About

At the present moment, The Company is a space in LoHi where a growing group of friends and regulars are frequently running into each other, some working from here during the day, and many of us presenting at, attending, and lingering at a steady rhythm of events.

We’re a mix of designers, developers, painters, explainers, and storytellers of many different sorts, all interested in creativity as a way to connect.

As a business, we are figuring out what we are. This is an experiment funded and run by three friends—Ivan, Livvy, and Norton—and continued because our members choose to support the space’s existence with time and money in (mostly) non-transactional ways.

We’re an aspiring third place—but not quite so public, and instead more focused on our members. We’re kind of a member club—but not so exclusive or cost-prohibitive. Legally, we are a for-profit LLC—not a non-profit or a co-op—a benevolent dictatorship where decisions are ultimately made by The Management. But we’re more compelled by ideas of cooperatives than by startups and scaling.

We’re inspired by the work of Priya Parker and Robert Putnam and Ray Oldenburg, by (some parts of some kinds of small, local) churches, by IndexNYC, by community centers, by public libraries, by the Shop at MATTER.

We’ve got a pretty good newsletter, find it hard to care about social media, and we’re writing and editing and building this website with the hopes of giving a better idea of what it’s like to be here. But it’s really all about the people. So if you want to learn more, the best way is really to show up to something.

Background

The Company was started by me (Ivan—usually the copywriter around here), my wife Livvy, and our dear friend Norton in June of 2024. It’s a scrappy passion project that we’re self-funding as a year-long, two part experiment:

Can this place feel the way we want it to (open, connective, creative, regular, supportive, cozy, generative)?

Can it be sustainable with a business model that is more akin to member-supported cultural institutions like museums and public radio stations (existing and accessible to more people because of the supporters, instead of accessible solely as a transaction)?

The first part has been going great since the beginning, and the flywheel keeps gaining momentum.

Thanks to a slowly growing group of people who are excited about what we’re doing here, the second part is approaching success. We’re feeling good about our chances, anyway.

More on what we’re doing here to follow, but this seems like a good time to introduce ourselves a little bit more, in case we haven’t met yet:

I’m a graphic designer at a tiny design studio I cofounded where I design brands and interfaces. In my free time I like making things and hosting events. Livvy is a creative coder for an agency that creates absurdly bespoke brand activations. In her free time she likes to code her own things and design rulesets. Norton is a freelance UI designer who spends a lot of his time using code as a tool for creating art and reading esoteric books on a wide range of creative topics.

All three of us enjoy making things in our free time, and getting people together who also like making things. Livvy and I have hosted structured events since we got married, and Norton has run Denver’s most popular creative coding meetup for the last few years.

Already having an interest in a shared creative workspace and third places in general, our events got to a point where we wanted a little more space, so we started thinking about our options and talking to friends. And then we had the great fortune of Livvy seeing a for-lease sign across the street from her office.

It’s important to know that our reason for starting The Company is a primarily self-serving reason. This is a space that we want to exist inside of. While third places, social clubs, and meetups are reentering the social milieu as valuable places for finding community (and are therefore things that can be turned into profitable businesses), we see this as a sort of subsistence project.

Our earliest members were friends, and our newest members have become friends. We have mostly grown by word of mouth. Friends recommending an event to friends, those friends doing the same.

Right now there are few enough of us that we either all know each other or can. It feels good at this size. We think there’s an inherent maximum size to a feeling like this, and we plan not to grow past it. We have no interest in scaling, or franchising, or ever achieving a point where we as Management have to sit outside of this community. While it would be fun to get to spend all of our time working on The Company (instead of all our free time), we never care to get The Company to a place where it needs to increase profits at the expense of the culture.

Another way to put this: while we want to be sustainable, our win condition involves becoming sustainable by following a specific rule set, which at this point takes the form of the following “visions”, which are centered around the areas of Community and Creativity.

Community

We want The Company to be:

• A place where people show up and can expect to see people they know, to varying degrees.

• A place where people return regularly.

• A place where people make interconnected friendships that transcend the place.

• A place where people think and care and do about the health of the community.

• A place that reflects the members.

Creativity

We want The Company to be:

• A place where creative work is made and shared.

• A place to learn or develop creative skills.

• A place to access and share creative tools and resources.

• A place to meet and be inspired by other creative people.

• A place where creative ideas are sparked, get better, and get done. (A cross-pollinating place.)

• A place that reflects the creative lives of its members.

With the above in mind, we are prioritizing certain actions over others, even if the others also have value. This is how it shakes out for us:

• We would rather delight people who care about us than attract people who don’t yet care about us.

• We would rather help deepen connections (and interconnections) than help people meet a lot of new people.

• We would rather lean toward existing networks or hyper local outreach than cast a wide geographic net.

• We would rather encourage return visits than have huge crowds.

• We would rather have member-run events than have stranger-run events.

• We would rather find members who are inclusive than find members who are reclusive.

• We would rather have a small, thriving, in-person community than a large, thriving, online community.

Some examples, using this framework:

• We prefer to only hang artwork made by members and friends.

• We prefer not to rent out our space for events that aren’t open to our members.

• We prefer not to host events that don’t align with our members’ interests.

• We will prioritize events hosted by members.

• We will reward people who read this entire thing with ice cream.

• We will not prioritize recording and posting “content” from our live events to social media.

• We prefer not to keep adding and renting out dedicated workstations at the expense of reserving space for events.

• We will not charge for day passes.

• We will not do paid social advertising.

• We will put tremendous amount of care and delight into documenting our weeks in a lengthy weekly newsletter that is often more insidery than might be good for marketing.

This is all still very much a work in progress, but if any of this resonates with you, we’d love to meet you! If all of this resonates with you then we’d really love to meet you. We’d probably enjoy each other’s company.

😘