Sorrel Salb

Scenia do not start fully-formed. Instead, they evolve through three stages: communities, micro-scenia, and scenia. 

Community: a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common; a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals.

Examples: early personal

Scenius is The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford, where C.S Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien frequented and birthed three of the five best-selling fantasy novels of all time: The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings; it’s The Bloomsbury Group, a loose collective of friends who met in England in the early 20th century such as Virginia

Finding your scenius is not finding how to be a star, famous or rich. It’s about finding your people, the one that help you emulate, create and go beyond your pre-supposed limits.

Just as the Renaissance had le botteghe , scenius more broadly requires a home. As it turns out, a surprising amount of innovation happens in bars.

Packy identified eight ingredients that, when combined, have a high chance of producing a scenius. A few of the best are place based ritual, non-zero-sum competition, and network effects of success.

Looking backwards, it’s striking how unevenly distributed progress has been in the past...the discoveries that came to elevate standards of living for everyone arose in comparatively tiny geographic pockets of innovative effort.

Zooming out though, The Hype House is part of a millennia-old tradition of collaboration among those at the avant-garde of new forms of media, technology, and thought. Outsiders like me have always dismissed the novel as silly, faddish, or worse. When those inside the cutting-edge scenes band together to support, teach, and create with each other,

Network effects of success : Silicon Valley is famous for its “mafias.” As companies sell or IPO for billions of dollars, they make many of their employees very wealthy. Those employees form new companies, support each other, and invest in the next generation of companies. ThePayPal Mafia, Silicon Valley’s most famous, includes entrepreneurs who