Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty Images
A gleaming, futuristic, tech-bro utopia in the Mediterranean. A crypto paradise on a small, rural island in Honduras. A virtual startup hub in Nigeria, where entrepreneurs can gather and start businesses—tax free.
All of these ideas have spurred interest, headlines, and millions of dollars from investors in recent years, making “startup cities” a hot topic of conversation in Silicon Valley. (Look no further than the proposed new city in Solano County, California, funded by some of the wealthiest names in tech.) But what the above projects have in common is not just their ambitious aspirations for the future, but a shared funding source: a startup-city venture capital fund founded by the grandson of a free-market icon and backed by some of the most powerful tech scions in the United States.
Their ultimate goal? To unite these cities into an ideologically aligned, lightly governed, VC-backed state.