The New Founders’ Frontier: Building a Business Out of Human Connection

Brynn Putnam and Tristan Walker have already achieved what most entrepreneurs spend their entire careers chasing: the creation of a company so compelling that it commands a massive exit to a major industry player. Putnam, a former professional ballerina who built a boutique studio chain, launched the connected-fitness phenomenon Mirror, only to sell it to Lululemon for $500 million in cash in under three years. Walker, who cut his teeth as an intern at Twitter while studying at Stanford, built the grooming powerhouse Walker & Company Brands, eventually orchestrating its sale to Procter & Gamble for a reported figure between $20 million and $40 million.

Today, both founders are back in the arena. Their return to the startup world is notable not just because of their track records, but because their latest ventures, while vastly different in scope and execution, share a singular, ambitious "north star": the intentional cultivation of in-person, offline human connection.

Putnam’s new venture, Board, is a radical departure from the solitary fitness experience of the Mirror. It features a 24-inch touchscreen table designed specifically to recognize physical game pieces and human gestures. Unlike the typical screen-based experience that isolates a single user, Board is engineered for groups, inviting players to gather around a physical table to engage in a shared, tactile environment.

Walker, meanwhile, is tackling the erosion of community from a different angle with Heirloom Craft. His company is in the process of acquiring and scaling fine-craft trade schools, beginning with a leatherworking academy in San Francisco that was originally established by the first American artisan-ambassador for Hermès. Beyond this, Walker remains active in the investment community, running Collaborative Holdings—a specialized fund carved out of the venture firm Collaborative Fund—with the goal of providing founders with the time and resources needed to build sustainable, long-term businesses.

At first glance, a digital-physical game console and a series of trade schools for artisans might seem to have little in common. However, both founders are betting on a growing market thesis: there is significant value to be found in fostering the kind of human connection that digital technology has steadily eroded over the last two decades.

This shift in focus is not a coincidence. The timing aligns with a growing global awareness of the social consequences of our digital lives. In June of last year, the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Connection formally classified loneliness as a major global health challenge. The commission estimates that one in six people worldwide are affected by it, linking the condition to approximately 870,000 deaths annually. As society grapples with these findings, the market opportunity to address this "loneliness epidemic" is expanding for those positioned to offer a solution.

Consumer behavior is already beginning to reflect this desire for tangible experience. According to a Harris Poll survey commissioned by Marriott Bonvoy, two-thirds of Americans stated that they were prioritizing experiences—such as travel—over material purchases this year. A similar percentage noted that modern retail shopping has become increasingly generic, with many consumers expressing a sense of fatigue toward a landscape where every brand feels interchangeable.

On the East Coast, a cohort of high-profile entrepreneurs is naturally gravitating toward this "connection" space. Beyond Putnam and Walker, founders such as Andy Dunn, the creator of Bonobos, and Audrey Gelman, the founder of the Wing, are shifting their professional efforts toward building platforms that facilitate real-world interaction.

Dunn’s five-year-old startup, Pie, has undergone a significant evolution. Initially launched as a friend-matching app, it transitioned into an event-discovery tool before settling into what Dunn now describes as a "social life operating system." The platform is anchored by "Community Homes," which act as permanent digital hubs for recurring social groups, such as run clubs or neighborhood watch parties, helping to bridge the gap between digital discovery and physical attendance.

Gelman, having previously built a brand around female connection with the Wing—a company that ultimately folded during the pandemic amidst internal controversies regarding equity and staff treatment—has pivoted to a new model. Her latest venture, the Six Bells Countryside Inn, is an 11-room guesthouse in the Hudson Valley. The inn serves as a venue for monthly murder-mystery dinners where professional actors seed the crowd, creating an environment designed to break the ice. The mystery itself is intentionally whimsical, but the result is consistently substantive; according to a New York Times profile from earlier this summer, guests at the inn frequently linger at the bar well past midnight, trading contact information and building genuine rapport with strangers.

For these founders, the transition into this space is deeply personal. At a recent TechCrunch StrictlyVC event in New York’s West Village, Putnam was candid about the genesis of her previous success. She explained that Mirror was built around the realities of her own life at the time: she was a pregnant mother of one, managing a chain of fitness studios, and struggling to reconcile her professional demands with her desire for personal wellness. Technology, in that instance, provided a way to bring that experience into the home—a way to focus on "myself, my body, my fitness, my reflection."

Board, however, was born from a completely different set of circumstances. As a mother of five in a blended family, Putnam found that her household size had jumped from three to seven, and she struggled to find products that allowed individuals of vastly different ages and abilities to play together. "How can we use tech to create a shared experience?" she asked. For Putnam, the pivot wasn’t a rejection of the digital world in favor of the analog, but a rethink of how technology could be utilized to draw people together rather than pull them apart.

This philosophy is reflected in the design of the Board table. By allowing the touchscreen to recognize physical objects—where placing a model spaceship on the screen triggers an action or a physical knife performs a virtual cut—the platform removes the barrier of traditional joysticks and buttons. It creates an environment where a young child and their grandparent can engage with the same software without the friction of a steep learning curve.

Walker’s motivation stems from a similar anxiety, albeit one focused on the professional landscape and the encroachment of artificial intelligence. He launched Heirloom because of his concerns that AI is "stealing knowledge work" and further isolating individuals from one another. He views his post-Walker & Company work as a mission to bring people back into the same physical space.

Speaking at the same StrictlyVC event, Walker argued that the United States has largely forgotten how to effectively transmit mastery in fields like leatherworking, watchmaking, and fragrance design. He contends that for the past half-century, the country has systematically broken the chain of apprenticeship, offshoring production and stripping prestige from manual skills to the point that trade education is often viewed as a secondary option for those who cannot access a traditional four-year college degree.

Heirloom is a direct wager that this cultural trend is reversing. Walker pointed to data suggesting that roughly half of Gen Z and Gen Alpha are questioning the necessity of a four-year degree. Furthermore, the first Heirloom location in San Francisco is currently operating at over half-capacity, filled not by retirees or career-changers, but by young tech workers who are specifically seeking what Walker describes as a "phones-down creative outlet."

The financial scale of these ventures remains relatively modest by current venture capital standards. Board has raised $35 million, Pie has secured $24 million, and Six Bells has raised approximately $3.8 million. Heirloom, while less than a year old, has not disclosed its funding totals.

The primary outlier in this movement is Flow, the residential real estate venture from WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann. Marketed on the premise of solving loneliness through physical space, Flow has raised more than $450 million, primarily from Andreessen Horowitz—a figure that dwarfs the combined funding of the other startups in this space.

Whether "togetherness" will emerge as a distinct and sizable investment category remains an open question. There is a fundamental challenge in these models: getting strangers to show up for each other, while socially beneficial, is notoriously difficult to scale compared to the distribution of software.

What remains significant is the pedigree of the builders involved. Putnam, Walker, Dunn, Gelman, and Neumann are not novices; they are seasoned founders who have each built substantial brands in the past. This history provides them with a distinct advantage in attracting capital and instills a measure of investor confidence that they understand how to identify and satisfy consumer needs. They have each correctly anticipated market shifts before, and in the coming years, the market will determine if they have successfully identified the next great consumer frontier.