We built Pond because the best rooms had the worst software.
A note from the founders · New York
A few winters ago, one of us walked into a members' reception holding a glass of something cold and a phone full of nothing useful. Forty-seven people in the room. Three of them, somewhere, would have been worth the evening. The other forty-four were a pleasant blur of jackets and small talk.
We left early, as you do, and went to dinner at the bar around the corner. And we kept asking: why does the club, of all places, have software that behaves like LinkedIn at last call?
The club had everything. A century of belonging. A shared room. A reason for everyone in it to be there. The app, somehow, had drained all of that into a feed.
Pond is the answer to the question we kept asking that night. It is small, on purpose. It does three things and stops. It tells you who is in the building tonight, who is worth crossing the room for, and how to find them again in the morning.
We licensed it to the house, never to the member, because the member is already paying enough. We refused ads because the room is not a billboard. We refused a feed because the room is the feed.
The cream and the navy and the single line of gold are not styling. They're a promise: that nothing in here will shout at you, that the typography will treat you as a grown-up, and that when you put the phone back in your pocket you will not have lost twenty minutes to it.
The pond is the room. We are only the ripples.
If your club has been waiting for software that respects the membership it serves, we'd like to hear from you. We are taking a small number of houses through the year. Each one matters.
— The founders