Today's newsletter features an interview with Density Co-Founder Scott Nelson on building Chicago's highest-trust founder collective; a recap of our creator hackathon at Drive Capital that drew 200+ attendees; open roles at Kadeya, Coinflow, Peak6, and Ripple via OneTwoLoop; and events this week including ClawCon Chicago and an AI Quantum Security summit

Scott Nelson and his co-founder Eric Mills believe the best thing you can do for the Chicago startup ecosystem is put the right people in a room and get out of the way.

Density is a curated, in-person collective of top founders and operators in Chicago, built around a simple but increasingly rare idea: that proximity compounds. Inspired by institutions like South Park Commons in SF, Density was designed not as a coworking space or an accelerator, but as a high-trust environment where serious builders can be heads down together, share investor networks, cross-sell products, and iterate fast.

Here’s our conversation:

SN: Most existing Chicago spaces and communities we saw were optimized for events, panels, and learning. This is great and is extremely useful for folks starting out. However, most startup builders at some point just need to be heads down and be around other startups so they can quickly iterate, share investor networks, cross-sell their products, or get feedback.

SN: We noticed that the best Chicago founders were effectively operating scattered across the city instead of together. They were building serious companies, but without a shared physical center where relationships, networks, and knowledge could compound.

Fun story → Because Eric and I started Density and started sitting next to each other 14 hours a day we ended up also becoming co-founders and started (www.permute.ai). We continue to work out of Density and are building our team here. So, the model works. Bring smart people in one room and magic will happen!

SN: When we sat down in the early days, we both agreed that the most important thing was to focus on quality. If you put driven, serious, smart people together in a room, magic happens. This is something we don’t see diluting, especially because we have no financial incentives. We started it to be around smart people, not to make money. As a result, we have no pressure and can scale with our partners at our own pace as quality teams join us.

SN: We set the expectation that Density is something you participate in, not something you attend. For teams or operators that can’t uphold such a commitment, we have a visitor structure allowing strong builders who want to network to occasionally come and co-work. In addition, we also try to have some fun here and there, get drinks, see movies etc. where non-members can come and network.

Density prioritizes founders who are driven, collaborative, intellectually honest, discreet, and generous with their time and insight. The biggest red flags are ego, performative networking, transactional behavior, information hoarding, or treating the community as a lead source rather than a place to contribute and build. The best way to make Chicago hot spot for startups is to have successful companies, run by good founders, that give back and want to build here. That’s the culture we want to see from the start because we care about that.

SN: The best fit is ambitious, venture-scale founders who value peer feedback and long-term relationships, especially repeat founders or fast-learning first-timers.

If Density succeeds at the highest level, Chicago will develop a tight, high-trust founder core that reinvests locally. More companies scale and stay headquartered in the city, with faster talent and capital circulation and more repeat, high-impact founders.

SN: Over $25M raised by startups out of Density since inception in 2024, mostly from top coastal VCs. Beyond capital, engineers and co-founders have found each other here too. The community is producing outcomes, not just conversations.

SN: It's not a coincidence. Techstars, Superior Studios, Lightbank's Lighthouse, the new Google office -- we're all within blocks of each other. That geographic concentration creates its own momentum. The name fits in more ways than one.

If you’re a founder actively working on a startup or have a good idea and strong background but don’t know where to start, we’re here for you.

June 30, 5:30 p.m. | Downtown Chicago | Free to Attend

We’re more connected than ever, yet loneliness, mistrust, and polarization are reaching crisis levels.

Join the University of Chicago Graham School for an in-person conversation with Megan Garber, award-winning staff writer at The Atlantic, whose work examines how media shapes culture and human relationships.

Garber will explore a provocative idea: that our media-saturated environment has trained us to see one another less as people and more as characters, flattened, performative, and easy to dismiss. It’s a shift with profound implications not
just for society, but for the technologies we build and use every day.

For professionals working in and around AI, this conversation lands at a critical moment. As systems become more sophisticated and embedded in daily life, they don’t just reflect human behavior, they influence it. What happens when the tools we design reinforce distance rather than understanding? How do we build technologies that support connection rather than erode it?

This is a chance to step out of the feed and into a shared, in-person conversation, beginning with a reception designed to encourage informal discussion, and an audience Q&A that brings multiple perspectives into the room.

Join this free event on June 30 at UChicago’s Gleacher Center in downtown Chicago or attend via livestream.

Yesterday, we hosted a creator hackathon at Drive Capital. The premise was simple: what happens when you hand people with real audiences the tools to build.

We had over 200 attendees for an event that only had 5 days of marketing.

The room was full of Chicago creators, writers, and community operators who have spent years earning trust with their followers. People who know how to move a crowd.

We paired them with engineers and gave them a day to ship something with Replit, backed by SVB and DubClub.

The output surprised people. But it shouldn't have.

Distribution is the hard part. Always has been. Teaching someone to code takes time. Teaching someone to build an audience takes years. When you start with the audience and add the tools, things happen fast.

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