After a $310M Exit, the Next Problem Was Making Friends

01 /The Concept

The founder behind today's startup has already built one successful company: Bonobos, a clothing brand he sold to Walmart in 2017 for $310M. Walmart later sold it for $75M six years later – but that's a different story.

So what does someone with a $310M exit behind them build next?

Pie is an app for making friends – real ones, in the physical world. Not followers, not message threads, but actual human relationships.

The product is deliberately simple. It's a feed of offline events, curated based on the user's interests and what people in their network are planning to attend.

Each event listing is expandable – details, description, and profiles of others planning to go, so you can decide whether it's worth showing up.

Notably, the app doesn't assume you should only go where your existing friends are going. As the App Store listing puts it: "find an interesting event and invite your friends… or don't, because going somewhere alone is brave and inspiring." The logic: you're far more likely to meet new people if you arrive without a ready-made social group already locked in.

The startup has even created a $1M fund to support people who want to organize compelling offline events. Applicants pitch their idea and, if selected, receive support to make it happen.

Pie currently operates only in Chicago, where the founder lives. It has 20,000 monthly active users, growing at 40% month-over-month.

The company just raised $11.5M in new funding, bringing its total to $24M. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams led the round with a $5.3M personal investment – the largest individual check he has written into someone else's startup.

02 /Why It Matters

The founder frames Pie's mission as fighting social isolation – and the diagnosis behind the product is worth understanding.

Before Pie, his family life was rich and present – but his professional and social life had nearly disappeared. That vacuum was being filled with screens: computers, television, phones. And that was passing for living.

The realization that followed was framed through ancient Greek philosophy. The Greeks described four types of love: *eros* (romantic love), *storge* (the bond between parents and children), *philia* (platonic love, friendship), and *agape* (the sense of belonging to a tribe or community). A life strong on *eros* and *storge* but starved of *philia* and *agape* is, as the founder put it, a half-empty cup.

This isn't just personal experience – it's a documented trend. As the US Surgeon General wrote in a 2023 report: "Over the last two decades, Americans have lost 24 hours of in-person social interaction per month. Of that, 14 hours of lost friendship time and 5 hours of lost family time. This level of social disconnection is equivalent, in its impact on health, to smoking 15 cigarettes a day."

The solution Pie proposes is to restore *philia* – the kind of friendship that sparks from unplanned, spontaneous encounters between people in the same physical space, where they feel free to be real with each other.

You can't plan spontaneous connection – but you can create the conditions for it. That's Pie's only job: make it easier to end up in a room with people you didn't know before, where something might click.

The vision: a future where finding interesting things to do with people you enjoy is as simple as ordering a ride through Uber.

The "Uber for friendship" framing is catchy – and the underlying model isn't entirely new. Two recent startups making similar bets have also raised fresh capital.

Howbout ([related review](/review/a-teper-vse-poshli-obratno)) raised $8M in September for a shared social calendar: users share their availability and plans with their network, making it easier to spontaneously cross paths in person.

POSH ([related review](/review/pojdjom-potusuemsja)) raised $22M in July for a two-sided platform: one app helps organizers create offline events; another helps people discover them and show up.

03 /Opportunities

The opportunity is building local social infrastructure – platforms that help people find each other offline.

The defining characteristic: these tools only work in dense local environments where people can actually meet. That's a constraint, but also a feature – it means you can build something that works deeply in a single city before expanding. The model can be copied and launched in any metropolitan area, which means there's room for many independent plays using similar blueprints.

The primary audience is Gen Z – the generation POSH's pitch deck called "the loneliest generation in human history," raised online and increasingly lacking the skills and habits for in-person connection.

But as one commenter on the Howbout post noted – this need isn't exclusive to Gen Z.

The problem is real, the urgency is growing, and the playbooks already exist to copy and iterate on. The main thing left is to build it where you live, if you feel the need yourself.