Why I Want to Build a Jerusalem for Founders

Over the past few months, I have become much clearer about what I am really trying to build. I want to build the place I needed when I was young, but never had. When I first started building, I figured out many things in the dark. No one told me what really mattered. No one pulled me back when I was lying to myself. Many judgments came only after I had paid with time, money, relationships, and lost opportunities. Later, after meeting more and more young people, I realized this was not just my own story.

Many people with real potential are slowly worn down during the most important years of their lives. They are not lacking intelligence, passion, or effort. They are lacking a place that is real enough, dense enough, and continuous enough. A place where they face real problems every day, meet people with a higher standard, see what great looks like, and are constantly forced to ask themselves: am I actually working on something that matters? Most environments pull people back to the average. When a young person starts to become slightly different, the world often pushes them back toward the safer path. Get good grades. Find a good internship. Join a good company. Secure a respectable outcome. These are not bad choices. But for a small number of people, they close the door too early.

I started N1 because I do not want to keep watching these people quietly disappear. I have always believed that the biggest innovations often grow at the edge. People who do not fully belong to the mainstream, people with obsessions, flaws, and strange instincts, are often closer to new things. But they are also the easiest to misunderstand, isolate, and waste. They may keep their sharpness, but never develop power. They may have imagination, but never truly enter reality. At the beginning, I thought of N1 as an entrepreneurship school. Entrepreneurship is one of the fastest ways for a young person to meet the real world. Whether you understand the problem, users will tell you. Whether you create value, money will tell you. Whether you have leadership, your team will tell you. Whether you have courage, failure will tell you. Entrepreneurship does not leave much room for self-comfort. It quickly puts your ideas, judgment, and actions in front of reality.

But after the first group of students came, my understanding changed. This summer, we tested N1 in the real world for the first time. In just a few months, some students went from rough ideas to working products. Some completed hundreds of iterations. Some built an AI video generation workflow. Some turned their instinct for game creation into a repeatable method. Some moved from research training toward a clearer path as technical founders. The results mattered. But what moved me more was how they changed. One student started with too many directions and wanted to build everything. After repeated user feedback and product rebuilds, he began cutting away beautiful but low-value features and focusing only on the modules users would actually return to. Another student, only fourteen, started by connecting APIs. A few weeks later, he had built a full AI video generation workflow and was already thinking about what his real differentiation could be. Another student saw a small opportunity after reposting a technical blog, delivered a research task within twenty-four hours, and earned an internship at a Silicon Valley startup.

These moments made something clear to me. Young people do not always need to be fully educated before they face the world. Often, they need to enter the real world earlier, then grow through dense feedback. I also began to understand that the best young founders do not really want to join a noisy community. Many of them are suspicious of surface-level socializing. What they need is more like a high ground. Standing there, they can see that other people are also taking risks for the same kind of thing. Standing there, they can know they are not crazy during their loneliest moments. Standing there, they do not need to be convinced. They only need to be seen. That is why I began to use the phrase Jerusalem for founders. It sounds big, but to me it is very concrete. It is not a beautiful campus or a course schedule. It is a feeling. Before a young person sets out, they finally find a place where they can confirm the road they want to take, and confirm that there are others on that road too.

Later, when I went to the United States, my view expanded again. I started meeting young people who did not need an entrepreneurship school at all. Some wanted to do fundamental research. Some wanted to create culture. Some wanted to devote their lives to public affairs. They were not interested in startup classes, and they might never start companies. But I knew very clearly that if the world is going to be reshaped over the next thirty years, people like them will be near the front. That forced me to rethink N1. In the first stage, N1 must build the founder track well. Entrepreneurship forms the fastest loop with reality. It is the clearest way to test whether a person can turn ideas into work, bring that work to users, and keep moving through feedback. It is also the practical path that allows N1 to survive.

But over a longer time horizon, N1 may grow into something larger. It should serve the kind of people between fourteen and twenty-two who have already begun to feel a deep restlessness, curiosity, and responsibility toward the world. Some of them may build companies. Some may do science. Some may make art. Some may enter public life. Their paths are different. But something inside them is similar. They are not satisfied with becoming merely successful. They want to pull the future a little closer to the direction they believe in. If N1 can give them anything, I hope it gives them three things. First, the chance to meet their people. If a person believes too early that they are alone, they become fragile, and sometimes strange in the wrong way. A person does not need many true peers. Two or three are enough. Once a young person meets the few people who truly understand them, their own judgment lights up again.

Second, the chance to make their first meaningful work. Growth does not come from listening to classes. Real users, real feedback, and real failure are what force judgment to grow. We provide resources, compute, mentors, space, and time because we want them to meet their first hard problem earlier. Third, the chance to become powerful and kind. Power can be trained. Kindness must be protected during the most important years. Technology, business, creativity, and leadership all amplify a person’s impact. That is why it is important to develop boundaries, responsibility, and respect for reality as early as possible. There is also a deeper reason I am doing this. Today, the most important opportunities in the world are still concentrated in a small number of places. Many young people are not less capable. They are simply born farther from the center, so they are seen later, understood less, and have fewer chances to enter the real creative frontier.

Resources, opportunities, knowledge, and judgment keep flowing toward a few places. The path to the frontier becomes narrower and narrower. But I do not believe a person’s fate should be decided too early by birthplace, nationality, or the path they happened to inherit. If someone has ability, courage, and creative energy, they should have the chance to participate in the most important work of our time. What N1 wants to do is build that bridge as early as possible. To let young people from different places be seen, judged, and pushed by the same standard. To let them recognize one another, pursue truth through shared problems, and grow through real creation. If such a place can exist, it will create more than a few companies, technologies, or success stories. It will let people meet who otherwise would never have met. It will make things happen that otherwise would never have happened. It will allow talent that might have been buried to grow for the first time.

I know this is hard. I also know it can be misunderstood. It sounds idealistic, but it requires very practical execution. Admissions, capital, space, curriculum, investment, mentors, student safety, and long-term support are all hard. The harder part is that we cannot treat young people as projects. We cannot turn education into a machine for packaging people. We have to keep remembering that the person matters more than the platform. So if I were to describe N1 today, I would say it more simply. It is a place where young people can see, earlier than they otherwise would, who they might become. If ten years from now, someone looks back and says their life truly started to change from that place, that would be enough.

Roderick Dong