Ben Borton

And, you know, the reason for that was you have relatively high rents in New York City of relatively high labor costs.

So the possibility of running a profitable ping pong club without food and booze was very little.

at that point.

So we looked at that cost stack and said, hey, if we could do something about the labor piece, insert technology, then there might be a third way to do this.

So that was the idea.

Could you take out that front desk type labor, run without kind of on-site labor all the time?

If you could do that, you could extend your hours to 24-7, so you're increasing capacity.

At the same time, you're reducing kind of your labor overhead.

So you're working on kind of both sides of the math equation.

And if you could do that, then you could do smaller format clubs.

So that was the vision.

Could you build a network of autonomous table tennis clubs spread out around New York?

Wherever you are in New York, you should never be too far away from a ping pong.

Lots of people grew up playing the game.

Nobody can afford to have a ping pong table in their apartment.

But would it be great if it was across the street and it was available on demand?

And we put some cool technology in there to elevate the experience.

So we built some community around it.

So that was that was the vision.

Got started in February of 2020.