Two Founders Who Already Sold Their Companies Bet on Bringing People Together Offline

Putnam, a trained ballerina who ran a small chain of boutique fitness 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 men's grooming brand Walker & Company Brands and sold it five years later to Procter & Gamble for undisclosed terms, reportedly in the range of $20 million to $40 million. Putnam has hinted that life as a general manager inside Lululemon was not for her, and Walker left Procter & Gamble after five years.

Their new companies differ sharply. Board, Putnam's venture, makes a 24-inch touchscreen table that recognizes physical game pieces as well as gestures and is built for a group sitting around it together rather than one person alone with a screen. Walker's Heirloom 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 runs Collaborative Holdings, a fund carved out by the venture firm Collaborative Fund to give founders running profitable, cash-flow-positive businesses room to grow on their own terms, without the pressure to chase venture-style returns.

Both founders are chasing a kind of connection they think technology has eroded over the past decade, and both think there is real money in restoring it. The timing is not 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.

In a Harris Poll survey sponsored by Marriott Bonvoy earlier this year, two-thirds of Americans said they were prioritizing experiences such as travel over material purchases this year. The same percentage said retail shopping today feels too generic, with all retailers looking and feeling the same.

East Coast entrepreneurs appear to be gravitating more naturally to the space, at least for now. Along with Putnam and Walker, two other founders whose newest businesses focus on connection are Bonobos founder Andy Dunn and Audrey Gelman of the Wing. Pie, Dunn's five-year-old company, has moved from a friend-matching app to an 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 such as run clubs or watch parties.

Gelman's previous company, the Wing, built a business on bringing women together and folded during the pandemic amid accusations that it did not treat its own staff equitably. Her current venture, the Six Bells Countryside Inn, is an 11-room guesthouse in the Hudson Valley that hosts a monthly murder-mystery dinner where actors seed the crowd and, by dessert, someone turns up dead. The mystery is a little ridiculous by design, and so is its effect on guests; according to a New York Times feature on the inn this summer, visitors routinely linger in the bar past midnight, trading numbers with strangers.

Speaking at one of TechCrunch's recent StrictlyVC evening events in New York's West Village, Putnam said 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 to work on, as she put it, "myself, my body, my fitness, my reflection."

Board was built with the opposite in mind. Now a mother of five in a blended family, with the household having gone 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 was not a "movement from digital to analog," she said, "so much as how can we use tech to bring people together rather than take them apart." That is why Board's touchscreen recognizes the physical objects placed on it, so that a spaceship triggers an action or a knife performs a specific move.