Where are we supposed to meet new people these days? This question is asked [[Where To Find People|countless times]] a day, on every online platform. Let's consider the possible answers. Picture any of the business parks or plazas you visit regularly. The places closest to your home that look something like this: ![[commercial-real-estate-1.jpg]] Mentally walk around that plaza, and start by deleting the places that aren't social to begin with. Cross out the grocery stores, convenience stores, pharmacies, chiropractors, massage parlors, salons, barbers, pet stores, and dentists. Sure, it's _possible_ to meet new people at the dentist. But going to the dentist in an attempt to meet new people would be sufficient for a diagnosis of delusional over-optimism. So, which businesses are left, after we cross out all the obvious non-starters? In the average business plaza, we're left with one category: The food and drink places. So let's examine them. Consider any coffee shop, restaurant, or bar in the average modern city. In the coffee shops, we find people doing things that look like this: ![[coffee-shop.jpg]] The restaurants are full of people doing things like this: ![[restaurant-1.jpg]] As for the bars, the night clubs and party focused ones look something like this: ![[nightclub-1.jpg]] Then there are the breweries and tasting rooms, where the focus is all on the beer or wine itself. They look something like this: ![[brewery-1-barn-door.jpg]] Every one of these businesses has the same problem. They're places you go either: 1. alone, or 2. with people you already know. They're not places that you can easily meet new people. And even when you do happen to meet someone new at such places, the locations themselves do not show any evidence of being designed for the specific purpose of helping you to meet other people who you didn't already know. When it happens, it's either a lucky accident, or because you specifically took the initiative yourself. The businesses themselves aren't designed to make it easier. In every coffee shop or restaurant, you'll see the same social structure. Little groups of people who already knew each other when they came in. You'll almost never see groups of people who met at that location. The closest exception is the neighborhood bar, which tends to look something like this: ![[neighborhood-bar-1.jpg]] These locations are the closest thing to a business that is optimized for meeting new people. And yet even these places completely fail to solve the problem in any general sense. First of all, not everyone drinks. Second of all, even for those of us who do drink, the human desire to meet new people goes far beyond the times of day when one is interested in drinking alcohol. So how do you design a place that makes it easy to meet new people, for everyone: morning, noon, and night? Go back to that mental image of your local coffee shop, restaurant, or bar. Picture all those people in the small groups that they came in with. Picture a girl in the corner, looking at her phone. Picture a guy on a laptop with his headphones in. How do you take that exact mental image, and make the smallest possible change that will get those people talking to each other? How do you break the thick imaginary walls between them, and create a place where it doesn't feel awkward to approach the small group, or the phone girl, or the laptop guy? The problem of how to break those walls naturally by introducing a small tweak to familiar business models is the problem we're focused on solving. For more details on how we aim to solve this problem, here's a more detailed description of our [[Plan]]. For upcoming events we're hosting, see [[Events]].