The founder who built the fitness mirror didn't pick an AI service for her next act. Brynn Putnam pioneered the home-fitness market by putting a screen on a mirror, then sold that company to Lululemon. Her new venture is called Board — a startup that creates gatherings where people meet in person, play games face to face, and connect. Investors sent it money.
Over the same stretch, AI startups were raising record sums quarter after quarter. While top AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic took in investments measured in tens of billions of dollars, someone was betting on rooms where people roll dice. The fact that these two directions coexist in the same investment market points to something more than a simple counterexample.
What Cyberdecks and Board Games Have in Common
Starting in late 2024, videos of a strange DIY gadget spread across social media: the Cyberdeck. It's a handmade portable computer assembled from a small board like a Raspberry Pi, a keyboard, and a tiny monitor. The point is the building process itself rather than any practical use, and the look draws on cyberpunk fiction. These videos racked up hundreds of thousands of views, and maker communities formed around them.
Board is a far more commercial undertaking. Putnam watched up close why Mirror stopped growing after the pandemic. Working out alone in front of a screen was quickly abandoned once gyms reopened. She knew exactly what Mirror had failed to capture in that shift: physical space, and the presence of other people.
Cyberdecks and Board differ in genre, scale, and business model. Where they overlap is this: each only comes together when people use their own hands and bodies and share a space with others. That's territory a screen struggles to replace.
The Demand for Offline Was Never Tied to the AI Boom
Some explain this movement as "AI fatigue" or a "digital backlash." The observation is fair as far as it goes — rising screen time and rising demand for offline experiences did show up in the same period.
But the backlash framing leaves things unexplained. Aquascaping — the hobby of building planted aquariums, arranging substrate and aquatic plants to create a living underwater ecosystem — predates the smartphone, and it keeps growing steadily even now, at the height of the AI boom. What people get from grading the soil and planting the greenery is the feeling of designing something, observing it, and producing a result with their own hands. Classes teaching the hobby keep appearing, books based on those classes get published, and the communities endure — a flow that has continued regardless of any algorithm change. A backlash doesn't sustain that kind of long arc.
Skepticism about offline-experience startups has its grounds, of course. Even before COVID, plenty of social-dining platforms, immersive art museums, and escape-room operators raised funding and quietly disappeared. Investors keep raising the same objection: experience businesses don't scale. Netflix can ship to the entire world at once; a board-game event is bound to one room in one city. How Putnam's Board plans to handle that structural limit hasn't been disclosed. Raising capital and building sustainable revenue are two different things.
Still, the backgrounds of these founders are worth a look. Putnam has already succeeded with technology-driven hardware. Cyberdeck builders are people fluent in software and electronics. When people who handle technology well deliberately choose to strip it away, it reads less as a rejection of technology than as a precise pointer to the spot technology can't fill.
The Premium Is Moving Off-Screen
In Korea, offline community businesses were long dismissed for their lack of scalability. But a few conditions have changed.
The online content market is more saturated than ever. The number of channels covering the same topics has multiplied, and per-view rates keep falling. Meanwhile, what participants pay for offline classes and workshops keeps widening its gap over online. People travel to a physical space for what a screen can't give them — and they pay more for the trip.
The community structure differs too. YouTube subscribers move on the moment a more interesting channel appears. Members of a group that meets regularly in person churn far more slowly. In a space where relationships have formed, things beyond content quality decide who stays.
For a solo business owner, there's a concrete check to run. If your current business includes anything that's only complete when touched by hand, try splitting that part off into an offline class or a small workshop. A class that teaches aquascaping commands a higher price than a video covering the same material because the process doesn't transmit through a screen. It's also why board-game cafés outlive app versions of the very same games.
If you run a community, it's worth considering a reorganization: make it an independent revenue unit rather than an adjunct to your online channels. An offline community whose members pay dues doesn't have to depend on a platform's algorithm.
There is one condition. "Analog feels nice" won't create willingness to pay on its own. It has to be clear what participants learn, make, or connect with — what result they can only get outside the screen.
Putnam didn't choose board games because offline is emotionally appealing. She first confirmed, in the data, the limits of working out alone in front of a screen — and then changed direction. As products that sell by getting you to turn the screen off keep finding their footing, I'd argue the useful question isn't whether this is a fad. It's whether there's a part of your own business, right now, that could command an offline price.
