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 i think a lot of what used to be a real third place has been replaced by the screen in our pocket.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 next Junto is being scheduled. Drop your email and you’ll be the first to hear when the date is set.
$20
Covers food, drinks, and the evening.
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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 →twelve people showed up with laptops.
almost four hours later, it still felt like we had barely started.
the idea was simple: bring something you’re working on, or something you’re trying to understand, and show the room how you’re using ai to build, automate, think, write, or make your work easier.
what actually happened was much better than that.
we had clinical oncology software on one screen. biomedical device manufacturing on another. someone walked through how ai is changing the boring-but-necessary business correspondence that eats half the day. someone else showed off claude skills for daily and weekly briefings. we got into ai note-taking for financial meetings, where accuracy isn’t some abstract concern — if the tool hears the wrong number, real money can move in the wrong direction.
there was a browser extension designed to force focus by nudging you toward the good parts of the internet and blocking the garbage. there was work on healthcare price transparency — taking something intentionally opaque and making it understandable to normal people. there was an education site that teaches in the style of chomsky and somehow reads like poetry.
and then there was a forecasting card game for kids that slowly turned into something bigger in the room. maybe a version for bars. maybe a way to get strangers talking again. maybe a small weapon against the weird, silent world we’ve built where everyone sits six feet apart staring into separate rectangles.
that was the best part of the night. not the tools. not the demos. the collisions.
someone would show a thing, and the room would start pulling on it. what if it did this? what if you sold it here? what if this became a game? what if this solved a real problem at work? what if this wasn’t just a toy?
we also got into the part nobody should skip: ai is wrong all the time. one person in the room spends his day cleaning up legal messes clients bring him after trusting ai too much. that turned into a real conversation about judgment, accountability, trust, and where these tools belong when the work actually matters.
that’s the point of this whole thing, i think.
not “ai is magic.”
not “ai will replace everyone.”
more like: this is here, it’s moving fast, and the people who learn how to use it with taste, skepticism, curiosity, and actual judgment are going to have a massive advantage.
twelve people. twelve laptops. almost four hours.
barely scratched the surface.