A small but growing number of founders are betting on bringing people together offline
A small but growing number of founders are betting on bringing people together offline
少数但不断增长的创业者正押注于将人们在线下聚在一起
Brynn Putnam and Tristan Walker have already done something that most founders only dream about: created companies so compelling that bigger outfits bought them. Putnam, a trained ballerina with a small chain of boutique studios, built the connected-fitness company Mirror and sold it to Lululemon for $500 million in cash less than three years later. Walker, who interned at Twitter while at Stanford business school, built the popular men’s grooming brand Walker & Company Brands, selling it five years later to Procter & Gamble for undisclosed terms (reportedly in the range of $20 million to $40 million).
Brynn Putnam 和 Tristan Walker 已经完成了大多数创业者梦寐以求的事情：创建了极具吸引力的公司，并被大型企业收购。Putnam 曾是一位受过专业训练的芭蕾舞演员，拥有一家小型精品健身工作室连锁店，她创立了联网健身公司 Mirror，并在不到三年后以 5 亿美元现金将其出售给 Lululemon。Walker 在斯坦福商学院就读期间曾在 Twitter 实习，他创立了广受欢迎的男士理容品牌 Walker & Company Brands，五年后将其出售给宝洁公司（Procter & Gamble），交易条款未公开（据报道在 2000 万至 4000 万美元之间）。
That both of them are at it again is less surprising than the fact that their dramatically different new startups share the same north star: bringing people together, offline, in the same room. Putnam’s new company, Board, which makes a 24-inch touchscreen table that recognizes physical game pieces as well as gestures, was built explicitly for a group sitting around it together rather than one person alone with a screen. Walker’s Heirloom Craft is buying up and scaling fine-craft trade schools, starting with a leatherworking school in San Francisco founded by Hermès’s first American artisan-ambassador. (Walker also running Collaborative Holdings, a fund carved out by the venture firm Collaborative Fund built to give founders more time to build their businesses.)
他们两人再次创业并不令人惊讶，令人惊讶的是他们截然不同的新初创公司有着共同的目标：在现实空间中将人们在线下聚在一起。Putnam 的新公司 Board 制造了一款 24 英寸的触摸屏桌子，它既能识别实体游戏棋子，也能识别手势，其设计初衷就是为了让一群人围坐在一起，而不是让一个人独自面对屏幕。Walker 的 Heirloom Craft 正在收购并扩大精细工艺职业学校的规模，首先从旧金山的一所皮革工艺学校开始，该学校由爱马仕（Hermès）首位美国工匠大使创立。（Walker 还经营着 Collaborative Holdings，这是由风险投资公司 Collaborative Fund 设立的一项基金，旨在为创业者提供更多时间来发展业务。）
On the surface, a game console and a leathercraft school don’t appear to have much in common. But both founders think there’s money is fostering the kind of connection that technology has eroded over the last couple of decades. The timing isn’t accidental. In June of last year, the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Connection formally classified loneliness as a defining global health challenge, estimating that one in six people worldwide are affected and linking the condition to roughly 870,000 deaths a year.
从表面上看，游戏机和皮革工艺学校似乎没有什么共同点。但两位创始人都认为，在过去几十年里，技术侵蚀了人与人之间的联系，而促进这种联系蕴藏着商机。这个时机并非偶然。去年 6 月，世界卫生组织社会联系委员会正式将孤独感列为一项决定性的全球健康挑战，估计全球有六分之一的人受到影响，并将这一状况与每年约 87 万人的死亡联系起来。
The opportunity to address that challenge is expanding, too, for those paying attention to it. In a Harris Poll survey sponsored by Marriott Bonvoy earlier this year, two-thirds of Americans said they were prioritizing experiences, like travel, over material purchases this year. (The same percentage said retail shopping today feels too generic, with all retailers looking and feeling the same.)
对于那些关注这一挑战的人来说，解决它的机会也在扩大。在今年早些时候由万豪旅享家（Marriott Bonvoy）赞助的一项哈里斯民意调查中，三分之二的美国人表示，他们今年将优先考虑旅行等体验，而不是物质消费。（同样比例的人表示，如今的零售购物感觉太千篇一律，所有零售商看起来和感觉都一样。）
For now, East Coast entrepreneurs seem to be gravitating more naturally to the space, if it can be called that. Along with Putnam and Walker, two other founders whose newest businesses are focused on connection include Bonobos founder Andy Dunn and Audrey Gelman of the Wing. Pie, Dunn’s now five-year-old company, has moved from friend-matching app to event-discovery tool to what he now calls a “social life operating system,” anchored by “Community Homes” — a permanent digital hub for recurring social groups like run clubs or watch parties.
目前，东海岸的创业者似乎更自然地向这一领域靠拢（如果可以称之为领域的话）。除了 Putnam 和 Walker，另外两位专注于连接业务的创始人包括 Bonobos 的创始人 Andy Dunn 和 The Wing 的 Audrey Gelman。Dunn 创立了五年的公司 Pie，已经从最初的交友匹配应用转变为活动发现工具，现在他将其称为“社交生活操作系统”，并以“社区之家”（Community Homes）为核心——这是一个为跑步俱乐部或观影派对等定期社交团体提供的永久性数字中心。
Gelman tried this once before. Her last company, the Wing, built a business on bringing women together and folded during the pandemic amid accusations that it didn’t treat its own staff equitably. Now she’s found a different way to do something similar. Her current venture, the Six Bells Countryside Inn, an 11-room guesthouse in the Hudson Valley, hosts a monthly murder-mystery dinner where actors seed the crowd and, by dessert, someone turns up dead. The mystery itself is a little ridiculous by design, but the effect it has on guests is reportedly substantial. (According to a New York Times feature on the inn this summer, its visitors routinely linger in the bar past midnight, trading numbers with strangers.)
Gelman 之前尝试过一次。她的上一家公司 The Wing 以将女性聚集在一起为业务核心，但在疫情期间因被指控未能公平对待员工而倒闭。现在，她找到了一种不同的方式来做类似的事情。她目前的项目是位于哈德逊河谷的 Six Bells Countryside Inn，这是一家拥有 11 间客房的旅馆，每月举办一次谋杀悬疑晚餐，演员会混入人群中，到甜点时间，就会有人“死亡”。这个谜题本身设计得有点荒谬，但据报道，它对客人的影响非常显著。（据《纽约时报》今年夏天对该旅馆的专题报道，游客们经常在酒吧逗留到午夜之后，与陌生人交换联系方式。）
All of these new businesses come from a personal as well as a professional place. At one of TechCrunch’s recent StrictlyVC evening events, held in New York’s West Village, Putnam was candid about the fact that Mirror was built around her own life. She was pregnant with her first child, running brick-and-mortar fitness studios, and trying to bring that experience home through a screen using technology, as she put it, to work on “myself, my body, my fitness, my reflection.”
所有这些新业务都源于个人和职业的双重考量。在 TechCrunch 最近于纽约西村举办的 StrictlyVC 晚间活动中，Putnam 坦言 Mirror 是围绕她自己的生活构建的。当时她怀着第一个孩子，经营着实体健身工作室，并试图通过屏幕利用技术将这种体验带回家，正如她所说，是为了“自我、身体、健康和反思”。
Board was built with the opposite in mind. Now a mother of five in a blended family — the household went from three people to seven — Putnam said she kept running into the same problem: no product on the market let people of wildly different ages and abilities play together. “How can we use tech to create a shared experience?” is the question she said drove the pivot. It wasn’t a “movement from digital to analog,” as she put it, “so much as how can we use tech to bring people together rather than take them apart.”
Board 的构建初衷则恰恰相反。现在，作为重组家庭中五个孩子的母亲——家庭成员从三个人增加到了七个人——Putnam 说她不断遇到同样的问题：市场上没有产品能让年龄和能力迥异的人一起玩耍。“我们如何利用技术创造共享体验？”是她所说的推动转型的核心问题。正如她所言，这并不是一场“从数字到模拟的运动”，而是“我们如何利用技术将人们聚在一起，而不是将他们分开”。
It’s why Board’s touchscreen recognizes the physical objects placed on it — a spaceship triggers an action, a knife performs a cut — instead of relying on the buttons and joysticks of a traditional controller; this way, a child and a grandparent can play the same game without a shared learning curve. Walker had the same instinct, but his came from anxiety about what AI is doing to work and to community. He started Heirloom, he said, because he was worried about AI “stealing knowledge work” and pulling people away from each other. If he was going to build something after Walker & Company, he wanted it to bring people back together.
这就是为什么 Board 的触摸屏能够识别放置在上面的实体物体——宇宙飞船触发动作，刀具执行切割——而不是依赖传统控制器的按钮和操纵杆；这样，孩子和祖父母就可以在没有共同学习曲线的情况下玩同一个游戏。Walker 也有同样的直觉，但他的直觉源于对人工智能对工作和社区影响的焦虑。他说，他创办 Heirloom 是因为担心人工智能会“窃取知识工作”并将人们彼此疏远。如果他在 Walker & Company 之后还要再创办什么，他希望它能让人们重新聚在一起。
It’s an interesting bet. Speaking at the same StrictlyVC event, Walker said he believes the U.S. has forgotten how to transmit mastery, including leatherworking, watchmaking, and fragrance design. For 50 years, he argued, America has broken the chain from master to apprentice, offshoring production and stripping the prestige from manual skill to the point that apprenticeships became something people did when they couldn’t get into a four-year college. Heirloom is a wager that that’s now reversing, and Walker had a number to back it up, telling a room full of founders and investors that roughly half of Gen Z and Gen Alpha say they don’t want a four-year degree at all. In fact, more than half of the capacity at Heirloom’s first location in San Francisco is currently filled not by…
这是一个有趣的赌注。在同一场 StrictlyVC 活动上，Walker 表示他认为美国已经忘记了如何传承精湛技艺，包括皮革工艺、钟表制造和香水设计。他认为，50 年来，美国打破了从师傅到学徒的传承链条，将生产外包，并剥夺了手工技能的声望，以至于学徒制成了人们在无法进入四年制大学时才做的事情。Heirloom 押注这种趋势正在逆转，Walker 用数据支持了他的观点，他告诉满屋子的创始人和投资者，大约一半的 Z 世代和 Alpha 世代表示他们根本不需要四年制学位。事实上，Heirloom 在旧金山的第一家门店目前超过一半的容量并不是由……填满的。