Describing Interact No. 2
Interact's Fellowship as told by John Luttig, Chris Bieser, Adaobi Adibe, Tyler Angert, and Anna Mitchell.
It can be tough to pin Interact’s Fellowship down. And as the years roll by, we’ve found that there is a lot of virtue in that ambiguity. But one thing we can say for sure is that Interact’s Fellowship is exactly that: a fellowship, where the primary thing you gain in joining is your own experience belonging to the deeply-linked, ever-new, social-professional technology phenomenon that is “Interact”.
With 2024 Fellowship admissions almost at a close, we thought it would be fun to share takes from the source. Maybe they will influence a few people’s admission choices; maybe not. In any case, we hope hearing these fellows “Describing Interact” gives you a glimpse of the fellowship for yourself.
2024 Fellowship Interviews conducted by 2018 Fellow Ava Huang.
When did you join Interact and what was your life like then?
[JOHN]: 2018. I was a young gun VC that had no idea what I was doing. I joined because I had a small network and Laura Deming told me to do it :)
[ANNA]: I joined Interact in 2018 when I was a junior at Stanford and a bit cynical about tech culture. I met Raymond Wang through a mutual friend at Stanford who knew we were both interested in tech and politics, we got along, then he told me I’d especially get along with Mackenzie Burnett, who introduced us; we of course instantly hit it off (I had a huge girl-crush on her/super-admired how much she went after what she was interested in) - she told me about Interact, and the rest was history. I was skeptical at first that Interact would be a not-very-fun VC-funded tech fellowship where it would feel like the founders were just waiting until I started a company so they could profit, but it didn’t feel like that at all. I was really surprised.
[TYLER]: I joined in summer 2022 in the first cohort of the residency. I was about 3 years into working at Replit at the time, and was thinking about how people share and distribute collections of links / browsing session data. Very chaotic and lots of ebikes.
[BEISER]: I joined Interact in 2019, as a new college grad. I didn’t really have a sense yet of where I wanted to be in the world—I was having all these crazy new experiences and diving into this deeply strange new world and the feeling I get when I look back is that I knew how to be fascinated and enthralled, and how to fascinate, and how to enthrall, but the world was still a kind of undifferentiated thing for me.
[ADAOBI]: I joined Interact in summer 2019. At the time I was about to graduate university and was feeling a little insecure about my next steps (starting a company). I had actually applied to Interact the prior year and didn’t get in, so had pretty low expectations the second time round, so when I found out I had gotten in I was pretty shocked. I was even more shocked when I actually got to experience Interact via the first retreat. It wasn’t networky at all. Nobody introduced or identified themselves based on their credentials, people were genuinely curious about each other on a friendship level.
Describe your fellow Interact fellows in one sentence.
[BEISER] Manic pixel dreamers.
[ANNA] Excellent at what they do, optimistic, singular, odd (in a good way).
[TYLER]: It feels like every possible conversation that could happen does happen
[JOHN]: Very positive, lots of spirited debates. Can discuss apocalypse plans in hot tubs for hours.
[ADAOBI]: Friendly, open, kind, ambitious.
Who’s your favorite person you met through Interact?
[ANNA]: Interact gave me some of my closest, most cherished female friendships especially. Tammy Winter and I went from Zoom buddies in an Interact writing group over COVID to nearly-instant best friends and roommates in New York. Maran is one of my closest friends. More than any other environment I’ve been in, I’ve met people in Interact where we just got each other off the bat. The people in Interact are also a lot more truly diverse, unique, and interested in different things than Stanford and other “elite” environments I’ve been in.
[TYLER]: I can’t pick one but nothing gets me going more than a good morning tweet from Omar Rizwan.
[JOHN]: Professionally, Alex Wang (FF ended up investing in Scale and Melisa worked there). Personally, Rosalie Nathans (ended up being bridesmaid for Melisa in our wedding).
[ADAOBI]: Hm this is hard to say! I would say two people, Melissa & Alyssia. I met Melissa through a writing circle and we have stayed in touch ever since! It’s been so awesome seeing her grow professionally and personally. As for Alyssia, I met her via twitter but turned out she was in Interact too! I value both of these people deeply.
Describe the impact Interact has had on your friendships.
[ANNA]: Conversational partners / collaborators for nearly anything I’m interested in, from history to AI to music.
[BEISER]: Strangely, I think the relationships that have been most impactful for me from Interact are the ones that I didn’t invest in. I think a lot of brilliant people have a kind of scarcity mindset around people they feel can really understand them, and the fear of being alone or perpetually misunderstood can make them pursue a lot of friendships that other people would recognize aren’t necessarily good for them. In some sense, I think Interact gave me the confidence that I would never run out of people, which both let me understand more who I really cared about, and has let me feel much more secure in how I approach friendships.
[ADAOBI]: Interact was the first place I found people like me, but also people I aspired to be like. It was the first time I felt like a community of people like me actually existed. Again, not for professional purposes, but more so friendship. It was nice to find people I could be my full self with, and have all sides of me taken seriously.
How has Interact shaped your relationship to technology?
[ANNA] More optimistic about technologists. I came from the Stanford computer science dept to Interact. While I learned a massive amount and made good friends there, it sometimes felt really closed-minded / uncurious - obsession with starting a company or getting a prestigious internship and a lot of herd-mindedness around what to work on - e.g. waves of crypto, AI, etc. I like that Interact has so many different kinds of technologists and the people made me less cynical and more excited about the tech world.
[TYLER]: Now I mostly think first about how work is communicated vs. how it’s built
[ADAOBI]: I’d say Interact is the most human focused tech community. Consciously, or subconsciously, I always have thoughts of how what I am building will impact people and if it will be good. This most definitely originated from Interact.
Describe the impact Interact has had on your work.
[JOHN]: A lot, primarily due to the Scale Series C which had a lot of downstream effects.
[ANNA]: I’ve always been interested in many subjects, from tech to theology to music to literature - and never felt comfortable fitting into the “tracks” around me. Interact is full of polymaths and people pursuing unusual interests - which made me feel like I could pursue my own without having to follow some pre-determined path. For example - while part of Interact I’ve worked in tech policy and defense tech, led growth marketing teams, wrote essays about politics and literature, and wrote code.
[ADAOBI]: Global community! No matter where I go I know there will most likely be an Interact fellow there, which is nice! Because of that I know I always have a place to stay, events to attend and a community to join. I’d also say that being in Interact promotes a certain level of trust pretty rapidly, which usually leads to nice things. Knowing someone else is in Interact automatically lets someone know what your values are and they are more willing to help.
What’s your favorite Interact memory?
[TYLER]: When I met Maran at a party, didn’t know who she was, and asked her why Interact has beef with old people (24+). That’s how I did the first residency.
[JOHN]: Discussing apocalypse plans in the hot tub on the first night of the retreat, with Maran, Rosalie, Joe Kahn, Nathaniel Horwitz, etc. I think the specific prompt was, “if the apocalypse began tonight (government collapse / anarchy), who would be on your team and what would your strategy be?”
[BEISER]: Many of my favorite memories of Interact are conversations with people I didn’t know at all, friendly, almost tender, and then suddenly, like a trap door opening, they let you in on the insane and glowing fundamental truth at the center of their world. A sad truth is that often, game does not always recognize game. And the kind of high-trust environment of Interact just sometimes delivers the room to stick with someone and trust that you’ll understand each other enough to blow your socks off.
[ADAOBI]: Kanye West Medley! Most of us absolutely sucked but it was fun to do (never again though).
What do you want technologists to talk more about?
[ANNA]: The theology and politics of technology, theology and philosophy more broadly, literature, and culture.
[BEISER]: Algorithmic interpellation, ideological potency in software, lightness. I would like theories of progress that are not whig-history, I would like theories of creativity that are not about mere expression, I would like interest in practices that are neither the endorsement of the steady march of techno-capital nor shallow opposition to it. I would like people to talk about the role of charisma in the startup, and the microscopic pecking order of the corporation. I would like them to talk about the feeling of being left on read, and what it would take to imagine a world without it. More than anything I think that technologists have abandoned sociology, and the desire to describe and understand the social systems they exist in, and the systems that are imposed on the world, beyond the laziest sorts of memes.
[TYLER]: How to write good near-term scifi. It’s probably the best way to imagine the future you wanna live in.
[ADAOBI]: I actually wish we would talk less. I think we talk too much.