The founder who built a fitness mirror didn't reach for an AI service as her next act. Brynn Putnam pioneered the at-home workout market by mounting a screen onto a mirror, then sold that company to Lululemon. The name of her new venture is 'Board.' It's a startup built around bringing people into one room to play games and connect with each other face to face. Investors wrote it checks.
Over the same stretch, the money AI startups pulled in broke records quarter after quarter. While top-tier AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic were raising rounds in the tens of billions of dollars, someone was placing a bet on a table where people roll dice. That these two directions coexist in the same investment market points to something more than a simple counterexample.
What a Cyberdeck and a Board Game Have in Common
Starting in late 2024, videos of strange DIY gadgets spread across social media: the 'cyberdeck.' It's a handheld device you build yourself by combining a small computer like a Raspberry Pi with a keyboard and a tiny monitor. The point is the act of building more than any practical use, and its look is borrowed from cyberpunk fiction. These videos racked up hundreds of thousands of views, and a maker community formed around them.
Board is a far more commercial undertaking. Putnam watched up close why Mirror stopped growing after the pandemic. Solitary workouts in front of a screen were quickly displaced once gyms reopened. She saw clearly what Mirror had failed to capture in that shift: physical space, and the presence of other people.
Cyberdecks and Board differ in genre, in scale, and in business model. They overlap in one respect—there's something that only comes together when users move their own bodies and share a physical space with others. It's a domain screens struggle to replace.
Offline Demand Was Never Tied to the AI Boom
Some read this movement as 'AI fatigue' or a 'digital backlash.' The observation that rising screen time and rising demand for offline experiences show up in the same period is a fair one.
But framing it purely as backlash leaves something unexplained. Aquascaping—building planted aquarium tanks by hand—predates the smartphone, and it keeps growing even now, in the thick of the AI boom. What people get from choosing the substrate, planting the greenery, and constructing an underwater ecosystem is the feeling of designing, observing, and making a result with their own hands. The arc in which classes spring up to teach the hobby, books get published documenting those classes, and communities sustain themselves has continued regardless of algorithm changes. A backlash doesn't carry on over a horizon this long.
To be sure, skepticism toward offline-experience startups has its own grounding. Even before COVID, plenty of social-dining platforms, experiential museums, and escape-room outfits raised money and quietly vanished. The critique that 'experiential businesses don't scale well' comes up steadily among investors. Netflix can distribute to the whole world at once, but a board-game event is tied to one space in one city. Exactly what business model Putnam's Board will use to handle that structural limit hasn't been disclosed. Taking investment and building sustainable revenue are two different things.
Even so, these founders' backgrounds are worth a look. Putnam has a track record of making technology-driven hardware succeed. The cyberdeck builders, likewise, are people fluent in software and electronics. If people who are good with technology are deliberately choosing to strip it away, that reads less as a rejection of technology than as a precise pointer to the places technology can't fill.
The Premium Is Rising Off-Screen
In Korea, offline community businesses were long rated low on the grounds that they don't scale. But a few conditions have shifted.
The online content market is more saturated than ever. The number of channels covering the same topic has grown sharply, and the revenue per view keeps falling. The price of attending an offline class or workshop, by contrast, is trending toward a widening gap with online. People travel to a space for what a screen can't give them, and they pay more for the trip.
The community structure is different, too. A YouTube subscriber moves on the moment a more interesting channel appears. A member of a group that meets in person on a regular basis churns far more slowly. In a space where relationships have formed, factors beyond content quality decide who stays.
There's something a solo operator can check for. If your current business has 'something that only comes together when you touch it directly,' try carving that part out into an offline class or a small workshop. A class that teaches aquascaping can charge more than a video covering the same material precisely because the process doesn't travel through a screen. It's the same reason a board-game café outlasts the app version of the same game.
If you run a community, it's worth weighing whether to rebuild it as an independent revenue unit rather than a sidekick to your online channel. An offline community that charges a membership fee doesn't have to depend on a platform's algorithm.
There's one condition. The sentiment that 'analog is nice' isn't enough, on its own, to create willingness to pay. It has to be clear what participants learn, make, or connect over—what the payoff is that can only be had off-screen.
Putnam didn't choose board games because offline simply feels good. She confirmed the limits of solitary, screen-facing workouts with data first, and only then changed direction. As products that sell precisely because they make you turn the screen off settle into place, I'd argue it's more useful to first check whether your own business has a piece that could command an offline premium than to argue over whether this is a passing fad.
