Every year after Camp Hustle wraps, I run into the same problem: I cannot explain to anyone who wasn’t there what just happened.
I can describe the surface — a 3-day gathering under the redwoods, around 200 people, a mix of founders, operators, investors, builders, and a few delightful weirdos who defy category. I can list activities. I can show photos. None of it lands. The thing people actually leave with — the part that has them texting their friends “you have to come next year” before they’ve even gotten home — sits underneath all of that, and it doesn’t translate well into a one-line pitch.
So instead of trying to describe what Camp Hustle is, I want to write about why we keep doing it.
The premise
The premise is almost embarrassingly simple: most of the best things that happen in a career — and in a life — happen because of who you happen to be standing next to when something hard or interesting comes up. The job you didn’t know existed. The co-founder. The investor who actually understood the idea. The friend who told you, gently, that you were burning out. The person who introduced you to the person who changed everything.
We spend an enormous amount of time optimizing for talent at the individual level — hiring well, learning fast, getting reps. We spend much less time thinking about the talent density and the trust density of the communities we live inside. Garett Jones makes a version of this argument in Hive Mind, where he shows that the average IQ of a nation predicts its prosperity far better than any individual’s IQ predicts theirs. I think the same logic extends downward. The community you operate in — the people whose group chats you’re in, whose dinners you go to, whose calls you pick up at 11pm — is doing a huge amount of the work of shaping your life. Most people leave that to chance. Camp Hustle is an attempt to be deliberate about it.
The loneliness problem
The other reason we keep doing it is that the alternative is getting worse, not better.
People are lonelier than they have ever been. The data on this is grim and well-rehearsed at this point, so I won’t belabor it. What’s newer, and what I think we’re underestimating, is how AI is going to interact with that loneliness. We are about to enter a period where it is genuinely pleasant — frictionless, validating, available at 3am — to spend hours a day talking to a system that has no skin in the game and no continuity of self. For people who are already isolated, that will feel like relief. For a lot of them, it will quietly become a substitute for the harder, weirder, more rewarding work of being known by other humans.
I don’t think AI companionship is going away, and I don’t think it’s all bad. But I do think the people who deliberately invest in real, embodied, repeated, slightly inconvenient human connection over the next decade are going to look back and feel very lucky they did. Camp Hustle is, among other things, a hedge against the cheap version of friendship winning by default.
What actually happens
What I love about camp, and what I find hardest to convey, is the texture of the conversations.
People talk about their work, but they also talk about the things underneath the work. Marriages that are wobbling. Companies that aren’t going to make it. Health stuff they haven’t told their team. Questions they’ve been carrying around for a year and haven’t had anyone honest enough to ask. And the room meets them where they are. People brainstorm. People commiserate. People say “I went through this exact thing, here’s what I wish I’d known.” Nobody is performing.
The thing that surprised me most this year was watching that same quality show up in our group chat. A 150-person thread is, by every law of physics on the internet, supposed to be where vulnerability goes to die. Ours has become something else. People post things there that they probably wouldn’t post on LinkedIn or in their company Slack, and the responses are warm and specific and useful. I don’t fully understand why it works, but I’ve stopped questioning it.
First-timers feel it fast. We hand out a small pin that says “New Here, Be Nice,” partly as a signal to others and partly as a hedge for the newcomer — a way to say “I might be a little lost, please be kind.” They put the pin on in the morning, and by lunch they’ve forgotten they’re new. That’s not because we’ve designed some clever onboarding flow. It’s because the people who’ve been coming for years take it on themselves to pull new people in. I watched it happen dozens of times this week — a returning camper noticing someone on the edge of a conversation and, with no fanfare, making room.
Five years in
This is our fifth year, which means we now have a meaningful cohort of repeat campers, which means the culture is starting to defend itself without me having to do anything.
The clearest example: a few times this week, I caught a returning camper gently nudging a newer one away from a “who do you know” or a “can you intro me to” register and back into an actual conversation. Always kind. Always something like “hey, no gatekeeping here, you don’t know what these people are going through.” We say no a**holes, but the community ensures it happens.
That, more than anything, is the thing I’m proudest of. A community that transmits its own norms is a community that no longer needs the organizer to hold it together. It just needs the organizer to keep showing up and keep the door open.
An invitation
If you came this year: thank you. You are the reason it works. The warmth, the curiosity, the willingness to be a little bit vulnerable in a room of people you barely know — that is the whole product. We only get to take credit for renting the venue.
If you didn’t come this year and you’re reading this and feeling a small tug: that tug is worth paying attention to. We’ll do it again next year. Come find your people. The pin will be waiting for you, and you won’t need it for long.