In this week’s episode of found, Dom and Becca are joined by former Bonobos CEO Andy Dunn to talk about his mission to reverse America’s loneliness epidemic through Pie, an app built to facilitate connections in the real world. In this conversation, they get into Dunn’s personal experience moving to a new city that inspired the app. The idea behind Pie is to get people to connect in-person by empowering users to facilitate events based on common interests; Dunn refers to these users as “IRL creators.”
“We need to stimulate a new gig economy,” Dunn said. “These are the people who are enterprising, who bring others together. And we actually launched a fund called the Pie Creator Fund to stimulate and to fund them and to back them into creating these IRL communities.”
The mission is to curb social isolation, especially as we’re still feeling the effects of the pandemic, with smaller social circles and working remotely. But the path to mass adoption of this kind of social network isn’t clear.
In this conversation, Dunn also discusses the lessons he brought from fundraising for Bonobos to Pie; his journey as a founder and how he protects his mental health; and building a consumer movement in the Midwest.
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