An Astoria Backyard Barbecue

I live in Astoria, Queens. I have been in this apartment for a long time. The neighborhood has a very specific population of nerdy millennial gays. This is not a guess. I have done the survey, in person, at backyard barbecues over the last several summers.

Astoria is not Hell’s Kitchen. Astoria is not Williamsburg. Astoria is the neighborhood where a guy named Patrick will host a barbecue in a small backyard with old string lights and a folding table, and over the course of an afternoon you will meet ten people, eight of them will be queer, six of them will work in tech or science or libraries or set design, and three of them will turn into the people you text about your week for the next four years.

That is the whole population structure I am writing about. Three text-friends per barbecue, multiplied across about six summers, equals the network I actually use. It is a lot of text-friends.

The network you do not have to maintain

Most of the conversation about networking, especially in tech, is about networks you have to maintain. Conferences. Slack groups. LinkedIn. The “weak ties” theory. The yearly check-in email.

The network in Astoria does not work like that. The network in Astoria works because the network is in walking distance. I run into Patrick at the coffee shop. Patrick mentions a thing his husband is working on. The thing his husband is working on turns out to be exactly the problem a friend of mine is hiring for. I make the introduction the same afternoon. None of this is networking. None of this required a yearly check-in. The check-in is that I had to buy oat milk anyway.

The network you bump into is more useful for almost every life decision a working adult actually has to make. Where to find an electrician. Who to hire as the second engineer. Whether your knee surgery person is actually good. The bump-into network knows. The maintained network is too far away.

Why I am not moving

I get asked about once a month by some founder or other whether I should “move to where the AI is happening.” Usually they mean San Francisco. Sometimes they mean a particular neighborhood in Manhattan that is allegedly where the AI is happening this year.

The answer is no. The AI is happening everywhere. The neighborhood I live in is full of people whose last names I do not know but whose dogs I do. The barbecue is in walking distance. The husband is in walking distance. The text-friends are in walking distance. I have an apartment with no dishwasher, a dog named Francis, and a working career that I built on this train line. None of that is portable.

I leave New York every winter for a stretch because I am from California and the seasonal depression is real. I always come back. I always come back because the barbecue is here. The barbecue is enough.

The smallest thing that is also the most useful thing

The most useful thing I have, personally, is a small neighborhood with a high density of people who know me by face.

The agentic system at work and the bump-into network in the neighborhood are both ways of saying: the most reliable infrastructure in your life is the one that is already running while you are doing something else. The barbecue is running. I just have to show up.

We are niche out here. A few backyard barbecues and you know everyone. That has turned out to be more than enough.

Cheers.