Nick Donahue

"What's the meaning of life?" my friend asks point-blank, the three of us squeezed in the back of a crowd on a dimly lit San Francisco rooftop. Nick thinks for a moment, then answers: "For the universe to become increasingly aware of itself."

Later I join Nick on a couch, slumped beneath the roar of the still-young night. Him fully sober and me less so, his boyfriend sitting on his lap engaged in another conversation altogether, we talk about this self-awareness.

Nick is the founder of Atmos, a startup that custom-designs and builds houses in North Carolina and other less-expensive areas for prices comparable to an apartment in San Francisco or New York. After raising $6.2M and going through YC, Atmos recently completed the construction of its first house in Chapel Hill. Unrelated to the houses that the company builds, a founder house bearing the Atmos name, tucked away between row houses in Nob Hill, was also the first to welcome me to SF two months ago.

Atmos began with the vision of building an open-source AR/VR platform, Nick tells me. For its eventual pivot, he drew on his parents' backgrounds, both in construction-related lines of work.

This pivot, too, is ultimately a stepping stone. Construction is an unsexy space, and even among construction tech companies Atmos isn't a company most would know and care about; but Atmos is promising to Nick because it provides leverage in the form of capital generation. Not venture or investor capital*, but real, unstrung capital from customers: capital that gives Nick leverage to build and make change.

What's the leverage for? Nick points out a trend he sees: "Decentralized computing is bringing the internet into the real world." Right now, computing is locally centralized on your phone, your laptop, etc., but increasingly this is being supplemented and replaced by massive distributed networks of computers, e.g. IoT devices, smart vehicles, and more, that allow houses and environments to be hypersensitive to your identity. Imagine walking through a train station and seeing ads tailored to you, for example: these are very real possibilities in the present and near future. This is the future on Nick's mind, and home construction, aside from providing a strong business model, is a natural place to start investing in and building it.

Being centered around the internet, the promise of the next internet revolution -- blockchain tech -- also has Nick's attention.

"Crypto people are so arrogant," Nick complains to me (this was actually our opening exchange after I sat down), not least because he had just spent half an hour talking with a particularly energetic crypto founder friend of mine.

"Blockchain has the opportunity to radically improve the efficiency and alignment of human endeavors," Nick says. He points out that, in the present day, the most important ways that we value things are speculative. Stocks, company valuations, prices: they're all guesses and approximations, based on irrational human behavior and the resulting market forces.

Instead, Nick asks, imagine a world where buying a company's product directly changes the company's valuation. Valuations big and small could be made truly concrete for the first time, and the market and financial systems that suck up so much talent and energy made airtight. That's the promise of crypto and blockchain to Nick, and the future that lies beyond house construction and IoT networks.

The crypto community, on the other hand, have reverted to "primal instincts," Nick says: Dogecoin, $SHIBA, and a thousand other hype cycles toss hundreds of millions of dollars around without effect. "Members of the crypto community lack humanity in their approach. There needs to be a Steve Jobs of crypto to inject it in."

As I think over the words of the aspirational Steve Jobs of crypto, passed from one quiet person to another in uncharacteristic half-shouts necessary for communication on an alcohol-infused Friday night, he questions me: what are my opinions on blockchain?

I say I don't have any at first. I've only been in tech for a year, and known anything at all about blockchain for maybe half of that. A few more gears turn, though, and two lines of inquiry arise from my own perspectives: I'm interested in crypto's potential to create new paradigms of information-sharing (what if journalists could maintain a ledger of their interviews and source material? what if students and academics could securely tie their methodology and data to published research?), and radically decentralized forms of investment and earning economies (what if creators could be invested in directly? what about students and other professionals, tying value to passion and learning?).

I left the party to catch up with some friends soon after, and would end up Ubering home early in the night (as early as 2 AM can be, anyways). I'm sure there are many other discussion points I've forgotten -- existentialist philosophy was in there, for example, as a Twitter DM exchange afterwards documents -- but my brief stay in Nick's thoughtscape, simultaneously expansive and streamlined, a microcosmic universe becoming aware of itself, is one I'll remember long afterwards.

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*Like other successful early-ish stage founders I've talked to, Nick is cautious about taking investor money. You're handing power away when you take investor money, he emphasizes, potentially locking yourself in a continuous cycle of fundraising.