The mastermind behind a mysterious plan to build a new city in California is a former Goldman Sachs wunderkind who quoted Ayn Rand, revered Peter Thiel, and wowed the finance industry before abruptly dropping out of the spotlight to secretly recruit billionaire investors.
For six years, a company called Flannery Associates has been buying up thousands of acres of land in rural Solano County in hopes of turning it into a walkable metropolis outside San Francisco. While the company was shrouded in mystery, The New York Times unveiled its top financial backers last week, among them venture capitalists Michael Moritz and Marc Andreessen, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison, and Emerson Collective founder Laurene Powell Jobs. The driving force behind this titan-backed utopia, according to the Times, is Jan Sramek.
Despite the secrecy of his latest venture, Sramek, 36, didn’t always shy from the limelight. In 2009, at age 22, he was named Financial News’ youngest ever “Rising Star”—similar to a Forbes 30 Under 30, but for the finance sector. A glowing profile of Sramek on the website, which was picked up by outlets from The Guardian to New York magazine, boasted that on top of working at Goldman Sachs, Sramek also trained for marathons, founded three startups, never smoked and rarely drank. Business Insider, in a piece naming Sramek one of their inaugural “Top Three Traders Under 30,” reported that “informed sources suggest that Sramek’s mentors include several of London’s most powerful hedge fund managers who are clearly grooming him for the very top.”
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On top of this, Sramek had a captivating underdog story: According to various profiles, the prodigy came from a 1,000-person town in the Czech Republic, the son of a schoolteacher and a mechanic. He reportedly scored As on 10 of his A-levels—he took a total of 44 in 78 hours, according to the Guardian—and won $100,000 in scholarships to attend Cambridge. He transferred to the London School of Economics and interned at Goldman, Barclays Capital, and Deutsche Bank, among others. While there, he claims to have started three businesses, including “AlphaParties,” an events club for “young professionals.” (The company appears to no longer be in operation.)
The whiz kid had a bit of an ego, telling one interviewer that he did not attend his college classes because they were “too slow” and that he instead taught himself everything that would be on the exam in two to three weeks. “The way we are taught, especially at university level, leaves much to be desired, and this applies even to the very best universities,” he said. “They rarely produce independent thinkers, people who change things.” (Unsurprisingly, he cited frequent higher-ed critic Peter Thiel as a role model.) When CNN invited him on air to discuss the G20 conference, he reportedly tweeted: “CNN’s editing may make me look like a son of Ayn Rand and Gordon Gekko.”
Sramek also co-wrote a self-help book, Racing Towards Excellence, about his own “outperformance” and how others could achieve it. In an introductory section, he claims he founded his first company at 13, was an Olympic handball hopeful, and bested “leading entrepreneurs, scientists, university professors, managers and politicians” in an online strategy game he played at age 14. The book was put out by a relatively unknown publishing house, Leveraged Publishing Ltd, in 2009, but notched a foreword by Sir Howard Davies, the director of the London School of Economics and the former chairman of the Financial Services Authority, the U.K.’s financial regulator. An Amazon description calls it a “must-read for all ambitious students and recent graduates.” It appears to be out of print.
Despite his heralded start, Sramek dropped out of the headlines after leaving Goldman in 2011. He co-founded an e-learning company called Better AG, which he reportedly sold to a compliance training company in 2016, according to a press release, and then a social media company called Memo Inc. (Sramek and his co-founder took Memo offline in 2016, citing a lack of growth.) According to a financial news blog, he also worked briefly as a consultant for Stripe, the founders of which are now investors in Flannery Associates.
In 2013, two years after he left Goldman, someone on the financial forum Wall Street Oasis looked for the wunderkind. “This guy was highly touted as the Kobe Bryant of trading and some powerful hedge fund managers grooming him for the very top,” the user wrote. “Anyone know what happened?”
It now seems Sramek was out convincing tech billionaires to buy up thousands of acres of land about 60 miles north of San Francisco. According to the Times, Flannery Associates has purchased more than $800 million in land in Solano County since 2017, often paying several times the market rate. If a landowner refused to sell, a local rancher told the San Francisco Chronicle, the group would approach other members of the family to see if they would sell their parcel. “It was like a hostile takeover,” the rancher said. “It was Shakespearean, a ‘Game of Thrones’ kind of thing.”
The purchases caused confusion and concern among locals, who did not know who was buying up their neighbors' land and what they planned to do with it. They also caught the eye of local and federal lawmakers, as well as the FBI and Department of Defense, which reportedly got involved because of the project’s proximity to Travis Air Force Base. Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA) also told the Chronicle he was concerned about the lack of communication from the group. “If, in fact, this was their plan all along, you would think that they would want to meet with the people that will determine the fate of their project,” he said.
This month, however, the investors came out of hiding. A poll circulated last week asked residents how they felt about a “new city with tens of thousands of new homes, a large solar energy farm, orchards with over a million new trees, and over 10,000 acres of new parks and open space.” The Times reported Mortiz had been circulating a pitch for years selling investors on an urban oasis that was as walkable as Paris but not too far from Silicon Valley. In an email to one such investor, Moritz said the project would “relieve some of the Silicon Valley pressures we all feel—rising home prices, homelessness, congestion etc.”
A spokesperson for Flannery Associates told the Chronicle that the investors “care deeply about the future of Solano County and California” and that they are “proud to partner on a project that aims to deliver access to good-paying jobs, affordable housing, clean energy, sustainable infrastructure, open space, and a healthy environment to residents of Solano County.” He said the company would start working with residents, local officials, and the Air Force Base this week.
Sramek did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment, and he personally has not commented on his motivations behind the project. But if his self-help book is any indication, he isn’t going to let the local backlash get him down. If there were a single quote he could pass down to his younger self, he writes in Racing Towards Excellence, it would be this one from Ayn Rand: “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”
