new models of living. A reminder, Cabin's neighborhoods are now open for co-living. So, if you're interested in long-term co-living at beautiful locations with nature out the front door, high speed internet, and actual campfires, you can join the waitlist today by visiting www.cabin.city.

[00:00:53] Another reminder, if you introduce us to a city builder and we book them on this podcast, we will reward you with some Cabin token. Cheers.

[00:01:04] Colin O’Donnell, welcome to Campfire.

[00:01:07] Colin O'Donnell: Thanks, Jackson. Happy to be here. 

[00:01:09] Jackson Steger: We're happy to have you. Super big fans of yours over here at Cabin, and thanks to Phil for connecting us. We're going to talk today all about Kift and what you all are building. But this is a city building podcast, so maybe before going deep on what Kift is exactly, I would love to just hear your thoughts on the modern city, like where it's been, where it's going. Is the city in its current state obsolete? Like what's happening with today's cities? 

[00:01:39] Colin O'Donnell: Well, I think we have to go back a couple thousand years and say, what is a city anyways. I've been thinking about cities as this kind of ancient communication technology. It's the thing that allowed us to come together and collaborate to work closely. We could do rapid forms of trade, sharing culture, commerce, buying and selling things. So, think of it as like the city is this prototype for the internet. And it's now, we've seen it be chipped away over the past 20, 30 years from this new communication technology we have. 

[00:02:11] So, all of a sudden the internet comes along, and a few easy things are chipped away. We've got music. I don't have to go to Tower Records anymore to get the latest CD. It's mind boggling just to think about I used to have to drive into the city to look up a fact in the library or buy some music or checkout the premiere. Obviously, all that stuff’s moved online. And these things that the city used to have a monopoly on are now broken.

[00:02:34] And even in the past, like whatever, five years, the idea of like remote work was preposterous. Like we had to have high speed connectivity in the office. We had to have a land. We had to have one from a hundred-Megabit land to a gigabit land, and moving files around. And so, the city still had this monopoly on work. But yeah, I don't think actually COVID crushed it, but obviously it revealed that we had seen a lot of advances that we weren't taking advantage of yet. So, high speed internet collaboration tools, all of a sudden, like working from home, while it's still kind of wild and at times miserable, is totally possible. 

[00:03:11] The last thing that's really changed, and I think you guys are seeing it too, is, you know, we used to have transit-oriented development in cities. Now, I think of it as like satellite-oriented development. So, Starlink in the past six months has gone nationwide, if not global, and the idea that now cities no longer have a monopoly on this connectivity because rural internet was not a thing six months ago.

[00:03:34] So, there's this really interesting change that I think we're seeing that we can talk about some of the implications. But cities had this monopoly. They had all the supply. And then the demand, you had to come to the city to get this stuff. Now, it's available And, if everywhere, you can't have change without impact. So, simple of economics. We got new kind of unlimited access and supply. We're going to see a massive change in cities.

[00:04:01] Jackson Steger: Yeah. I'm very much on Twitter. And also, first season of this podcast was very DAO-oriented. Now, we're more oriented around the city building part. But during the DAO piece, we talked about how there's Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0. Can cities similarly be thought of in these different phases? And if so, might you be able to outline, like what are the discrete stages of how city evolution has happened over time? 

[00:04:28] Colin O'Donnell: Yeah, I think I don't know if it's this thing where you get a certain lens and everything you look at is now in this kind of focus, and you know, I've got a new hammer and everything's a nail. But, and just for the folks tuning in from home, at Web1, we've got a server in our closet. We own all of our own data. We own all those services who were responsible for running it. We know how the whole thing works. But we can't really scale that too well. So, then we go Web2, centralized services, Google, Facebook. No one knows the control is in the hands of select few. We don't own any of that responsibility here. And then Web3, we've got, how it works it’s built into the protocol, and we can have this decentralized way of managing services and data across the internet.

[00:05:12] So, cities. I think City 1 is really this village, and everyone in the village knows how to operate the village, all the dirt, everything that's going on, you know, all the systems, and it's very Web1 City 1. You own your stuff, you're responsible. But you can't scale that. You can't have a 10,000-person village where everyone knows how everything works. You have to start to get levels of abstraction. And we build hierarchy. And in New York City, you got a mayor's office, city council. It's just very abstracted in this very hierarchical way, and no citizen knows how it works, and that we really don’t control it in any way. So, I think City 3.0 is this really interesting opportunity.

[00:05:54] So, what happens when the city, the built environment? I'm struggling for words around this because I say like the city is dead, but like long live the city because the city isn't that concrete and steel exoskeleton yet at the window. You know, the city is the people, it's the culture, it's the community, it's the retail, it's the commerce, it's all that stuff.

[00:06:13] So, City 3.0, decentralized city, what does that look like? Physically decentralized, but also decision-making decentralized. Also, things like zoning, is that something that happens by a city council or is that something we can decide on the fly. So, I think there's a lot of ground to cover, and obviously no one knows exactly what it's going to look like. But definitely I think of this as an opportunity to get away from decentralized city, and there's a lot of nostalgia for it. So, I don't want to be seen as this cheerleader on the side, like rooting for the demise of this beautiful thing. I lived in New York City for 20 years, lived in San Francisco for five years, four years. But I think it's calling it what it is and trying to get ahead of the challenges, so that we can plan for a smooth transition, if that's possible, but at least trying to anticipate what can go wrong and how do we look for those quieter voices, the marginalized people, how do we look for people who don't have the agency. It's an exciting time in the world. 

[00:07:14] Jackson Steger: Yeah. I appreciate you giving us that framework. I want to talk about how Kift is working towards this kind of future, and I'm sure that will help us get into some of the more characteristics of this future city. But first, before we go like deep into the roadmap of the past, present, and future of Kift, I would love to just give you a chance to say what is Kift, why did you start it, and, yeah, we'll just start there. 

[00:07:39] Colin O'Donnell: Yeah. Kift is an answer to what comes next after this City 2.0 that we're living in. We anticipated that remote work was going to be a thing, it got started just before COVID, then COVID happened, and all of a sudden remote work was just everywhere. 

[00:07:55] And so, Kift is a way to live and work anywhere but be part of a global community. We've started off by building a network of houses from Joshua Tree up to Washington. On the West Coast, we're starting to move the further east. And it's a membership model. We've discovered this hack, a couple hacks. One is Starlink satellite is amazing and just creates this massive opportunity of where you can call home or you can call office. And then the second hack that we discovered was you can take a two-bedroom house, and if everybody has a camper van as their mobile bedroom, you can roll up and overnight take a two-bedroom house and turn it into a 20-unit co-living space.

[00:08:38] So, at Kift, we really focus on the community. I've been in technology my whole career, and technology is definitely a secondary thing that's serving the community here. So, as community first, we like, this is more than co-living too. We're really trying to define a new way of living. We've got a DAO, www.kiftdao.xyz. We use Web3 tools for proposals, for governance. But we try not talk about them as Web3 stuff. We’re just, this is how we operate. And people who live here are interested in cooking dinner together. They're interested in doing yoga together. They're interested in like being there for co-working opportunities, for collaborations, for dance parties, for art, and to live in nature, and to be in nature. 

[00:09:19] Yeah. Kift is a new way to live and work remotely. All of your basic needs are met, internet, all your groceries, place to stay, use the van as your bedroom, and it's $4.25 a month. So, we think it’s better in terms of quality of life, and it's far cheaper than living in cities. So, we think there's like this viral opportunity when that these things are met. 

[00:09:42] Jackson Steger: Definitely. I'm glad you brought up the van piece. My understanding is that's how everything got started. Could you tell us about the first Kift caravan? What happened, how many people were there, and what was like a moment during that caravan where you had this maybe the moment of validation that this works and that it could be something really special? 

[00:10:03] Colin O'Donnell: First off, this seemed like a crazy idea, but like, hey, can I have freedom in community? Can I move around and be able to live in different places, but also be part of the community? The thing I figured, and we thought there's 30 million people who are working remotely in the U.S., that's a huge new market. There's got to be a number of people who want to live closer to nature and explore. If we're asking them to have a van, we should start with Vanlifers and just right off the bat we can offer them something like great places, community, and things that we're missing. And I figured that people would be interested in, oh, I've got a shower and place to do laundry and some reliable WiFi, but I'm going to be a loner because, I don’t know, if you start to feel that community is amazing, it's the reason why, but it's been so removed from our lives that the idea of cooking dinner together or just eating dinner together every night is overwhelming. So, I guess when we started off a year ago in September, our first prototype for like how to launch a business or how to launch a community, before we go and buy a network of real estate, let's see if people like this. 

So, we got six locations lined up and we went a couple weeks at each, up to a month at each location, and we moved 25 people together through this. And I could fill a lot of credit for coming up with this strategy. And what we found is people came on, and within the first day, it was all about the community. We had, I think the first dinner, I was like just dropping hints. So I'm like, we could cook dinner every night and just we've got 20 something people, so it'll take two people, and everyone cooks dinner every 10th day, and we eat dinner every night if you guys want to do that. If not, we'll just cook once a week and people can forge for themselves. Everyone's like, no, we want to cook dinner every night, and then we want to hold hands together, and we want to say like a little thing about the food and be thankful. And it went into, we've done that every night at Kift for the past year, plus every community house. It's just staggering to see how that moment of a tiny taste of what it can be like to focus on the human things, focus on being together, caring for each other, nurturing. And to follow on. So, we went from Ukiah down to, let's see, we went to maybe Arcosanti, Joshua Tree, down in the mountains outside of San Diego, and it just evolved into this thing where people were bringing their gifts and contributing them to the community and not asking what do I get out of it. 

[00:12:28] And so, when you think about Web3, like one of the things to think about is what are you offering a bounty for? What is a bounty? Is that really even a kind thing to say? What are you offering a proof of attendance token for, because people are doing this out of the desire to be part of a community, and so they're leading yoga classes. They're getting people out the door. They're like, hey, I'm doing a hike on Saturday. Who wants to come? 

[00:12:50] So yeah, it went off the chart. So, I think there's been multiple moments where just people have just been transformed emotionally, and other doors are open to, hey, we don't have to live by ourselves in a Sheetrock box in a city where you don't know anyone or like neighbors don't know each other, eating dinner by ourselves. Communing with a family on TV is the closest thing we get to like social interaction a lot of nights. 

[00:13:14] Jackson Steger: I’m curious because I've done a number and we've talked about it on the podcast as well, but I've done a number of different temporary co-living experiences, and a big challenge I've seen when I've been more on the organizing side is just finding the right properties. And so, I'm curious in that first experience, when you're doing a lot of, I imagine Airbnb, with this temporary caravan model, what you learned about what kind of property makes sense for the Kift community really from a design perspective? And then also, why does it make sense for you to now be thinking about acquiring land, and where are you in in that process?

[00:13:54] Colin O'Donnell: Yeah. So, exactly. We started with those kind of six properties in serial, and then we moved to, we have four properties that are permanent, so in a network, so you can travel between them. First off, climate has to be nice. Secondly, WiFi is default standard, so we can get that anywhere. Secondly, package delivery. So, people are living on the road. Many times we won't leave the property because we've had properties that are 150 acres. You won't leave the property for a week, two weeks, but you need to get something. So, package delivery is important. 

[00:14:26] Flat ground is surprisingly important. So, you want to have 20, 30 people in a space. You want to have room to spread out. People want to be sitting on the grass and on laptops. California presents a lot of super hilly land, which can be challenging, whether you're in a van or just even feeling like you're isolated on an island. And so, flat ground is great, big open kitchens, and we have this kitchen concept, which is like a gradient of production. So, on the outer edge of the kitchen, you can have soft, comfortable seating and watch the world pass by and have a conversation with people who are preparing food. You have a next gradient and it’s more of like a food prep/eating area. Think about that as your kitchen counter. So, the outside is like a couch that's near the kitchen counter. And then, on the other side of that kitchen counter is that hardcore kind of prep area where there's a lot of hard metal, hot surfaces, and maybe grease sputtering, but everyone can be involved around that. And such a critical part of this. We take bedrooms, and we turn them into conference room If you need to do a Zoom call, it's totally private. You can do that from your room or do it from a bedroom. So that converts really easily. 

[00:15:37] And over time, what we've found is that people are more, I think this is really important for just general development, but interested in spending more time outside. And we don't have to have a huge house if we have a great lawn, we have nice shade structures, little roofed areas, and good lawn furniture.

[00:15:56] Jackson Steger: Sounds great. And yeah, just thinking about Kift as like an entity that wants to have longevity to it, I imagine that it's more affordable in the long run to own the land rather than renting it, that there's an advantage just in what you're able to do with the properties to customize them to what you're thinking about. What's the legal structure here for the land owning part? Because I know you all operate as a DAO, and we'll talk about that a little bit, but just someone who is an owner of Kift and that they like have an NFT, do they have ownership rights over the land or is that governed separately? And just, yeah, help us on that.

[00:16:33] Colin O'Donnell: This is classic, this is not an investment tool. This is, you're not buying the land, you're being a member in a club and you're getting some say over how that club is run. We're actually staying pretty fluid right now because obviously emerging landscape, and so we're trying to look for precedent in direction, and we've explored the Wyoming LLC controlled by a DAO, controlled by a smart contract, a DAO running that.

[00:17:02] What we're leaning towards is an unaffiliated nonprofit. And we think this is aligned with our interests. We think it's the reason why we want to be community funded. We think if we get a bunch of real estate development money, we're going to be squeaking out those 20% returns and trying to produce the kind of minimal product possible. And this is, if someone's going to own the land, we think it should be a nonprofit, and the community should be running it. 

[00:17:29] We think there's a lot of economic advantages of it. We can, especially given the new opportunities around a satellite-oriented development around being able to develop anywhere, all of a sudden places in Utah or Wyoming where there was no house before becomes possible. And then building to suit. So, we found that a lot of our members really want more outdoor kitchens. We're just integrated with nature. We think that's really possible. And particularly in smaller sites, we'll do a test site where buy a very small piece of land, go through the process of doing that through the DAO, and then building a minimal amount of infrastructure. I've started to call it like pluggable infrastructure stuff that you can move between sites. A lot of stuff is on trailers now. We've got sauna on a trailer. We've got building out a mobile kitchen. So, we can quickly light up a site and test it out and see how we like it before committing. 

[00:18:22] Jackson Steger: I want to come back to the land stuff, but just the sauna on a trailer gave me a quick distraction or quick tangent, which is that, is there any sort of skill share that's happening on these trips in terms of some people I'm sure have a really sophisticated van life experience or maybe just have like more of this innovative builder mindset. From a hard skill standpoint, have you been learning anything, and do you see the community exchanging that? And what's like an example? 

[00:18:52] Colin O'Donnell: Yeah, I think there is a lot of people who have some amazing skills around van life. We’ve got a few women who have built out, like all electrical systems, kitchens, and they're, you know, answering questions, telling us how things were built. We have some people…I think focusing on, it's not just van life stuff. So, we see mindfulness, meditation, we've got a couple of therapists who work full-time as therapists. They're bringing kind of mindfulness and meditation and viewing that into everything we do. We're all picking up non-violent communication from each other. We think it’s a critical part of like building a strong resilient community. We've got people who are web developers who are working on with the Kift website. They're helping each other launch their own websites. We had a large number of people who were learning to DJ and learning to DJ from each other. Music, sound, celebration, dance, being our authentic self is a big part of what we think is great about cities and what we're bringing to the, yeah. If you think about this as a neighborhood, it's we want to have everything. We want to have great cooks. We want to have places we can walk into.

[00:19:56] So, we see a lot of that. But definitely a lot of skills share around basics of van life. We have formalized it a bit, but we've got tea times. We've got one coming up soon. This is a very curious community, and this community is built around sharing, and sharing their gifts and information. 

[00:20:15] Jackson Steger: Yeah. I love the intrinsic motivation that at least I'm perceiving from how you're talking about this. Is it entirely intrinsic? Are folks who like lead a yoga session or lead a van building workshop ever compensated? How do you think about like that balancing that fine line between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation?

[00:20:36] Colin O'Donnell: Yeah. We have a couple of things. Like right now we have opportunity for a site liaison and that's going to be managing, a repair person showing up, talking to the landlord. Not a lot of work. You've got your membership covered if you're that person. So, we have a few positions like that, but they're very specific, and definitely not like community member.

[00:20:59] And so, yeah, there is, I haven't really seen the compensation be a motivator. I think sometimes it's an afterthought or something, I get my haircut from a community member, and it has been a while, so don't judge. And I might send that person a tip as on the side on Venmo as a thought of gratitude, but it really is gifting is a big part of it. And honestly, I think there's a parallel of a Web 1, 2, 3. We've got a kind of capitalism 1, 2, 3 and capitalism with the marketplace where you knew every provider and then we're affected from that into an Amazon at scale where we don't know anything and don't have any control, and now we're bringing that back to a much more personal level of exchange. So, you see, getting a lot of use out of this hammer. 

[00:21:49] Jackson Steger: Yeah. I mean, there's this constant bundling and unbundling that I think we've seen in cities over time. Like Jon Hillis, Cabin talks about this really well. You have these technology innovations that will create some sort of huge change in how we behave. So like, for example, the alphabet enables the city states of Greece to now have these methods of communication that can be replicated across different regions. And so, like you see this distribution over time. And then you see the Roman Empire with like new methods of irrigation and just battlefield advancements come and centralize this, and this pattern of bundling and unbundling happens over and over again.

[00:22:32] Colin O'Donnell: Yeah. I just think it's maybe the, yeah, we tend see the technology and we’re like, oh, the technology changed how we operate. And I really think the technology is a product of society. And so, society is desiring of this new way to operate. And so, then we've created the tools that allow us to do it. But yeah, the same thing. So, I think that the change was like built up and we really want to get away from this nuclear family, the suburbs, the don't know my neighbors, and it's like can't we like ingrain all these, embody all these operating functions into a protocol and actually be more connected with each other? 

[00:23:04] Jackson Steger: Definitely, I think the American dream “of the single-family home with the white picket fence” like, to me, is the American nightmare. I, to some degree, had that as a kid and like it was nice, but I feel so much more fulfilled by people that I love and admire and hope for my kids that there's way more than like me and that there's many positive influences and a sophisticated neighborhood around me.

[00:23:28] Colin O'Donnell: As much as we all like to kick the internet for this social isolation and all the problems that it brings, I think it's also amazing to think, and I also feel like such an old man, like when I was a kid, when I was a kid, the only six kids I could possibly be friends with were the ones who lived in the two block radius from me, and those were the only ones that I could see for influences, role models, maybe their older brothers. It was such a very limited world. Now, kids are drinking from the fire hose and just have TikTok or whatever the kids are up to these days. But having access to millions of different voices that speak more to who they are. And if you're a queer kid in Alabama in the 90’s, like who are you looking up to for role models for information? And now, that's available to you. 

[00:24:17] So I think there's a thing that's happening, which is a pendulum swings one way and then the other, but we're getting to hybrid plan. And I think even younger people always ask, what about kids at Kift? And we're like, yes, we're a young community, we believe that should happen, we're not sure if it's the right place right now, we think there's critical mass, but yeah, why wouldn't 10 young families get together at a location, have their kids play and grow together and at the same time get exposed to global influences and have those these intimate human connections but at the same time be tapped in globally.

[00:24:51] Jackson Steger: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense to me. The cliché, it takes a village, is cliche for a reason, right? And like you have this mobile village of people. So, I wouldn't be surprised at all to see kids as a part of that soon enough. 

[00:25:04] I want to definitely finish the thought on the path we were going down on expansion strategy. You have these four properties now. But how are you thinking about procuring more properties right now? All of those are concentrated in the American West. Are there plans to expand to the rest of the U.S.? How are you thinking about international expansion? Obviously, like as a van-based community, you are constrained, at least it seems to me, by where wheels can bring you, but push back on that if there is pushback to be had and how do you think about crossing oceans one day? 

[00:25:38] Colin O'Donnell: Yeah, I mean, it’s funny because pre-COVID we were thinking about how do we bring people into cities and zoning is so much tighter here. And one of the things that we played around with was like, what if we got a barge and parked it off of one of the docks in SF and put 50 or 100 vans on it with a clubhouse, and we could actually sail it down to L.A. once a month and go back and forth. 

[00:26:00] So, I think there's a lot of fun opportunities. I think that vans are, you know, like the future of buildings, prefab, we want recyclable buildings, like vehicles are actually that, they actually come with furniture built in and climate control and stuff. So, they're really interesting little tiny homes on wheels, and the price of the wheels is like, it's a fraction of the cost of a tiny home. So, like for a little bit more, your tiny home can transport you anywhere. That's pretty cool. 

[00:26:27] But we do recognize that, you know, some people don't have a van and they're like, I want to do this, I want to try it out. I'm not sure if it's for me. So, we're starting to roll out a trial with like an ADU-type, whether it's trailers, glamping units, or like actually Accessory Dwelling Units around our properties so that we can bring in people who don't have a van and be like, yeah, post up for a couple weeks or a month and you're living out of your backpack. You can unpack and make that your own space.

[00:26:56] The thing I'm really excited about is starting to think about what it would look like if we built the sort of, kind of a beacon for this decentralized city and what it would look like. First off, it would be sustainable, we’d be at closer contact with nature on a daily basis. We’d have plenty of room to roam about. We'd be more integrated with our agriculture. So, probably onsite food production doesn't seem too hard, I think people are really interested in it, maybe permaculture, maybe some hydroponics, other things. 

[00:27:29] We think it would have music as core. We think that there's a reason why cities have music, why cathedrals that we build were like halls of celebration. We think we can have better means of celebration, building the best kind of sound system in the world, maybe having some kind of Berghain in the woods. And we think that bathing wellness would be part of this too. So, like you don't want to just be a depleting community that just comes to a place and parties, but we don’t think we need to celebrate but also care for each other. So, we think of a whole bathing wellness regime. 

[00:28:02] So, we're starting to look now for this mega site, and we think there's some really interesting opportunities out there. For the price of a two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, you can get about a thousand acres in a nearby state. We think it's time to start to open this up to a bigger group than just this initial core community, and we think having this place that can bring people in for a weekend, a week, a month, a season, maybe they stay for a year, and then they're like, wait for less than 500 bucks a month, I can have all my basic needs met, including like organic plant-based food, dope community. Let's just continue this journey, and rather than going back to my apartment that I'm paying $3,000 a month from and paying like $50 to $100 a day of just how much money you bleed in the city, like you can go to a place with a community and then just go on in nature. So, yeah, that's part of our expansion plans.

[00:28:57] We also have a lot of people who are offering to bring land on. So, we're starting to, as we grow the community, we're thoughtfully bringing out those next things. Continuing the caravans. We've got a group going to Baja if anyone wants to go to Baja. We've got about 30 people so far lined up with the cool trailer with two Starlinks, solar panels, surfboards, kiteboards, and be driving on the weekends, co-working on the week on beaches. So, starting to define this new decentralized city and starting to do it and see what happens. 

[00:29:25] Jackson Steger: I don't think there's a better place to end than that. For folks who do want to join on that caravan, where should we send them? 

[00:29:35] Colin O'Donnell: www.kift.com or we’re always active on Instagram. So, @kiftlife on Instagram.

[00:29:44] Jackson Steger: Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Colin, and I hope that the caravan rolls through a Cabin neighborhood sooner or later and…

[00:29:52] Colin O'Donnell:  Definitely.

[00:29:54] Jackson Steger: Meanwhile, we will see you all at Sotheby this year where Kift and Cabin are going to be on a panel together and talk about network states and all that fun stuff. So, we'll reconnect then.

[00:30:05] Colin O'Donnell: Cool. Thanks, Jackson.

END OF TRANSCRIPT

#26 Kift: Live and Work Anywhere with Colin O'Donnell