Scenius

When I started studying computer science, I was quite scared of math, mostly because I kept comparing myself with people who seemed to understand everything much faster than me. I wondered if I'd spend the whole degree trying to catch up.

Around that time I moved in with Herre, a friend from high school who was studying the same thing. He ended up being the smartest person in our class, but he also studied more than anyone I'd met. While I spent an afternoon building some random side project, he was already doing exercises from the next problem set.

Several people in our group had some of the highest grades in the class, and around exams everyone shared whatever they found. If someone got an old final, the rest of us had it too, and for some subjects we ended up with solved exams going back six years. We all wanted each other to pass.

We all finished on time or even a semester ahead of schedule. Herre even received a national award as the best student in the country in 2024.

Years later I came across Brian Eno's idea of scenius, the collective genius of a scene. People pick up ideas from each other, challenge what the others are doing and end up making things they might never have made on their own. Even when one person gets the recognition, a lot of what made their work possible came from being part of that community.

That gave me a way to understand what had happened with our group. Kevin Kelly describes four conditions that tend to show up:

1. Mutual appreciation. People respect what the others are doing.
2. Rapid exchange of tools and techniques. Useful information spreads quickly.
3. Network effects of success. One person's breakthrough helps everyone around them.
4. Tolerance for the unusual. The scene develops its own idea of what is normal.

I could see our group in all four points, but the last one made me think of Herre taking seven courses at the same time. At first that sounded crazy to me, but seeing him do it made me want to try the same so I could graduate faster. Being around him and our friends changed what I considered normal. I had started out worrying about keeping up, and now I was thinking about taking more courses.

That is also what interests me about Serú Girán, an example from Argentina: how much being around certain people can change what you try to do. The band was part of a whole rock nacional scene where musicians kept meeting again in different projects.

Charly García and David Lebón started writing together in Brazil, Oscar Moro already knew Charly from La Máquina de Hacer Pájaros, and Pedro Aznar joined Serú at 18. A few years later Fito Páez was playing keyboards for Charly at 21, before recording La la la with Spinetta.

Of course they were already insanely talented, but I keep thinking about Pedro and Fito being that young and playing every day with musicians they looked up to. I imagine that, after a while, your idea of what's possible starts changing too.

I feel something similar now with friends who are building companies. We share tools, talk about things that went wrong and spend time looking at what the others are doing. Literally while writing this, another founder sent me a message suggesting that our search should let people find properties inside a specific building by name. I hadn't asked him to review it, and I really like that he cared enough to look at what we're building and send that over.

Those conversations also make me think there's something missing from Kelly's list, which I'd call network effects of failure. If a friend spends a month on something that doesn't work and tells me why, maybe I can avoid the same mistake. And hearing that someone I respect is also having a terrible week helps me feel less alone in mine. With friends you hear about the product nobody used or the investor who stopped replying, and it makes your own problems feel a bit less dramatic.

I once tried to explain to my girlfriend what I liked about these people and ended up calling them truth seekers. They're curious and want to understand things, even when they're just having dinner with friends. I don't mean that they read all day or code 24/7, but that they ask questions, get interested in what you're doing and are willing to change their minds. I think that's part of why we can learn so much from each other.

You have to be comfortable admitting when you're wrong, otherwise everyone shares the experiment that worked and skips the five that didn't. Math was good training for this, because someone could point at the exact line where you fucked up, while startups leave much more room to bullshit yourself.

I want that same honesty and curiosity in my team, and that's what comes to mind when I think about a VC's advice to look for people who raise my bar. I'd love for someone great to meet us and think, “fuck, I want to work with these people”, and then join and make the rest of us better.

If I'm part of a scenius today, it's probably with the entrepreneurs around me. I ended up there almost by accident, just like I ended up living with Herre. I got lucky enough to stumble into this twice.

I think it's worth recognizing when you're part of something like that and making an effort to protect it. It gets weird when you try to institutionalize it, turn it into a status symbol, or start caring more about how the group looks to outsiders than what happens between the people in it.

So when I think about my brother at university, a friend starting out as an entrepreneur, or a friend who wants to be a musician, I keep coming back to the same advice: look for your scenius.