A small but growing number of founders, including Brynn Putnam and Tristan Walker, both of whom have already sold companies, are betting their next acts on the offline gathering economy. The thesis: digital saturation has created genuine demand for structured, curated, in-person experiences, and that demand is large enough to be a standalone industry rather than a feature of something else.
The IRL Economy and Why Serial Founders Are Circling It
Putnam built Mirror, the connected fitness company acquired by Lululemon, and Walker built Bevel, the shaving brand acquired by Procter and Gamble. Both exits were premised on the idea that digital platforms could enhance physical experience. The new bet inverts this: physical experience is the product, and digital is the distribution mechanism that gets people to the room. This is not a trivial distinction. The connected fitness wave, Peloton included, ultimately discovered that the screen was a crutch and the community was the value. Lululemon's Mirror acquisition struggled. The studios survived. The insight being operationalised here is that people will pay for the room itself if the room is designed well enough. TurboFund's live investor signals show where VC attention is actually moving in this space, and community infrastructure has been a recurring theme in recent deal flow.
Culture Arrived Here Before the Founders Did
The Bread&&Butter festival in 2010s Berlin, documented this week by Highsnobiety, was doing exactly this before 'IRL economy' was a pitch deck category: fashion, music, art, and culture under one warehouse roof, with Zalando as the infrastructure. The festival proved the demand. It also proved the fragility. Bread&&Butter ended. What the current founder cohort is presumably solving for is the recurring revenue model that a festival cannot sustain. The Atlantic's recommendation this week of Adults, a show lovingly poking fun at Gen Z, catches the generational mood: a cohort that grew up digital is now conspicuously, almost performatively, interested in being in the same physical space as other humans. That is not irony. That is a market signal. For a direct examination of why third spaces and IRL experiences are not a trend but a structural need, Mieke Marple and Francesca Sonara's conversation on clowning, gift economies, and what comes after social media is the cultural theory that the pitch decks are circling without quite naming.