Touching Grass With Edge Esmeralda Co-Founder Timour Foster

If you haven’t read our insightful recap blog about the month-long Edge Esmeralda experience, we suggest you do. It’s a gem. That reflection captured what Edge Esmeralda made us think about as event engineers. It gave us fresh perspectives on participation, connection, programming, imperfection, and the important moments between the agenda.

After spending time inside the Edge Esmeralda experience, our team had the pleasure of sitting down with Founder Timour Foster

No stage, no formal setup. Just a thoughtful conversation with the person behind one of the most interesting community experiments we have seen. And honestly, that setting felt exactly perfect and on-brand. Edge Esmeralda is hard to describe in one sentence because it is designed to be more than one thing. It is part event, part pop-up city, part learning community, part social experiment, and part early blueprint for what a more intentional way of living, building, and gathering could look like.

Timour’s path to this work helps explain why Edge feels so expansive. He shared pieces of his story, from his early life in Russia to studying at NYU and spending the last decade building startups. His introduction to this kind of community-focused gathering came through Zuzalu, a multi-month experience in Montenegro that brought people together around collaboration, innovation, and new ways of thinking about society. Edge Esmeralda grew from that same curiosity, but with its own distinct vision.

At its core, Edge is not simply trying to host interesting events

It is trying to build the conditions for a meaningful community. The goal is to create an environment where founders, investors, researchers, artists, academics, families, technologists, and curious people can learn from each other and build relationships that continue after the gathering ends. An event asks people to attend, but a community asks people to participate. Throughout the conversation, Timour spoke about designing spaces where people feel comfortable enough to contribute. Not just to sit in a room and listen, but to share what they know, ask better questions, offer ideas, and build something with the people around them.

For us, that is one of the most compelling lessons from Edge Esmeralda. The experience is not built around perfection. It is built around ownership. Attendees are not treated as passive guests waiting to be impressed, they are invited to shape the experience itself. That kind of participation creates a different kind of energy. It also creates a different kind of responsibility. Edge has evolved through several iterations, and Timour was open about the learning that has come with that growth. Building something community-led requires constant adjustment. You have to think about sustainability, volunteer energy, burnout, accessibility, programming, and how to make people feel supported while still giving them room to lead. That level of learning is part of what makes Edge interesting. It does not feel finished. It feels alive.

Their support from the venture community is also worth paying attention to. Edge Esmeralda is organically attracting investors who understand that big ideas often need the right conditions and space to take shape. Long Journey’s involvement is a strong example. Their residency at Edge Esmeralda was designed to give early-stage founders and future founders a place to live, build, test ideas, and learn from the people around them. That matters because some of the most interesting companies are not born from perfectly polished environments. For a venture firm known for backing companies like Uber and Notion early, that kind of environment makes sense. Edge creates the kind of third space where ambitious builders can stretch creatively and potentially develop the next groundbreaking idea.

One of the bigger visions Timour shared was the idea of Esmeralda as a future walkable, family-friendly town in California that is currently being built.

The vision is not just to host a temporary gathering, but to explore what a more intentional community could look like at a larger scale. A place shaped by sustainability, healthy living, inclusivity, and human connection. It is ambitious. It is also deeply consistent with the questions Edge Esmeralda seems to be asking. What happens when people live closer to the ideas they care about? What happens when learning, wellness, work, family, and community are designed to overlap? What happens when a gathering is not just a moment on the calendar, but a prototype for something bigger? Those questions stayed with us. We are looking forward to seeing the future of Esmeralda come together. Timour and his team are consulting on this project.

The conversation also touched on Edge’s international growth, including future gatherings in places like India. Timour spoke about the importance of making the experience accessible to more people through scholarships, partnerships, and local collaboration. That matters because a community built around big ideas is only as strong as the range of people invited into the room. Or in this case, into the park.For Bash, the conversation reinforced so much of what we believe about events. The most meaningful experiences are not built only through programming. They are built through trust, thoughtful design, and the space for people to find each other in a real way. 

For Bash, the conversation reinforced so much of what we believe about events. The most meaningful experiences are not built only through programming. They are built through trust, thoughtful design, and the space for people to find each other in a real way. That is why our conversation with Timour felt so aligned. It was not a polished keynote or a rehearsed founder story. It was a conversation in the grass about community, experimentation, human behavior, and the future of gathering. It was the kind of conversation that makes you leave with more questions than answers, which may be the point.

Edge Esmeralda is not giving the events industry a tidy formula to copy. It is offering something far more rewarding, a challenge.

Build experiences that people can participate in.
Create spaces that invite contribution.
Let connection happen in ways that are not overly scripted.
Think beyond the event itself.
Ask what kind of community the gathering is really serving.

As event professionals, those are questions worth sitting with. And for anyone who is thinking about the future of events, community, and connection, Edge Esmeralda is a reminder that sometimes the most important conversations do not happen under stage lights. Sometimes they happen while touching grass.