Founders who built brands once are betting on togetherness

Brynn Putnam sold her connected-fitness company Mirror to Lululemon for $500 million in cash less than three years after founding it. Tristan Walker 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. Both are building again — and this time, their new companies share a different premise: getting people into the same room.

Putnam’s new company, Board, makes a 24-inch touchscreen table that recognizes physical game pieces and gestures, built for a group to use together rather than for one person alone with a screen. Walker’s Heirloom Craft 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.

The timing tracks a broader signal. In June of last year, the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Connection 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. Separately, a Harris Poll survey sponsored by Marriott Bonvoy found that two-thirds of Americans say they’re prioritizing experiences like travel over material purchases this year, with the same share saying retail shopping today feels too generic.

Other founders are making similar bets. Andy Dunn, who founded Bonobos, has evolved his five-year-old company Pie from a friend-matching app into what he calls a “social life operating system,” anchored by “Community Homes” for recurring groups like run clubs. Audrey Gelman, whose earlier company the Wing folded during the pandemic amid accusations it didn’t treat its own staff equitably, now runs the Six Bells Countryside Inn, an 11-room Hudson Valley guesthouse that hosts a monthly murder-mystery dinner.

The dollar amounts involved are still modest: Putnam has raised $35 million for Board, Pie has raised $24 million, and Six Bells has raised roughly $3.8 million. One exception is WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann, whose residential venture Flow — built around the same premise of solving loneliness through physical space — has raised more than $450 million, largely from Andreessen Horowitz, dwarfing the others combined. Whether “togetherness” becomes a sizable investment category on its own is still unclear.

Why it matters

Each of these founders has built a real brand before, which makes it easier to raise capital and gives investors confidence in their judgment — even in a category that, unlike software, isn’t obviously scalable.