YouSaid · the spoken record

Devon Zuegel

lines on the record: 85
first: 2025-03-04
most recent: 2025-03-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Planted the seed really early from the moment we first realized that he was developing differently than most kids. And that was when I was maybe six or seven. But then it just grew from there. And I feel like it wasn't one moment. It was something that we cultivated. And each time I'd earn a little bit more trust and it would expand from there. I think it's interesting to compare it to the experience with the doctors who helped me with the hand surgeries. I don't think they would have necessarily behaved that way with every patient because some people are going to be more difficult or they may not have the curiosity or they might just want to be upset and I get it. I was in a lot of pain and I was really stressed. So I had my moments too. Don't get me wrong. But I think empowerment is something that requires trust. And for someone to empower you, you also have to give them a reason to do so. And it's sort of a give and take. It's not just one person bestowing it upon you.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I grew up with a brother with special needs. I still have a brother with special needs. He's five years younger than me. And as a result, I had to grow up pretty quickly because I helped take care of him and love him to death. He's wonderful. And I think the fact my parents trusted me from a very young age to help take care of him. That was very empowering for me. And I always appreciated it. I was taken seriously early. Being in a position where they'd leave me at home to help take care of him while they had to go run get groceries, things like that. It just made me feel like my parents believe that I can handle this. And it then made me want to step in those shoes and handle it. So I think that's probably the first that really comes to mind.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My first reaction is it's almost like a terminal value, so it's kind of hard to explain. This is going to sound a little cheesy, but we only get to live one life. And getting to do the most with that time that we can and working on truly interesting things that we care about and pushing ourselves as far as possible in that limited time that we have, I think is really great. And if I think back a thousand years ago, people's lives were so much more constrained. The possibility for how they could spend their life was quite limited to just making sure that they got enough food and that their children weren't starving. And I think the arc of progress is allowing people to have a broader range of things that they can do and broadening the sense of possibility, I think, really brings me awe.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was like, what does that mean? He's like, Well, we could bring 12 of the leading hand experts to all talk about your hand injury with you and talk about different possibilities of what could happen and what we think is a likely outcome. And I was like, yeah, absolutely. I would love that. And so we spent a morning having a conference all about my hand. And they really took me seriously, even though I'm not an expert. They knew that obviously I didn't have the expertise that they had, but also it's my hand and I want it to work. So being given the opportunity to have that experience and to really be taken seriously meant a lot. And honestly, it was just fascinating as well at no additional cost as far as I can tell. My insurance company might think differently, but they just genuinely wanted to make sure that I ended up with the best outcome and that I felt like I was the decision maker with a lot of experts around me.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is very out of left field and not related to anything we've been talking about, but it rings true anyway. And I won't go into all the details. My life is fine now. But it was one of those things where I ended up having an antibiotic-resistant infection and weird stuff ended up happening. And I just went down very odd parts of the probability tree. Had many different surgeries. And the way that the doctors treated me, I had two doctors in particular, Dr. Mickey and Dr. Buntick, who are both hand surgeons. And they treated me with so much respect. And they particularly encouraged my curiosity and made it so that I was part of the decision making process, which I don't think always happens in the medical sphere. And in fact, because it was so unclear what was going on with my hand injury, Dr. Buntick actually asked me, would you be interested in having a conference about your hand?”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One is we would have a chain of these villages all across the country, maybe also bigger ones. Like, I'd love to build something even larger scale one day. And then also for people to copy. And then I think at the personal level, I mean, I'm building this because I want to live here. I'm building the place that I would like to raise my future family in and spend my life in. And so success to me is building a place that I like.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the most successful version of the story, I'll give the big abstract answer and then also the personal answer. At the high level, the most successful version of the story is that we prove out this model and I and my team get to go build many, many more of these in the world. Not just that, but also it then inspires other people to build in this way. We're not even trying to do particularly crazy things. Some of them to me just feel very low key, but for many developers, they're like, oh, that's so hard to even imagine doing. And so just giving them an existence proof that this is possible, I think, would then inspire people to do more. And I've already seen this play out in the southeast. And I think it could go even farther. It's not the dominant form of development happening in the southeast, but it is a growing form. So that's the big.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a whole thing. I'm not worried about it. We're going to do If your infrastructure costs end up being 10% more than you expect, that could be the difference between having a successful project versus not.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depends on who I'm talking to, but I think the infrastructure costs to build something like this are astronomical. People don't really understand how expensive infrastructure is. Even quote-unquote basics like roads and electrolyte. I'm not even talking about like a fancy suspension bridge or something, just a road costs a lot of money to build this stuff. And I think that many people I talk to are just not aware of it because also a lot of the infrastructure costs are not even visible. They're underground. And so I spend most of my day in spreadsheets and talking to our general contractor and civil engineer thinking about how do we make sure that we both design this in a way that's beautiful and supportive of the type of living that we want to have, but also pays for itself and is not crazy expensive. And people almost never ask me about the infrastructure. I think they just assume that it'll be handled and I can tell you that it will not just be handled.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Onto that. It helps them start to imagine, oh, my 12 year old kid could be friends with this other 12-year-old kid whose family is also thinking of moving there. And people can start to picture themselves in it. So I think that's the number one takeaway for me is do less talking and do more showing.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But on the other hand, I'm like, man, if I can't even explain this verbally to one of my closest friends, how could I possibly communicate it with other people? And so that's another reason why the pop-up is so useful, because it's been a way to bring people up to the place where we're actually building this community and the town where we're hosting in Heelsburg. It's not the same. We're going to do things differently from Healsburg to some degree. on the spectrum of American cities, it's much closer to what we ultimately want to build than not. And so getting to just show people the lifestyle that we're trying to create and the types of values that we want people to have in this community has been huge. And I think especially for something like this, we're essentially creating a real life social network. When people move places, they're not just moving for the house and the physical place, but also who do I know who lives there, who's someone that I would like to know who lives there. By being able to show them the types of people who come to Edge Esmeralda and are drawn.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably the number one thing is something that we all learned in elementary school, but I've seen more examples of is the idea of show don't tell. I have talked off a lot of my friends' ears for years now about the benefits of walkability and being able to go and get a coffee in the morning and having your friends within a few minutes of your home. One of my friends in particular, and she'll know who she is when she's listening to this, I think has not really been sold on that for a very long time. And she says, okay, Devin, okay, Devin, that's nice. But then when she and her family came and visited Edges Moral the last year, the pop-up village, she lived the lifestyle for that week that I had been describing to her for so long. And a few days in, she was like, oh, I get it. I see why you've been talking about this for so long. This is great. And on one hand, I kind of laughed because it was quite funny to see that. And I was really happy that it clicked for her at that moment.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Able to point to that and saying, hey, look, it worked in Washington. Maybe it can work in California. It's a slow and steady process. But I think as we develop more comps, more and more people will build in this way.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's now a growing community of practice of developers who build in this way. And they're starting to be understanding in that region and more and more institutional capital is coming in. Right now in California, there's basically none. I mean, there's some debatable cases, but there's none that I would really put cleanly in the category. One that we've found really helpful when talking to investors and to our partners is this beautiful little town in Washington state called Seabrook. It's about two and a half hours from San Francisco and I'm friends with the developer. His name is Casey. And it's been built over the last 20 years and it's been a tremendous financial success. It's a place that a lot of people in Seattle go for vacation. And that's been a helpful one to have because Seattle and San Francisco have a lot more similarities than Atlanta or Birmingham, Alabama.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if you're only innovating on one or two things, then you're going to end up falling flat. And you do lose out on the leverage without the benefit of much higher property values. So I think there's a bit of a chasm, basically, between more conventional development, which has debt, and it's more conservative versus taking a really big swing and saying we're going to do things like really differently. The second one is a little discouraging because it means that there's a lot of players in the ecosystem who don't want to act on this. But I also think it's encouraging because once we do have enough examples and we get more and more every few years, there's now a few dozen of these across America. As we have more of these examples, the more conservative capital will be more interested in participating and say, oh, okay, we've seen this work now. A lot of these small towns have been built throughout the American Southeast places like Georgia, Florida, South Carolina.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were talking about before with comps and all the other forces that cause real estate to be quite conservative. Because a lot of real estate is done with debt, including at the infrastructure level and like earlier on, there's a lot of pressure to not try something new. Even if it sounds like a good idea, it's like, you know what, if you try something new and it wins, we, the lenders, don't really get benefit from that upside. But we do have to bear the downside. I can't blame them. Like if I was a lender, I would say exactly the same thing. Much of real estate development does assume that you're going to take on debt. And it's just in the water and part of the culture of how people do projects. I think it also means that when you're doing something, if you're not going to take on debt, you will hurt your returns. And so what you're doing better be sufficiently innovative that it makes up for the last leverage. And if you make something really incredible like a shautauqua, then I think you can jump over that hurdle.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And many of them ended up being things like one wealthy family who just decided to go all in on this project. And they ended up making huge returns, including on an IRR basis, by the way. So I'm not just saying equity multiple. They ended up making huge returns, but it was 15 years later, which is just a long time for a fund. Or there's another one where in the Florida panhandle of all places, there's a lumber company called St. Joe, and they own a huge amount of the land in the Florida panhandle. And they have long looking time horizons. So they decided to turn some of their former lumberlands into building these communities. Basically, what I realized is when patient capital comes in, they can and do make a huge amount of money, but your traditional real estate funds don't fit that timeline. So that's one reason that there aren't more of these. I think another reason from a financial perspective is related to”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And started to realize that no, when people build this way, they actually do make more money. It does take longer, though. So I think the next natural question was, why aren't more of these being built if this is a good business? And I think it's a mixture of things. I think one key factor is because it takes longer, it often doesn't fit into the fund length.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had the same question when I first started working on this when my husband asked the question five years ago, I was like, Yeah, it'd be nice if there was another Chautauqua, but is it really a good business? And the thing that actually got me to think, oh, I should actually work on this was I started digging in Zillow at the property values and realizing that homes in Chautauqua self or dramatically more than outside of Chautauqua. I think it's 2x more. And those are just the homes that are like just outside of the town to understate it, I think. Because if you're just outside the town, you still have some access. And then I kept going and asking myself, is that an anomaly? Or is Chautauqua unique? But then I studied some of these other new towns, the ones that the people in the national town builders association build, such as Serenvy in Atlanta or Seaside in Florida or Trillith or Seabrook. And I have a long, long list of these. And Las Catalinas, the one I mentioned in Costa Rica.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Year five, year ten than if you just churn out another ticky tacky box. Actually, that reminds me of a question you had asked earlier, which is why don't people build towns anymore? And I think it really depends on how you define it. People are building a lot of housing in some parts of the country. There's large subdivisions that get built, which are at the scale of towns. But I would never call those towns because they usually don't have very many public spaces. They're usually just a bunch of homes that all get built all at once. And it's just a place that you can have a private space of your own, but there's nowhere to walk to. There's maybe not even anything that close to drive to. And so the national town builders say, no, the way to create long-term value in places that people actually value and will ultimately pay for is to build that. It just takes a bit longer. So that's been an incredibly helpful group.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Street designer who lives in Harlem, the original Harlem in the Netherlands. We talk about street design and we met online. I also try to reach out to particular groups that I think are useful. So there's this one group called the National Town Builders Association. And it's people who have done or are doing exactly the kind of thing that I'm doing where they're trying to build traditional walkable community where there's a clear soul to the community. It used to be that places were built with downtowns and now modern developments tend not to really build downtowns. They just build the residential piece because you can flip it and turn it faster. But the national town builders association is filled with people who think, no, actually both the way that you can build a much higher level of value is if you do invest more upfront to create incredible public places. And yes, that will cost more money on day one, but people will end up paying way more for it.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of my communities, especially over the last few years, have become disjoint because they are very different from each other. My core network and friend group and people that I know is people in San Francisco and the broader Bay Area who are working on frontier technology for lack of better term. But as I've gotten really into what's functionally real estate development, it's actually not as relevant of an interest directly for those people and they don't necessarily know about it. And so I've spent the last few years getting to know various developers and architects and engineers who do work on this kind of thing. And I often meet them through Twitter or through email. I'm a really big believer in what I call the Lighthouse approach where if you talk about the stuff that you find interesting online enough, people will come to you and they'll often share those interests and values. I'm friends with a Dutch.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Within the next six months, that became the center of gravity for a lot of the people that I want to talk to. And now it's the obvious place for me to spend my time in San Francisco because all he did was he had to draw that circle. I'm really obsessed with the question of coordination and what are the key small things that you can do or you can say to get people to behave in the ways that they want to behave but may not come naturally to them if they're working unilaterally.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fruit. If you know the concept of a shelling point, it's like here's this idea that you're going to pick a place to meet and just people go there. And the way that the Heelsburg Plaza in Heelsburg is a shelling point where if I tell you, let's meet in Heelsburg, but I don't tell you where, it's obviously going to be in the center of the plaza. I think you can create a shelling point for a community too quite easily by simply calling it out. Another example of this that I love is a friend of mine named Jason created something that he calls the neighborhood in San Francisco. And a lot of work on the neighborhood, but I think the key thing that he did was actually really simple, which was he told our friends and our loose network of friends of friends beyond that. He picked a point in the middle of San Francisco and drew, I think it was a quarter mile circle around it. And he just said, next time you consider moving, move to this area. And then we can all live close to each other. And it's so simple. It's literally just a circle on a map. But the next thing I knew.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before coming to Frontier Camp last year, I knew that they knew each other, but it wasn't until they were put in this context where it was explicitly about talking about a particular type of work and it was explicitly about optimism for the future where they started exploring potential collaborations for each other. I have two people in particular in mind, but one of them gave a session about something they were thinking about. It was, again, this unconference format so people could add their own sessions. And the discussion about what they were working on and someone else who they knew and even knew that they were working on this, they came up to them afterwards and they said, hey, do you want to collaborate on this? This was almost six months ago now and now they've written some papers together and introduced each other to other people. And so I really think that by creating containers with a particular purpose in mind, you can end up creating opportunities for people that they might not naturally create themselves. I love it because it feels like such low hanging.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so this is the really fun event I host with some friends each year called Frontier Camp, and we've taken about 120 people that we admire to go camping for a weekend in Northern California. And the theme is Frontier Technology that we define that really broadly. It includes things from gene editing and supersonic flight, but also people who are working on the frontier of California land use policy and things like that. Basically, anyone who's pushing the frontier of what they're doing is fair game with a particular focus on hard tech. I think the biggest thing I've learned is that people are really seeking out containers for them to live in and for them to act and to meet people. And they're almost looking for places that will give them a social infrastructure to have particular types of conversations. So I'll be concrete. There were some people who actually already knew each other.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“History. And I think basically Michael has reminded me to not be jaded and always see the wonder and how special things are as opposed to getting into a more perhaps cynical worldview.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I've learned so much from Michael Nielsen. I think probably the number one biggest thing from Michael is always having a sense of wonder in everything I do and everything I see and I learn. I was traveling in Japan last year and Michael happened to be in Japan as well. So we ended up hanging around Japan for a while together. And he was doing a world tour at the time of all these different iconic places like in Japan he was going to like bamboo forests. Also, he went to Hiroshima to see where the bomb was dropped. And he went to all these world historic places. It made me realize that I had gotten jaded where I'd thought, oh, there's all these tourists at the tourist spot. I'm not going to go there. But seeing Michael go like, no, this is one of the most important places in the world for world history. In the case of Hiroshima, it was the place where one of the first atomic bombs was dropped. That is an inflection point in world.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decisions pushed to the lowest level as possible so that the local level can make choices, but then also recognizing that there are some that require a more global solution, but always trying to push it down to that local level as much as possible.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That precipitated more planning. But then we ended up getting to this place where we thought, oh, everything has to be controlled, everything has to be planned. The width of your hallways, the distance of your house from the road. And we ended up, I think, overdoing it, frankly. I think it's important for us to revisit what should be planned and what should be left to a more organic process where people can solve their problems on their own. My basic framework is that there are some core decisions like making sure that everybody has access to clean water and that there are reasonable transportation networks throughout a city that allow things to be connected that do have to be planned in advance. But things like what color do you paint your house, especially for a big city, doesn't necessarily have to be so controlled. I do think that you might have subsets of communities that still choose to do that, sort of like a federal system. You want to have as many.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's really interesting to look at how cities across different places and times have developed based on different local constraints. Like historically, we've piled on a lot more rules over the years and over the centuries of how places get built. And it used to be that cities were much more developed by like an organic process. So when you go to old towns in Europe or Asia or anywhere, places that were built hundreds of years ago, they tend to have more human scale winding streets and it's almost more like a garden that's been left to overgrow, but it grows in interesting ways. And you can tell pretty quickly how planned a place has been. And I think a shift that I've seen over time is it used to be that we wouldn't plan cities very much at all. And that had some real problems, especially as we started living more densely with each other. There would be more issues of cholera in the water system, which would kill a lot of people, like real, real problems.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Homes in usual American development would take multiples of that space usually when you have cars involved. And so just getting to experience what that was like and realize that I think we can push that idea farther of having more car free or car light spaces. I really like studying things that are extremes on a particular dimension because I think that you end up learning a lot about the limits of the system. And I expected to hit up against the limits of that system much sooner than the extreme that Las Catalinas took it to.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of their development, they're going to have some car access. But in the first phase, it was completely car free. And I went there thinking, how is this going to work? I don't really get it, but something magical happened when I was there, which is I realized that once you take cars fully out of the equation of a residential neighborhood, suddenly everything can be a lot closer together because I think something most people don't realize is that cars take an incredible amount of space. I urge you next time you go outside to just look around and really think about how much space is devoted to cars and getting them around. Some of that space is totally warranted. I want emergency vehicles to be able to access my home if I have a problem and being able to drop off my groceries is really nice. There's a lot of really good use cases for cars, but it is a trade-off that we have made. And I think people are not often aware of that trade-off of just how much space is taken. And so Las Catalinas can fit a lot into 20 acres.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Las Catalinas is really spectacular. I highly recommend that people visit. So Las Catalinas is on the west coast of Costa Rica, and it's comprised of 1,200 acres, which is approximately the same size as Golden Gate Park in San Francisco or Central Park, give or take. So it's a lot of land and Las Catalinas has a really interesting model of development where they've decided that they're going to preserve a thousand out of the 1,200 acres as natural rainforest. And then the remaining 200 acres will be developed into basically an Italian hilltop on the side of Costa Rican coast. So it's as beautiful as it sounds. Right now, they've developed 20 of the acres, which is not that much land. It's got about 200 homes, and it's got 10 restaurants, a hotel. Something's really striking about Las Catalinas is that in the 20 acres, it's completely car free. In other words,”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there's a lot of things that I am inspired by in that community. And I could have just gone there by myself. But when you go somewhere by yourself, you don't fully experience what it's like to live there because you don't have your community. Whereas I was down there with, I think, about 20 people and we were there for a whole week and we experienced what it was actually like to be there embedded in more of a community. Of course, not the same thing as living there full time and having a job, but it simulates the experience more. Long story short, as I spent a lot of time thinking about how to get those feedback loops. And I actually think that the fact that feedback loops are so long and frankly getting longer in real estate is a big part of why people don't like a lot of the stuff that gets developed. And I could speak for days about why those feedback loops are getting longer.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Informed the way that people interacted with each other in Edges Meralalda. And there were a lot of really great things that we want to learn from, like having that central plaza is amazing for what we're doing. People always know to find each other in the plaza. But then there's other aspects like right near the plaza, there's a super wide road called Healdsburg Avenue, which has a lot of fast cars. And I noticed every time I have to cross from the plaza to the other side, there's this friction where I'm like, oh, it better be really worth it for me to get to the other side of this road compared to the other direction, which has like much more narrow roads and easier to cross. So that event has really tightened the feedback loop. I've also organized over the last few years what I call traveling neighborhoods, where I basically invite friends and friends of friends to come travel with me in different places in the world that have inspired what we're trying to build. A recent one was this beautiful town in Costa Rica called Las Catalinas. And I could talk for days about Las Catalinas.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We pour a bunch of concrete, we build all this infrastructure, we build these beautiful homes, but then it's not quite what people want. And it doesn't quite actually encourage the type of community that I'm interested in. That would be a real shame. And so trying to figure out ways to tighten that feedback loop is really important. And the pop-up village is one way that we do that where we've brought it really close to the property. And this summer, when we hosted, I'm planning to bring people to the property. And we'll go on hikes around it. I'll show people the site plans and get their reactions on what they think, get their feedback. It was also interesting Healdsburg, which is the town 15 minutes south where we're hosting the Papa Village. Heldsburg is a really charming little walkable town as well, centered around a plaza, basically a town square. And I got to get a lot of hands-on experience of seeing how the different aspects of urban design in Healdsburg.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. This, I actually think, is the hardest part of this project, is just the timelines involved. Every single step of the way takes way longer. My background is in software. I was a software engineer for many years, and then I ran a team of software engineers. the iteration speed in software is so fast you can deploy a change in literally three seconds if you want i mean assuming you have the change done in fact i updated something on my website today and it took literally 20 seconds Nothing in real estate takes 20 seconds nothing, even moving a shrub or something is not going to take you 20 seconds. And so this is something I've thought a lot about. And it's a big part of why we have the pop-up village, Edge Esmeralda, the 30-day events that we host 15 minutes from the site. Because I ask myself, how do we take this huge thing and turn it into smaller bite-sized pieces that we can learn from? Because imagine if we create this whole site plan.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Female is a part of that. Email is a useful tool, but it shouldn't draw me in so much. And so I think of tools for thought as like building a video game for your life where you make certain types of actions a lot easier or more interesting and more fun.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And take very different actions than when I'm in New York City or when I'm in Miami or when I'm in Buenos Aires. Those places end up having natural gradients in different directions. And I think that's similar with tools where if you have a tool that makes it really easy to do one thing and much harder to do another thing, you're going to tend to do the first thing more. One thing I've been thinking about recently is I have almost two good of a feedback loop with my email inbox. I have these hot keys. I have a system that I really like. And I say it's almost too good because I find myself drawn to responding to my email more than doing other types of work that I think maybe are more important. And that's largely because I've basically turned my inbox into like a video game where I have like a counter and I have like points and I'm burning down the number of emails that I've responded to. But if I step back and I think how do I actually want to be spending my time? What are the problems that I actually want to be solving?”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really glad you actually see that connection. So, the way I think of tools for thought is environments to think in and cities are environments to live in. And sort of like what we were talking about at the beginning, the environments that were in shape our behavior a lot. And I think the tools that we use shape our behavior a lot as well. And so we end up taking different actions as a result of the tools and the spaces that we inhabit. And so I actually think of it as very similar thread, but manifest in very different ways. I basically believe that we are almost defined by the things that we put around ourselves and the tools and spaces that we use. And so making sure that those actually define you in the way you want it. I'm not saying it's very articulately, but I don't think of my identity as just myself. I think of it as also the tools and the places that I'm in and how they shape me. Because when I'm in San Francisco, for example, I have very different.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Felt like anyone might have written. And I just didn't feel as challenged. So I wanted to join the review because I want to seek the truth. And I don't necessarily think that I'm ever going to find the truth, but I think that being around people who will challenge me makes it much more likely that I make some progress on that.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I joined the Stanford Review, which is a smaller paper on campus, and at times somewhat controversial. I joined because when I read it as an incoming freshman, I thought, wow, this is a place where people can really talk about ideas seriously. They can take these ideas seriously, even if they're taboos and things that maybe we're not supposed to talk about. It's a place where I can actually explore that. And it felt like there was an intellectual freedom and curiosity that I didn't always feel was super common on the Stanford campus. And it wasn't that I agreed with everything in the paper. Actually, there were many things that I strongly disagreed with, but that was kind of the point. I liked that there was a diversity of viewpoints and people who would challenge me and ask hard questions. Whereas I felt like a lot of the rest of the discourse that I found on campus felt much more like one track mind. A lot of things that people would write.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For rent for a crummy little apartment. And then there's this empty lot where people would love to live if only someone would build a building there. And I looked it up and the owner had just owned it. And so, rules like Prop 13 make a huge impact on how people live and how people end up using space.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Too much. And one way that you can think of property tax is that it's something that makes sure that people are making good use of the land. Because if you are in a place that's super, super productive, let's say you're in the heart of Silicon Valley and it's a place where there's a lot of jobs. Usually the real estate prices will go up. And having a higher property tax that reflects those higher prices is a way to basically send a price signal to people to say, hey, you should be here. You're going to be able to participate in this economy. And I say this descriptively, not normatively. That's just actionably what it does. And when you end up freezing property taxes at a much lower level, you end up deadening that price signal. As a result, I was walking around San Francisco yesterday and there's this empty lot. I looked it up and it's in a very central place, in a place where people are paying thousands of dollars a month.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Property tax. Different cities and states have different property tax levels. People who own a home or a building will pay something on the order of 1% a year on the value of their home back to the state. Property taxes are very unpopular. Taxes in general are pretty unpopular. And so in California in particular, there's this rule on the books called Proposition 13, which was passed in the 1970s. And it basically froze property tax increases to, I think it's a maximum of 2% a year increase. And that ends up having a huge number of knock-on effects. One is it has a huge impact on the budget. And so, for example, my parents have owned a home in California since the early 1980s. And since the 1980s, the value of their home has appreciated a huge amount. But the property tax that they have to pay does not appreciate.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you get closer to finished product that you can sell to people, it makes less of a difference, and you get more of a benefit.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To lenders, there's a few specific choices that we've made. For example, many of the homes in the community will be fee simple lots. So basically people will just own their lots outright, which makes the ownership model a lot simpler and more straightforward. Or other things that are very tactical but important where we plan to have zero lot line homes instead of townhomes which have a shared wall. from the outside they both look like townhomes but in the zero lot line model you don't share a wall with your neighbor and so again the ownership is a lot simpler and so there's a lot of tactical decisions like that that we can make that i think that allow it to fit cleanly into a mortgage lender's box while still actually being quite innovative and interesting to do innovative stuff especially at the urban planning stage that is the place where you really don't want to take on the debt but i think as you go through”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's maybe a slightly better idea to take debt than when you're doing it at the land stage, but there's still a lot of risk. In that situation, we have not decided exactly how we're going to fund the infrastructure. We're in talks right now, actually, with several investors who are interested in doing a full equity deal, both for the land purchase and for infrastructure build out. And that's really exciting to us because we wouldn't be as dependent on interest rate fluctuations, but it could go either way and I think that there's arguments in both sides. Then getting to the vertical and housing, which is more related to the mortgages that we were talking about, I think that mortgages make buying a home a lot more affordable for people. And there's a lot of good reasons to use mortgages. And my view is that there's other ways that we could de-risk the project to make it attractive.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You end up with higher returns because you need less equity to fund the project. So that's what you're trading off when you're deciding on equity versus debt. And so what we're doing is we're purchasing the land, all equity. Then the infrastructure stage, because it's one click farther, is a bit less risky. Have the land, you have the approvals so you know what you're going to be allowed to build. There's still other risks in the future that may affect the returns like market demand. Did you actually do a good job of predicting what people want in our situation, the whole Esmeralda concept, it's got some examples of it working? You know, Chautauqua works well and there's other communities I've studied that I think are really good comparables. But at the end of the day, there is nothing quite like it in this part of California and there's real risk that we're wrong. And so in that situation, it's one click farther in the”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source