Grit

She Sold Her Startup for $500 Million, Here’s Her Next Idea

November 24, 2025

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  • Brynn Putnam's ventures, including Mirror and her current company Board, consistently originate from solving a deeply personal problem that 'pisses you off,' with her focus evolving from personal fitness identity to family connection. 
  • Building hardware/software combinations like Mirror requires disciplined focus on essential customer experience, often necessitating non-technical founders to prioritize experience over engineering complexity. 
  • The transition from a highly successful, founder-driven company like Mirror into a large corporation like Lululemon proved challenging due to fundamental differences in operating culture and meritocracy, leading to Putnam's eventual departure. 
  • Brynn Putnam's new venture, Board, leverages mature, affordable touchscreen technology with significant innovation focused on the software layer and proprietary real-time tracking models for its physical pieces. 
  • Putnam approaches her second major venture without the fear of being overshadowed by her previous success (Mirror), driven instead by personal standards and the desire to build excellent, enduring products that connect people. 
  • The most challenging aspect of developing Board was finding the fun in the games and ensuring the proprietary models could train every physical piece to operate with zero latency for seamless gameplay. 

Segments

Dancer’s Fitness Myths
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(00:00:00)
  • Key Takeaway: Post-retirement from professional dancing, Brynn Putnam needed to independently verify fitness truths versus long-held industry myths.
  • Summary: Dancers are taught myths about body mechanics, such as avoiding heavy weights to prevent bulkiness. Upon retiring, Putnam sought to determine factual exercise principles. Her subsequent fitness approach involved interval training and functional movements like squats and push-ups, inspired by professional athlete training methods.
Origin of Board Company
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(00:00:28)
  • Key Takeaway: The concept for Board arose from a personal struggle to find meaningful ways for Brynn Putnam’s family and relationships to connect.
  • Summary: Putnam’s new company, Board, addresses a family need for connection, aiming to merge the togetherness of board games with the interactivity of video games. This required two years of development to train a 24-inch touchscreen to recognize physical pieces in real time. The goal is to create an entirely new way to play together.
Introduction and Background
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(00:01:15)
  • Key Takeaway: Brynn Putnam is introduced as the founder of Board, previously founding Mirror which sold for $500 million, following a career with the New York City Ballet.
  • Summary: Joubin Mirzadegan welcomes Putnam to the podcast ‘Grit,’ which explores the challenges of building history-making companies. Putnam’s entrepreneurial journey spans from professional ballet to founding fitness studios, then Mirror, and now the face-to-face game console, Board.
New York vs. San Francisco Vibe
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(00:01:40)
  • Key Takeaway: Putnam identifies as a New Yorker, preferring the city’s overtly intense and fast-moving culture over the more laid-back intensity of the Bay Area.
  • Summary: Putnam notes the current high level of activity in San Francisco but affirms her identity as a New Yorker due to her preference for directness and intensity. Ironically, most of her family resides in the Bay Area, though she only visits quarterly.
Fitness Studio Origins
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(00:03:27)
  • Key Takeaway: Putnam’s first fitness studios were bootstrapped in a 500 sq ft church room, necessitating the invention of wall-mounted cable fitness equipment to maximize class size.
  • Summary: Before Mirror, Putnam ran HIIT studios, closing them in 2021 after a decade. The first studio required daily setup and teardown, leading her to design a wall-mounted cable tower using sailing lines and elastic bands. This small space accommodated 14 people per class, running seven or eight full classes daily.
Funding First Gym
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(00:06:48)
  • Key Takeaway: The initial fitness studio was funded entirely by $15,000 saved from Putnam’s professional ballet career earnings.
  • Summary: Putnam saved money from dancing since age seven, accumulating $15,000 by her twenties to open her first gym. The location was secured by negotiating a low rent with a Russian Orthodox church that needed the space back on Sundays.
Transitioning from Dancer to Entrepreneur
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(00:07:34)
  • Key Takeaway: Putnam chose to pursue fitness entrepreneurship over a ballet studio because she needed to re-educate herself on effective exercise after retiring from ballet.
  • Summary: Putnam sought training knowledge from those who worked with professional athletes, learning about interval training and functional strength. This self-re-education process formed the basis of her first business, as she adapted professional athlete training for the average person.
Mirror’s Creation and Sale
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(00:09:33)
  • Key Takeaway: Mirror was built by focusing on commodity hardware and developing proprietary, high-value software experiences, a strategy that de-risked hardware execution.
  • Summary: Putnam sold Mirror in early March 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically increased demand for at-home fitness. The product’s form factor—a full-length mirror—was an ‘aha moment’ derived from client feedback noting the value of mirrors for form correction in her studios.
Hardware Building Philosophy
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(00:12:26)
  • Key Takeaway: Being non-technical forced Putnam to be disciplined about doing less and focusing on the customer experience, contrasting with engineers who might overbuild hardware.
  • Summary: Putnam’s theory for successful hardware/software integration is to focus on commodity hardware and build IP in the software layer. For Mirror, she started with a single napkin outlining essential product goals and constantly hacked away non-essential features.
Ignoring Early Negative Feedback
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(00:19:21)
  • Key Takeaway: Putnam ignored overwhelmingly negative early customer feedback and mock-up reactions for Mirror, relying solely on her gut instinct that the concept was necessary.
  • Summary: Early customer insight studies and mock-ups for Mirror were poorly received, leading Putnam to stop seeking external validation. She felt confident enough in her personal need for the product to tune out the negative input and proceed based on instinct.
Confidence and Founder Identity
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(00:22:11)
  • Key Takeaway: Putnam’s confidence stems from a continuous cycle of setting high daily bars, achieving them, and then tackling harder challenges, a trait honed by her ballet training.
  • Summary: Her formative years as a professional dancer instilled the resilience, internal focus, and discipline necessary for founding companies, as ballet requires daily incremental improvement without traditional win/loss reinforcement. She feels most like herself when building solutions to problems.
Post-Sale Experience and Lululemon Integration
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(00:34:01)
  • Key Takeaway: The $500 million sale of Mirror was surreal, and Putnam immediately sought intellectual stimulation outside of fitness by buying NYU textbooks.
  • Summary: Putnam stayed at Lululemon for one year post-acquisition, finding the integration between a fast-growing tech company and a mature retail giant challenging, especially during the pandemic. She felt a sense of loss that her creation was not enduring after Lululemon sold the hardware business to Peloton.
Board’s Mission and Technology
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(00:47:48)
  • Key Takeaway: Board is a face-to-face game console that uses custom technology to recognize unique patterns on physical pieces in real time, enabling native digital/physical hybrid games.
  • Summary: Putnam developed Board because her large, blended family struggled to connect over existing games that favored one age group over another. The device uses a custom touch stack and embedded AI to read capacitive patterns on physical pieces, allowing for intuitive, scalable gameplay across different ages.
Board V1 Hardware Details
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(00:56:07)
  • Key Takeaway: Board V1 requires being plugged in, with embedded battery planned for a future version.
  • Summary: The physical pieces of Board are tracked by the device, which corresponds to purpose-built, original games created from imagination. The V1 requires being plugged in, though an embedded battery pack is considered for V2. The company leverages existing screen technology expertise to manufacture the hardware efficiently from the start.
Commodity Hardware and Innovation
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(00:57:12)
  • Key Takeaway: Board utilizes mature, affordable touchscreen technology, focusing innovation primarily at the software layer.
  • Summary: Brynn Putnam references the Nintendo phrase ‘wither technology with lateral thinking’ to describe their approach. The core device uses commodity, mature, and affordable touchscreen technology. Innovation is heavily concentrated at the software layer to maintain cost efficiency on the core device.
Connecting with Gaming Legends
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(00:57:36)
  • Key Takeaway: Kleiner Perkins partner Seth (who leads games) knows Bing from Zynga and World of Warcraft days.
  • Summary: The host mentions Bing, who leads games at Kleiner Perkins, is known to Seth next door. Bing previously sold his company to Blizzard and ran World of Warcraft. The host suggests Brynn should connect with Bing, noting he would be highly interested in Board.
Solving Hardest Technical Challenges
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(00:58:15)
  • Key Takeaway: The most difficult technical hurdle was training the proprietary models for real-time, zero-latency piece recognition during gameplay.
  • Summary: Finding the fun in the games was incredibly challenging, requiring extensive training hours and modeling work. The team built proprietary models to ensure every piece is instantly recognized by the system when moved or manipulated. This required experience from the HCI team, who previously worked on self-driving cars and scooters.
Connectivity and Development Timeline
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(00:59:40)
  • Key Takeaway: Board only connects to Wi-Fi for game downloads, operating entirely locally, a feat only possible recently due to hardware advancements.
  • Summary: The device only connects to Wi-Fi to download games; gameplay is entirely local, which was not possible in 2018 due to device constraints. Brynn met CTO Ryan through LinkedIn connections, and he brought his experienced team from a previously sold company. The company is currently lean, with about 15-20 in-house staff, partnering with external studios for game execution.
Second Success Mindset
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(01:01:11)
  • Key Takeaway: Putnam views her work as a personal competition against her own standards, detached from the shadow of her $500 million exit.
  • Summary: The host observes that successful first-time founders often struggle with the insecurity of whether their success was repeatable. Putnam counters this by framing her motivation as ‘me versus myself’ and focusing on building excellent things. She is not scared of failure, prioritizing execution that makes herself proud over worrying about victory conditions.
Pre-Launch Stress and Priorities
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(01:03:14)
  • Key Takeaway: Pre-launch stress involves cycling through a laundry list of business fires, requiring the difficult decision of knowing when to accept ‘good enough’ to launch.
  • Summary: Putnam manages stress by mentally cycling through urgent issues on her whiteboard, focusing time on what truly matters. She finds it hard in the final minutes to let certain tasks drop, needing to declare them ‘good enough’ to meet the launch deadline. Her personal success metric is already met, as her two-year-old asks to play Board every day.
Launch Strategy and Scaling
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(01:04:39)
  • Key Takeaway: The TechCrunch demo will feature a video presentation followed by live play units in the Expo Hall, with scaling capacity set for tens to hundreds of thousands of units before holiday shipping becomes a major challenge.
  • Summary: The launch demo involves showing the launch commercial on a big screen while Brynn speaks, followed by Q&A, encouraging attendees to play live units in the Expo Hall. The company is equipped to scale for the holiday season, though selling a million units would cause trouble. The biggest logistical challenge identified is getting products to customers in time for the holidays.
Product Aesthetics and Design Choices
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(01:06:30)
  • Key Takeaway: The beige exterior was chosen for neutrality, and the design emphasizes a flat, shared home decor aesthetic rather than a wall-mounted personal device.
  • Summary: The base frame color was debated, ultimately landing on beige to be as neutral as possible for various home environments. The exterior is magnetized, allowing for interchangeable frames with different colors or wood finishes to be sold later. The device was always intended to lay flat on a table as a shared device for gathering around.
Game Scalability and Developer Ecosystem
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(01:07:08)
  • Key Takeaway: Board games support 4-6 players, feature multiple modes (competitive/cooperative), and range from quick arcade hits to hour-long sessions.
  • Summary: Most games support 4 to 6 players and scale from one player up to many, offering both competitive and cooperative modes. The development cost for these initial 12 games was relatively low (tens of thousands to a few hundred thousand) because they avoid complex AAA graphics. The company is now focused on stoking a developer ecosystem using an SDK compatible with Unity or Unreal.
Funding and Series A Timing
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(01:08:53)
  • Key Takeaway: Board raised $15 million, and the Series A fundraising tour begins immediately following the public launch tomorrow.
  • Summary: The company has raised approximately $15 million in funding. Game development costs are kept efficient because they are not building AAA titles. The Series A tour is scheduled to commence as soon as the product goes live tomorrow.