The most interesting startups right now want to get you off your phone
Some startups are focusing on getting people off their phones by promoting in-person interactions and experiences. These startups, such as Board and Cyberdeck, are gaining attention for their unique approaches to socializing and technology. This trend is seen as a shift towards more human-centered experiences, rather than just a backlash against AI and technology.
- ▪Mirror founder Brynn Putnam has raised money for Board, a startup focused on in-person games and social experiences.
- ▪Cyberdeck creators are crafting DIY computers that encourage users to engage with the physical world.
- ▪The Equity podcast hosts discuss the 'together tech' wave and its implications for the tech industry.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/video/the-most-interesting-startups-right-now-want-to-get-you-off-your-phone/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:17:06 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-10T05:56:20.620Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-10T13:07:29.214Z |
| 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 | pEaw_HnRKNTq |
| 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 |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| 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
Loading the player… var playerInstance_31300481 = jwplayer( "jwppp-video-31300481" ); playerInstance_31300481.setup({ playlist: "https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/E1nvf5Yu", }) While the AI fundraising machine keeps breaking its own records, some founders are building in the other direction. Mirror founder Brynn Putnam just raised money for Board, a startup focused on bringing people together through in-person games and social experiences. Cyberdeck creators are going viral crafting whimsical DIY computers that literally encourage users to touch grass. Unlike the AI-free browser crowd, this doesn’t just feel like backlash, but also people genuinely gravitating toward things that feel a little more human.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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