Where Builders
Gather
A small-room experiment in craft, connection, and mutual improvement — inspired by Benjamin Franklin’s original Junto club.
Join the Next Gathering
A small-room experiment in craft, connection, and mutual improvement — inspired by Benjamin Franklin’s original Junto club.
Join the Next GatheringA small gathering at a private residence in Philadelphia. Twenty chairs. Good food. Sharp people. One rule: nobody sits quietly in the corner.
Each meeting has a different shape. Sometimes someone pitches a business idea and the room tears it apart with love. Sometimes it’s a live demo or a working session where something gets built from scratch on a projector. Sometimes it’s a talk about something fascinating, a PowerPoint night, or a question that won’t leave someone alone. The format changes. The energy doesn’t.
Call it a third placeⓘthe disintegrating third place is something i have felt deeply for a long time, before learning what it was sociologically called several years ago. a third place is a place outside of your home (first place) and work (second place) where community is built and thrives. i think a lot of what used to be a real third place has been replaced by the screen in our pocket. it gives us a version of connection, but not much depth. you can scroll for hours and still feel weirdly alone. i care about building an actual room where people show up in person, bring something with them, and leave more connected than when they walked in.: a real room outside of work and home where people come to think, build, talk, and connect.
This is a room for people who participate, not consume. Share an idea. Give honest feedback. Connect with someone you wouldn’t have met otherwise. It’s part working session, part dinner party, part collision of interesting minds — designed for people who think with their hands and show up ready to contribute.
In 1727, a young Benjamin Franklin gathered twelve friends in Philadelphia to form a club for mutual improvement. They called it the Junto. Every Friday evening, they met to discuss morals, politics, and natural philosophy — and to help each other become better tradesmen, thinkers, and citizens.
“The Junto was the best school of philosophy, morality, and politics that then existed in the province.” — Benjamin Franklin
Three hundred years later, the tools have changed. The spirit hasn't. We still learn best in small rooms, from people we trust, working on problems that matter to us.
The Junto lost its way after COVID hit. Five years of silence. But it’s coming back — and it’s coming back loud.
“The tools that used to require a developer, a budget, and six months — now require an afternoon and curiosity.”
Something fundamental is shifting in how software gets built, how businesses get started, and who gets to do both. It’s not coming. It’s here. And most people are still sitting on the sidelines wondering if they should pay attention.
This Junto, we’re paying attention.
We’ll start with an honest talk about what AI is actually doing to the working world — not the hype, not the doom, just the real picture of how the landscape is changing for entrepreneurs, professionals, and anyone who has ever said “I’d need to hire someone for that.”
Then we’ll open Claude Code on the projector and build something live.
Someone in the room will pitch an idea — an app, a tool, a business concept, something they’ve been sitting on. We’ll start building it. In real time. In front of everyone. No editing, no safety net, no “we prepared this earlier.”
The goal isn’t to make you a developer. The goal is to show you the rabbit hole exists — and let you decide if you want to jump in.
Come with an idea. Any idea. It might be the one we build.
📅 Friday, April 3rd
🕕 6:00 PM
📍 Address sent upon RSVP
💵 $20 — pizza & beer... maybe gelato if I have time
Spots are limited. This is a small room by design.
$20
Covers food, drinks, and the evening.
Cash works. Bitcoin works better.
Pay with StrikeNew to Bitcoin? Get Strike — it takes 2 minutes.
The first one. A bottle of whiskey, twenty-one chairs, and a bet that interesting people would show up if you just asked them to.
Here’s what I told everyone: look, you’re really smart. You think outside the box, you’re driven, you’re maybe tired of your nine-to-five gig working for someone else. Or you want to be part of something bigger than collecting a paycheck. You may have even told me about a business idea you’ve been noodling over.
The rules were simple. Come prepared to present something — a business idea you think could be revolutionary, something you can’t stop thinking about, something you’re actually working on, or fuck, something you just think will make you some money. Ten minutes max. The room responds. No commitments. No stealing ideas. Ideas are a dime a dozen — execution and people are what count.
My first topic was about natural body decomposition into soil, and repurposing cemeteries into viable elegant gardens and reclaimed nature for meditation and peaceful enjoyment. Burial is a sustainability nightmare. Cremation is an environmental burden. We should be smarter about this. That should tell you everything about the vibe.
Whiskey was provided. Pizza was ordered. The rest was up to whoever showed up. It was a successful first junto — can’t believe that was six years ago.
No skills required. No talent expected. Just a table full of supplies and a room full of people willing to make something.
4819 provided everything — canvases, paint, charcoal, pastels, brushes, markers, whatever you needed. The only instruction was to make something. Anything. There’s something about putting a brush in someone’s hands in a room where nobody’s judging that gets people out of their own head. Most of us haven’t made art since grade school, and there’s a reason for that — somewhere along the way we decided we weren’t “creative people.” That’s bullshit.
Creativity isn’t a talent. It’s a muscle. And most of us just stopped using it because nobody gave us a reason to pick it back up. This night was that reason.
Some people painted. Some people worked in charcoal. Someone brought old credit cards and cut them up into a mosaic. Mixed media was encouraged — there were no rules about what “art” was supposed to look like. Some people made something personal. Some people made something weird. Some people made something genuinely beautiful and didn’t believe it.
Take your art home with you — and if we really liked it, we asked to keep it for the art wall.
Fourteen people showed up. Everyone left with paint on their hands and something they made that didn’t exist three hours earlier.
The Junto lost its way after COVID hit. Five years of silence. But it came back — and it came back loud.
We opened Claude Code on the projector and built things live. From scratch. In front of everyone. Three apps got built in one night — a dinosaur game, a Latin vocabulary trainer, and a family chore tracker.
See what we built →