A project that took four years to get approved for two weeks of existence. A new art fair in Philadelphia staking its identity on being embedded rather than parachuted in. A fintech company extending credit to people whom every incumbent lender wrote off. This week's strangest throughline is about what happens when you refuse to optimize for speed.
Running Fence as Business Model
The Museum of Sonoma County's retrospective on Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Running Fence is a document of bureaucratic endurance. Eighteen months of hearings, 59 government agencies, four years total. The work existed for 14 days. What's being exhibited now isn't the fabric. It's the process: the proof that duration of commitment can itself be the artistic statement. Elsewhere, Philadelphia's new community-rooted art fair, is operating on a similar logic. Rather than dropping into the city as a commercial event and leaving, it's building from the neighborhood up, treating long-term presence as the value proposition.
Fintech, Credit, and the Patience Premium
This is also exactly what Salmon is doing in the Philippines. The underbanked are underbanked precisely because they lack the credit histories that fast-moving lenders need to process quickly. Serving them requires patience: building alternative data infrastructure, tolerating longer repayment cycles, resisting the pressure to only serve the easily scorable. A 2022 paper in the Journal of Financial Economics by Berg, Burg, Gombovic, and Puri found that alternative data credit models outperform traditional scoring specifically over longer time horizons. Duration is the moat. TurboFund's guide to building a fundraising pipeline makes a related point: founders who treat investor relationships as long-horizon processes close better rounds than those optimizing for speed. Christo knew this. Salmon knows this. The Elsewhere fair is betting on it.