About Edge Esmeralda
Edge Esmeralda is a month-long popup village in Healdsburg, California, where people working at the frontiers of tech, science, and society come together to build, learn, and live well.
Co-organized by Edge City and Esmeralda Institute, the gathering serves as a living prototype for a permanent walkable town taking shape just 15 minutes north of Healdsburg. Each year, we test the culture, governance, and ways of living that will eventually define that place. By joining us, you help co-author the DNA of something lasting.
Over two years and three editions, Edge Esmeralda has grown from a first experiment into the flagship gathering of the Edge City network. In 2025, over 1,300 people visited across the month, with 300+ full-time residents from 60+ countries. They launched startups, ran neuroscience experiments, built solar-powered datacenters, tested community currencies, and formed collaborations that continue to this day.
The village brings together founders, scientists, researchers, engineers, artists, educators, and families. Participants come from fields as varied as AI, biotech, longevity, crypto, governance, consciousness research, urban design, and culture. What they share: curiosity, ambition, and a conviction that the future can be better than the present.
Why create spaces like this? The systems that shape our time, from institutions to governance structures to norms, were built for a prior world. They are rigid and slow to evolve. By creating temporary villages, we open space to experiment with new systems, technologies, and practices. What works in these environments can then be shared with broader society.
"Edge City did an excellent job integrating diverse participants from all kinds of backgrounds: technical and non-technical, crypto, biotech and culture, young and old. I learned a lot from my time there." — Vitalik Buterin
Edge Esmeralda 2026: May 30 – June 27
The third edition returns to Healdsburg for another month of building, experimentation, and community. We expect 800+ participants from 90+ countries across the month.
Each week is organized around a theme:
Week 1 (June 1–7) | Protocols for Flourishing: Health & Longevity, Consciousness, Wellbeing, Bio & Neuro
Week 2 (June 8–14) | Intelligence and Autonomy: AI, Governance & Coordination, Hard Tech, Privacy, d/acc
Week 3 (June 15–21) | Emergent Futures & World Building: Art & Culture, Decentralized Tech, Creative AI, Spatial Computing
Week 4 (June 22–27) | Environments of Tomorrow: New Urbanism, Education, Energy & Climate, Food Systems
Programming falls into three formats: Tracks (week-long thematic programming that showcases frontier ideas), Residencies (multi-week cohorts of builders focused on shipping projects), and Experiments (applied research that takes advantage of the village's unique conditions: density, duration, and trust).
Past participants include Vitalik Buterin, Ivan Zhao, Audrey Tang, Dylan Field, Grimes, Laura Deming, Joscha Bach, Emad Mostaque, Justin Drake, Devon Zuegel, Juan Benet, Illia Polosukhin, Allison Duettmann, and leaders from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Stripe, Coinbase, and hundreds of world-class builders and researchers.
Past Editions
- Edge Esmeralda 2025 [May 24th - June 21st]: The second edition of our month-long popup village in Healdsburg, CA, prototyping a permanent new town nearby. Once again, we focused on building frontier technologies, healthy living environments, novel education models, and new ways of living and working together. This year featured thematic residencies, expanded multigenerational programming, and a focus on applied experiments to foster innovation across disciplines. Read the recap here.
- Edge Esmeralda 2024 [June 2nd - June 29th]: A monthlong popup village in Northern California. This event helped expose the SF community to the movement we’re building with Edge City. We had 1,300 people visit, with 300 full-time residents, and 25 emergent programs.The inaugural edition brought 1,300 visitors and 300 full-time residents to Healdsburg, with 25 emergent programs. It introduced the SF and broader tech community to the popup village movement. Read the recap here.
Edge Esmeralda is part of the broader Edge City network, which has hosted popup villages in Chiang Mai, Buenos Aires, San Martín de los Andes, Bhutan, Austin, Denver, and South Africa. Check out the gallery of past Edge City villages.
The Experience
We attract great folks by creating an amazing experience that makes it easy for them to live meaningfully and do their best work.
The resident experience entails:
- Being surrounded by passionate, curious peers.
- Facilitated sessions with leaders of frontier tech and science fields.
- Fresh, high-quality meals every day.
- Unconferences on frontier tech topics and self-organized knowledge-sharing sessions.
- Group fitness and health-tracking activities.
- Excellent coworking spaces with fast WiFi.
- A physical layout designed for creating Schelling points and collisions of ideas.
- Buildathons and constant experimentation with emerging products and ideas.
- Close proximity to nature.
Four Key Design Principles
Our popup villages and gatherings are shaped by four key design principles: we focus on health, multidisciplinarity, a culture of co-creation, and making sure that the events are family-friendly and multigenerational (we make it easy for folks with families to bring their kids).
These aspects are critical because we know that if we actually want to experiment with building a better future, we need people to be able to live a holistic experience that combines the full variety of their lives. We've seen how a focus on these aspects creates a healthier, more productive lifestyle for the time that they are at Edge Esmeralda.
Healdsburg's walkable downtown, surrounding wine country, and the Russian River create the perfect backdrop for this kind of gathering. And just 90 minutes north of San Francisco, the location offers easy access for the Bay Area community while bringing in international participants from around the world.
Our attendees are all curious, kind, and high-agency, working on something towards a brighter future.
The Impact
Edge Esmeralda creates impact in three key areas:
- Accelerate Resident Impact
We fill our villages with curious, kind, ambitious people who give each other the courage, education, and inspiration to apply their talents to do the most impactful work of their lives. Through grants, fellowships, and residencies, we support builders with bold ideas. - Incubate Projects
We foster the development of groundbreaking technologies and experiments. Our community is eager to build and test prototypes and give feedback, which is critical to beating the cold start problem for novel ideas. The trajectory from village experiment to funded company (as with Constellation's $10M raise) is what this environment is designed to produce.Our community is keen to build and test out prototypes and give feedback, which is critical to helping beat the cold start problem for novel ideas. - Advance Governance and Community Models
We will demonstrate new models for community living. Popup We demonstrate new models for community living. The popup village is a real-life laboratory for decision-making and organizational models, allowing us to try innovative governance and community designs. And because Edge Esmeralda serves as the testing ground for the permanent town of Esmeralda nearby, the lessons carry forward directly.
The Team
The two cofounders of Edge City are Janine and Timour.
Janine Leger was a driving force behind Zuzalu Montenegro and ZuConnect. Previously, she led the Gitcoin Public Goods Funding workstream and built multiple popup co-living communities. She is a community leader in Austin, where she lives.
Timour Kosters brings 10 years of experience building startups, including Artsy, the largest online art marketplace; Kama, a leading health-tech app; and Impact, a large social brand. He is also an investor and was a partner at Seed Club Ventures. He has built multiple large communities and started the award-winning experiential agency Excetera.
Edge Esmeralda is co-organized with Esmeralda Institute, led by Devon Zuegel, which is building a permanent walkable town in Sonoma County.
Let's build this together
We envision a network of interconnected communities, each a hub of talented people living and innovating together. We invite you to be part of the next steps in our journey.
Follow us on Twitter and Instagram to stay in touch. If you’re interested in attending, funding, or collaborating, please fill out this contributor interest form!
Contact
Email: info@edgeesmeralda.com
Edge Institute, Inc. · 1300 S 6th St, Austin, TX 78704, United States · 501(c)(3) Nonprofit · EIN: 99-2785973