The world our parents grew up in was nothing like ours. They didn’t know when their crush from 8th grade got a promotion. Or when their coworker had a few too many drinks last weekend. All they knew was the reality that played out before them.

While exes were forgotten about and old communities were lost, a select few relationships really meant something. Forged through daily communication and unspoken rituals, most of society boasted connections stronger than what most of us have ever known.

Our world is much different. We know when that weird hookup from 8 years ago has a baby. Or when someone who’s decided to classify us as a “close friend” really likes their meal before they even had the chance to eat it. We embraced the internet seemingly overnight, barely able to regulate it fast enough before it divided us just as quickly as it “brought us together”. And now, just as we’re getting our bearings (becoming more conscious of screen time, deleting and redownloading Instagram, trying to figure out who our real “friends” are), we have unearthed a new unbounded technology with an even greater potential impact on the world: AI.

These technologies (the internet and AI) are fascinating because of how powerful they are. We can find people just like us or information we need in a matter of seconds. And while that sounds great in theory, the free market has wrongfully rewarded too many people who’ve given us their speeches about “making the world a better place” while making society more jealous, self-conscious, and vain.

Posh exists to use the cutting edge technologies of our time in the way they were intended: to connect society more meaningfully than ever before, IRL.

The internet empowered creators: free-thinkers who make digital content that other people want to consume - music, photos, videos, and even software. If you’re good at making digital content, you can make a lot of money on the internet. But the idea of content has been limited to the digital world for too long.

Posh empowers connectors: visionaries who have the uncanny ability to bring people together in the physical world around a shared idea. some day-to-day examples include:

Connectors create a different kind of content: social experiences. Social experiences are shared moments of any kind between 2 or more people: a coffee in the park, a dinner party, a run club, a music festival. Even the simplest social experiences build tighter bonds between attendees than any zoom call or comment section ever could.

It’s no secret that connectors are the people who make life worth living. They turn strangers into marriages. They turn otherwise forgotten moments into lifelong memories. But in all of our hysteria to “make the world a better place”, the technology industry has seemingly forgotten about these societal totems. Even as of this writing, as AI enhancements have been built for seemingly every B2B use case known to man, the technology that connectors use to bring their communities together has evolved at the same rate as the paper clip.

In order for connectors to be financially incentivized enough to keep creating the IRL content our society needs so desperately, we have worked tirelessly to provide them with technology that empowers them to start, scale, and monetize their abilities sustainably. While tooling to manage day-to-day payments, marketing, and operations was a necessary beginning, we now aspire to provide connectors with exponentially more value: distribution.

As we’ve continued to expand our toolkit to empower more and more connectors to flourish, we have gradually brought the 2nd chapter of our vision to life: becoming the go-to marketplace for social experiences.

As social commerce platforms like Whatnot and TikTok Shop explode, experiences remain the most social product category there is, but are still explored through archaic categorical filters. As Posh enables more connectors to create sustainable businesses built around bringing people together, we will utilize the early social graphs of these businesses to recommend experiences to consumers based on who they know.

This is the ultimate climax of our vision: a world where anyone can monetize the ability to bring people together, birthing countless new IRL communities that we can then can surface to the most relevant consumers. As redundant as it is to say, loneliness is a real problem. Allowing those who are solving it day-to-day to build sustainable income doing so is the only feasible solution.

Posh has been around for about 6 years now. Though we’ve helped connectors sell over 25 million tickets and generate over $300m in revenue, it feels like we’ve only just turned to page 2 of a dense novel. We recently raised our Series B to build teams around answering 3 existential questions:

Answering even 1 of these questions with a “yes” will make Posh a category-defining company. Answering all 3 will make our impact generational. It won’t be easy, but it is extremely fun work.

We wake up every day trying to make the answer “yes” to all 3. Sometimes, it feels like a strong “maybe”, other days we ask ourselves if we’ve even made a difference yet. But that’s when you know you’re working on worthwhile problems. If you want to contribute to this future, you can become a connector, find an experience, or join the team.

Time to bring the world back together, one experience at a time.