A dance with serendipity

How Nicole Ruiz’s path from Twitter to VC to homemaker exemplifies “the life of the mind”

Welcome to today’s installment of “Fantastic Builders and Where to Find Them.”

Builder Spotlight: Nicole Ruiz

Principles on display: radical agency; your life as the measure of all things; be intellectually ambitious; we build ourselves by building

Nicole Ruiz is a community builder. She’s a full-time mother who hosts dinner parties, who gets to know her neighbors, and who keeps an informal social CRM on local people. In a world where people complain about fragmentation and isolation, where people leave the house less, where child-raising villages are the exception rather than the rule—Nicole is quietly building these things for herself.

Her path to this point is a classic case of Steve Jobs’ “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” Even looking backwards, it looks less like a carefully charted course, and more like a dance with serendipity. A dance of striking complexity and skill, no less, which Nicole has continuously honed in the conte…