After selling to P&G and Lululemon, these founders are building for life beyond the screen

0:00This episode of Equity is brought to you by Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric, your energy technology partner. Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Kirsten Korosek and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore trend in the tech world and dive deep. As AI makes it easier than ever to create products and content, some founders are pushing in the opposite direction, aiming to get people away from their screens and back to each other. At the latest Strictly VC event in New York, our own AI editor, Russell Brandom, sat down with two repeat founders chasing that idea.

0:38Tristan Walker, now behind the Leathercraft trade school, Heirloom Craft, and Bryn Putnam, CEO of Bored, a touchscreen that blends board games and video games. Both spent their last companies, Bevel and Mir, building products designed to fit into our increasingly digital lives. Now they're betting on something that sounds almost counterintuitive in the age of AI, that as technology gets better at doing more for us, there may be more value in the things that feel distinctly human. Let's listen.

1:09I realized, actually, as we were talking about this, that I have consumed rather a lot of marketing for companies both of you founded. So let's start with Tristan. Walker and Company, this is your first... That's my first business. Your first business is the maker of Bevel, of course, the razor company, which was a mainstay of podcast advertising. Many of you, but sold to Procter & Gamble. And now, these days, you're focused on a leather craft trade school called Heirloom in San Francisco, which is super interesting pivot, and also a partner with Collaborative Holdings. And then Bryn danced with New York City Ballet, moved into fitness with Mirror, which again, a mainstay of New York City subway advertising for years and years.

2:01Sort of people in various dynamic poses. It inspired me to work out. I never got an actual Mirror, but I was like, I should do this. Anyway, sold to Lululemon. and now you're focused on a physical game console called Boards that's also a sort of creator ecosystem. It's this really interesting mix of custom hardware and sort of software platform thinking. We're going to get into all of it. I wanted to talk about this sort of pivot both of you have sort of made to, I don't like to say real-life, offline activities maybe, Bored, of course, is not like screen-free. There is a screen on it, and there's a whole software component to it.

2:47But I'm curious sort of what, and maybe we start with you, Bryn, what made you feel like now was the moment to sort of move away from software, move towards tangible hardware and sort of in-person experiences?

3:03Brynn Putnam: Yeah. So Mir was very much a product of my life at the time, and my problems. I was pregnant with baby one and trying to figure out how to take the studio experience I had built in my bricks and mortar gyms and bring it to the home through technology. And so it was really about using technology to better myself, my body, my fitness, my reflection. And then fast forward after the sale and leaving Lululemon and post-COVID, now a mom of a five blended family, so going from three to 22, and trying to figure out really how to bring everyone together, given all the diverse ages and abilities. And play has always been a way that I gathered with people that I loved.

3:51Brynn Putnam: And so the idea was really, how can we use technology to bring people together, rather than one person sort of immersed in their own device? How can we use tech to create a shared experience. So really not a movement from digital to analog, so much as how can we use tech to bring people together rather than take them apart. Yeah. And I think because it's such a new idea, it's a little bit, I think it can be sort of hard to wrap your mind around if I just say, okay, it's, you know, SaaS for the legal industry. Everyone immediately knows what it is. But I think, Bord, do you want to just walk us through a little bit of what physically you're getting?

4:32Brynn Putnam: Sure. Yeah. New category creation seems to be my area. It's a 24 inch touchscreen that sits on a table. And what's unique about it is the touchscreen recognizes physical objects as well as gestures. So it's basically board games meets video games and enables everyone to sit around a shared experience and play together regardless of their age or ability. So rather than kind of modern controllers with lots of buttons and joysticks. You know, you put down a spaceship on board and it shoots, or you put down a knife and it slices. So it's a way of bringing people together through play. And it's sort of, there's this mix of the digital and the physical because it recognizes the pieces, which is so intriguing.

5:17Okay. So now Tristan, your turn. You purchased a leather craft trade school. I said this before and you agreed, but so I guess walk us through how you, even came to that as a thing to do and sort of what you what what the plan is there? Yeah, so I started Heirloom because I was worried. I was worried about what AI was doing to the world, how it's potentially stealing knowledge work, how it's taking us away from the community, and I felt if I were going to do anything next post Bevel, I wanted to bring the world together. So at Heirloom, look, the goal is to acquire and scale trade schools and fine handcraft.

5:58And what we're building is what I like to call like the succession infrastructure to forms of mastery that America's forgotten how to reproduce. So think leatherworking, think fine watchmaking, think fragrance design. You know, for the past 50 years, America has really dismantled these chains of transmission from master to apprentice You know, production has gone abroad. Manual skill has lost its luster. People treat apprentices, or almost presume apprentices to be people who couldn't get into four-year colleges. All that at the same time when AI is stealing knowledge work. The contract between students and four-year institutions is really broken, right?

6:48And there's a demand for this work, for good work. And we felt that we needed to fill that supply. So the first school that we bought is a leatherwork trade school that was actually founded by the first ambassador artisan of Hermes. She worked at Hermes back in the 80s and 90s. She was shipped to the United States to kind of start their business in San Francisco. And she built this compelling trade school that a lot of students are finding great value in. And I think building community with soul, with things that people can touch, and mutual dependence felt really good in a time like this, and perhaps was the most contrarian bet, in my opinion, that anyone can make at this point in time.

7:36So I can't help but notice, as a journalist, you said the first school we bought. Yes. So there are more coming? No, the ambition, I mean, if we were to think about how do we restore or reshore the American find handcraft supply chain, right? That means that we need to train artisans. We need to train artisans to teach. We need to train artisans who teach people to create things and build that flywheel of continuity, not only, again, in leather work, but watchmaking, woodworking, fragrance design, et cetera. So no one else is doing it, and we plan to. Yeah, and so there is, you know, it's not the quick scale of my sort of SAS legal services idea, but there is this sense of scaling of the more we do this, the bigger it'll grow, the faster it'll grow.

8:30It's sort of accumulate over time. Yeah, if you think about, you know, we have a place-based product right now focused on education, creation, and restoration. There's a place for place in each of those things, but then there's also a place for digital, accretive work. So scale is whatever we want it to be across each of those domains. Yeah. Have you gotten into it personally? Are you now a skilled leather worker? Yeah. No, I mean, so actually the inspiration, I was a bookbinder for like two years just for fun. And I went through some formal training for it. I actually joined a school in Boston.

9:11It's called North Bennett Street School. It's the first kind of craft school in the country where I learned some of that stuff. And I was like, wow, like, you know, you can actually scale this thing, a profitable business where you're building community. And that really inspired me to do this.

9:25Brynn Putnam: Book binder in his spare time. Yeah. Do you have any, do you have any, do you have any trade skills or? I have no. I don't either. No other skills. It's okay. It's, this is a safe space for not having manual skills. Um, so one thing I was curious, you talked about the transition from mirror to board being about, I want to make sure I get this right from tech about me to together tech, which I thought was so interesting, but also sort of suggests, you know, part of the reason funders love sort of repeat founders is you learn so much from the experience of developing a product, bringing it to market, going through the different fundraising stages.

10:12I guess, what did you feel you took from Mirror to this new project?

10:19Brynn Putnam: Yeah, I mean, it's not a coincidence that I'm building a hardware, software content platform now that is centered around a touchscreen. I think something that I definitely learned and that we were just talking about is the importance of products where the experience helps to scale itself. I think having built Mirror in the age of Facebook marketing and sort of a beautiful golden previous time, really understanding that to get to large scale, you need a product that the act of using it, you know, creates these incredible network effects. So that was very important to me when I thought about board is just through the act of playing, you bring people into the experience and then those people bring other people to the experience.

11:04Brynn Putnam: And similarly, we have a play to create cycle at board. So people buy games, they use the physical pieces, they become inspired, they then create their own experiences using the pieces, which they share back to the community, which creates more play. So I think that was definitely a core learning for me, the importance of sort of having those network loops built into the product in the early days. every company today is looking for an edge better insights faster decisions greater resilience but as ai drives new growth it also creates new demands on energy and infrastructure schneider electric is connecting energy automation and digital technologies to help organizations make smarter decisions and operate more efficiently because the future won't be shaped by ai alone it will be shaped by energy and industrial intelligence schneider electric advancing energy tech yeah yeah i want to pull on something you said about sort of the golden age of you know i think uh when we first sort of discovered marketing on social media and targeted advertising and i think there was a whole growth playbook around that a whole go-to-market playbook and it does feel like the landscape is very different now and i think you know both of you, as I said, like this is in some ways a huge driving force of your success is being able to identify that, where the opportunity is and where the opportunity is moving in terms of marketing a product.

12:33How do you see that changing? I guess, would you, I mean, one question is, if someone were bringing a physical product to market right now, would you suggest, okay, hey, let's focus on the alternative channels. Let's throw our money into Facebook, finding our audience there, and then making sure they're aware. Or do you have to kind of really start from the product itself? You're shaking your head sadly.

13:03Brynn Putnam: No, I mean, I think unless you're prepared to light a very large pile of money on fire, I wouldn't recommend that. I think, no, I think you need to, I mean, it's storytelling, right? You need to create an experience and package that experience in a way and find an audience that loves that experience and then empower them to tell your story to other evangelists. So I think the core priority is creating a product with a beautiful story that inspires people that they then share. Sort of the days in which you can put a coin into the slot machine and pull the handle and let it rip, I think are long gone.

13:39Except for literal slot machines, of course.

13:42Brynn Putnam: You can still put it on red in Vegas, yes. Yeah, Tristan, I mean, what's your perspective on sort of how that puzzle has shifted and sort of... Yeah, we were, I mean, we existed during the golden age of that stuff. And I'm traumatized by it. You know, I had a CPG company with 30 different products, hardware, soft goods, everything. And, you know, we spent tens of millions of dollars. And it wasn't until I got acquired and got to the other side at Procter & Gamble that I realized how naive I was. You know, Procter & Gamble is an$80 billion revenue company. 25 different billion dollar products. And the only reason that's the case is because they have 100 % brand awareness in every single one.

14:23The formula for consumer, if you're going to win, is brand awareness. There are only two ways you can do it. One, have unlimited amounts of money, or two, have a Kim Kardashian-like figure to support you. Now, this time around, I guess the learning in it for me, which is a true blessing, is I bought a profitable free cash flow generating business. You know, so and I bought a profitable free cash flow generating business in a very narrow vertical that no one else is attacking. So if you have this hardware person that needs to figure out, it's like, what is the most narrow lane or narrowest thin edge of that wedge that you can get into?

15:03And ideally make your first sale profitable. And I know that that is easier said than done, but the alternative is really hard, really hard. So a short runway until you're aloft into profitability. It takes a lot of money. It takes a lot of money. So that gets into this sort of thing that I think is interesting about both projects. And I want to start with Heirloom. there's this sort of coming from just, as you say, consumer packaged goods, where it's pretty clear what the product is, who the consumer is. You know, when I go to the checkout, no one's getting confused. It feels like with Heirloom, for one, there's this sort of loop between, okay, I'm learning, I'm the apprentice, eventually the apprentice becomes the master and has apprentices of his or her own.

15:58And then also there's this sense of, well, I'm learning to produce these craft goods in a sense, if I'm a bookbinder, the end consumer is the consumer of books. I guess, how do you navigate that? It feels in some ways much more complicated than just saying, here is the product, here's the price, this is exactly what it does, either you want to buy it or you don't? Yeah, no, it's a great question. I mean, and I've learned a lot over the past year since I bought the business. There are a few kind of tiers of kind of customers that walk through the door or students, we say. It's the career changer.

16:35Somebody just fed up, right? The one thing that has been really interesting to observe over the past year, our first locations in San Francisco, the number of young tech employees who need a phones down creative outlet I mean, it's probably 50 plus percent of our capacity right now. So that's one. The folks that either kind of see the writing on the wall or want to kind of do a career switch into entrepreneurship and learn this craft from a master. Then there are the surprising folks that I had no idea about until I really understood the stats. Follow the youth. I think there's a crazy stat that 50 % of like Gen Z, Gen Alpha folks don't want to do four-year college.

17:23They want to do trade schools. That's crazy, right? And they don't want to go to trade school to become an electrician to serve in the interest of metadata centers. So we need to kind of fill that supply, right? This idea of like demand for mastery hasn't gone down, but there's no supply to fill that demand. So, and then there's just the hobbyist. You know, we have a 75-year-old former gemologist from Sotheby's who is retired and just wants to learn and has gone through our program and is now teaching the next generation of people who want to be these artisans, right? So I think that there's just a craving from, you know, this kind of who's the center customer?

18:08The youth. The writing is on the wall that they don't want kind of what's been served to them over the past kind of decade. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So moving on to board, we're talking about this custom hardware, but part of the roadmap for you is eventually having a whole creator economy of people use the product, they get an idea for a game. Everyone's, I feel like it's very common, people are like, oh, I have this great idea for a board game. Now I just need to hire a AAA developer and sort of get it. I guess, how do you think about fostering that community and you know I think any platform product it can be a real

18:52Brynn Putnam: challenge yeah I mean I think board is unique and generally when you're using a creator tool you create something and then you send it out onto a feed and the only feedback you get is likes or sales and I think what's so fascinating about board is you create a game and then it's on a table and immediately you know is the 10 year old entertained or not you know is this fun have you found the fun is this good and so what was exciting for us really early days is people were creating and not just developers we we obviously have lots of developers creating but just hobbyists and families were figuring out ways to use our SDK how well together AI tools talking with each other on forums to build their own experiences really to serve their own personal needs to bring their family together to connect and so in Q4 we're launching Board Studio which is a creator product that is basically a suite of creator tools that we've built from our experience shipping first party games that kind of widens the door for creation obviously like professional developer tools still are necessary to really increase the ceiling but to make it such that anyone can and create, share, iterate in a quicker way.

20:11Brynn Putnam: And that's been really exciting to see what the community has been building. Yeah, yeah. Well, so you mentioned AI under the hood. So you said it first. Five minutes. I am curious, sort of, I think there have been a lot of predictions about what the rise of AI software development would mean for software as a product and sort of the economics of software. And I'm curious if, well, I guess how you see board fitting into that. I mean, is it just vibe coding makes everything simple? And so now the sort of barrier between me and a functional board game that I can show to my kids is finally low enough that I can jump over it?

20:56Brynn Putnam: Yeah, I mean, I think in our world where we're using AI makes sense is where you can reduce the production friction from idea to something that is playable. So things like quick prototyping, helping someone to understand really quickly what makes a good board experience, how to use our pieces, how to make shared play, multiplayer play work is a good use of AI. I think for us, it doesn't remove the creator's need for taste and judgment and the personal story and need behind why they are creating this. Why are they desiring to bring people to the table? And it doesn't remove the need for human connection.

21:40Brynn Putnam: So this is not solitary creation. This is creation that then goes to the table and brings everyone together again. So that's for us where sort of AI lives in our world. Yeah. And the skill of incorporating user feedback, even when it comes from a seven-year-old, especially maybe when it comes from a seven-year-old. I think that the core learning for me, having gone from fitness, which is very different than entertainment, there's an entertainment element, but to games, it's impossible to know when you've found the fun. But when you haven't found the fun, the people around the table will tell you.

22:14So then, I mean, Tristan, I'm curious to give you a crack at the AI question. It was sort of looming in the background there when you were talking about physical goods and why suddenly people find it very satisfying to be able to build something with their hands without a screen or sort of intense flows of data. I guess, how do you see it changing? Everything. Yeah. Yeah, look, for us, if you walk into our studio, in the back, there are racks and racks of little envelopes of patterns that Beatrice, our master artisan, has made for the past 30 years. I think we counted as probably 7 ,000 of them.

23:01Now, these are like physical patterns that if you lay them out on the floor, you'd have no idea what they are, right? So one thing that we actually have been doing is, first of all, digitizing them. So how do we offer her the ability to have a more sovereign inspiration? Once we have an understanding around what all of these patterns are, how can she get inspired to make the next creation for a client? Can we license those designs to people? Can we reshape them? Can we do that for other students in our marketplace? So that's kind of an interesting use case. The other is kind of in this transmission of pedagogy from the master to the apprentice, if Beatrice has kind of guardrails for how she trains versus her daughter who has guardrails for how she trains, right?

23:52And if each of them have their own kind of standalone apprentice, what does it mean for that apprentice to go and practice and learn corrective behavior without Beatrice and Amelie in the room, right? So as we think about, like, we're training the next kind of generation of masters to train the next generation of masters, right? What is the pedagogy that each of them has that can be kind of transmitted to the next generation? And how can that, I hate using the word data, but like, how can that information be leveraged to inspire and create? and still give the artisan room for her own judgment to create in her own way.

24:35Yeah. Of course, AI and education is a whole other panel, a whole other bag of works. But I want to give you a chance to talk also, before we're done, about collaborative holdings, which is sort of also a bit more focused on this craft line of thinking. Where's Craig? Craig? Is he here? Craig's awesome. He, founder of Collab, started this new kind of entity, Collab Holdings, We started talking about this, gosh, probably about a year or so ago. And he had this really kind of wonderful idea. He said, Tristan, what if we can take beloved consumer brands, right, that are profitable, generating cash flow with founders that don't necessarily want to sell, you know, that don't need to worry about kind of returns of VC capital and make kind of the same poor choices that you made, Tristan, at Walker & Company and give you room to thrive.

25:26Think about an heirloom, right? You bought this profitable business. We want it to scale. You're not going to go anywhere How do we find the supreme before it came supreme? How do we find the Beats by Dre before it became Beats by Dre? And invest behind these beloved companies with beloved founders And what Craig is working on with the team That he's assembled is something that I think is really really really special And I'm really really excited about kind of some of the work that we have coming up. Well, fantastic Thank you both so much for taking the stage. This is lovely.