Successful Founders Are Betting Their Next Companies on Getting People in a Room

The Pattern

Brynn Putnam built Mirror, sold it to Lululemon, and her next company is about getting people into the same physical space. Tristan Walker founded Walker & Company, sold it to Procter & Gamble, and is now building a business centered on in-person connection.

They are not alone. Andy Dunn, who founded Bonobos, and Audrey Gelman, co-founder of The Wing, are pursuing similar ideas. According to TechCrunch, a small but growing group of repeat founders are betting that "bringing people together offline" can be a standalone business category — not a feature of conferences or coworking, but the product itself.

This is unusual timing. For the past decade, venture-backed B2B companies have sold the opposite proposition: fewer meetings, fewer offices, fewer trips. Collaboration software, videoconferencing platforms, and digital communities all benefited from the assumption that physical presence could be optimized away. Now, experienced entrepreneurs who have already proven they can build scalable companies are treating physical presence as the scarce resource.

Why It Matters

The reversal is revealing. In an AI-heavy enterprise market, software is becoming abundant. Agents can draft, summarize, schedule, search, and increasingly execute routine workflows. The harder thing to manufacture may be trust, attention, serendipity, and the emotional force of meeting another person face-to-face.

Putnam and Walker are particularly interesting cases because this is not their first attempt at building consumer-facing brands with strong communities. Their previous businesses were compelling enough to attract major acquirers. Their next ventures are moving toward an even more explicitly social proposition — one that is harder to standardize and measure than conventional SaaS.

Their thesis implicitly challenges the assumption that the next generation of workplace products should make human interaction less necessary. They are not rejecting technology. They are identifying a limitation in technology's usual promise: digital tools can make coordination easier, but they do not necessarily create belonging or meaningful relationships.

The B2B Angle

This matters to enterprise technology because the boundary between workplace software and workplace experience is changing.

Companies have spent years buying tools to manage hybrid work: scheduling systems, employee-engagement platforms, digital headquarters, collaboration suites, and office-utilization software. The new opportunity may be the layer that persuades people that meeting physically is worth the effort.

That could produce unusual B2B models:

- Companies paying for curated employee gatherings rather than more software seats - Professional communities operating as recruiting or sales channels - Physical spaces designed around specific industries or job functions - Corporate "connection budgets" measured by participation and retention rather than desk utilization - Events and communities becoming recurring infrastructure instead of one-off marketing expenses

The founders' direction also fits a broader enterprise paradox: as AI reduces the amount of routine human work, the remaining human interactions may become more valuable. A sales conversation, leadership retreat, customer advisory board, or chance encounter between employees could carry more strategic weight when machines handle more of the transactional layer.

What We Don't Know Yet

The evidence here is strongest on the pattern, not the financial performance. Revenue, customer counts, and proof of repeatable business models are not yet public. That limitation is worth preserving: the compelling story is not that the model has already been proven, but that several experienced entrepreneurs independently see offline connection itself as an underbuilt market at the exact moment the rest of technology is moving online.

They have already built and sold companies. They could build anything. They are choosing to build businesses around the thing that videoconferences, Slack channels, and AI assistants cannot fully replicate: being in the same room.