A small but growing number of founders are betting on bringing people together offline
A growing number of entrepreneurs are launching businesses focused on facilitating offline social connections in response to rising global loneliness. Notable founders like Brynn Putnam and Tristan Walker are building companies such as Board and Heirloom that prioritize in-person experiences over digital isolation. This trend is supported by data showing that consumers are increasingly prioritizing experiential spending over material goods.
- ▪Brynn Putnam is developing Board, a touchscreen table designed for group interaction, while Tristan Walker is scaling fine-craft trade schools through his company Heirloom.
- ▪The World Health Organization has classified loneliness as a defining global health challenge, affecting one in six people worldwide.
- ▪A Harris Poll survey indicated that two-thirds of Americans are prioritizing experiences over material purchases this year.
- ▪Other founders joining this movement include Andy Dunn with his social life operating system Pie and Audrey Gelman with her Six Bells Countryside Inn.
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| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/20/a-small-but-growing-number-of-founders-are-betting-that-bringing-people-together-is-its-own-industry/ |
| Publication time | Sun, 20 Sep 2026 15:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-20T15:03:50.021Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-20T15:03:50.021Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | ocKohV_N3Rm- · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
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). That both of them are at it again is less surprising than what each is building.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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