Startups Betting on Getting You Off Your Phone

The AI sector continues to set funding records quarter after quarter, yet a growing number of founders are deliberately building in the opposite direction. Brynn Putnam, creator of Mirror, the smart fitness mirror that Lululemon acquired in 2020, has just closed a funding round for her new venture: Board, a startup whose core proposition is bringing people together around games and physical social experiences. No screens as the main attraction. No notifications. No feeds.

Meanwhile, so-called cyberdecks, retro-looking DIY computers designed for deliberately local use, have been going viral on social media for months. Their creators present them as machines that, paradoxically, invite you to disconnect: hardware you can touch, modify, and enjoy without requiring constant cloud service connectivity. TechCrunch covers both trends in an analysis published this June, suggesting this is not simply a passing backlash phenomenon.

More Than a Reaction Against AI

The difference between this trend and previous movements, such as the "AI-free" browsers that proliferated throughout 2025, is significant. Those projects defined themselves primarily by what they excluded; they were reactive proposals built on negation. What TechCrunch describes now is different: founders identifying a positive need, human connection, physical presence, deliberate friction, and designing products around it, regardless of whether using advanced technology is involved.

Board, for example, is not anti-tech on principle. Putnam has a long track record in connected hardware; she knows exactly what it is to build for the digital ecosystem. Her bet here is about product design: in-person games create types of social bonds that apps simply don't replicate well, and there's a real market for that.

Cyberdecks respond to similar logic, though more artisanal. They are mostly non-commercial personal projects circulating in communities like Reddit or Hackaday. What makes them interesting as a market signal is precisely their organic virality: nobody is financing them to spread.

Who This Approach Makes Sense For

This trend matters especially to three profiles:

• Founders and investors looking for less saturated spaces. Venture capital consensus still points toward AI infrastructure, agents, and automation. This leaves niches in consumption, particularly in social entertainment and physical hardware, relatively clear.
• Product designers working on digital experiences who need to understand why certain users actively seek friction. It's not irrationality; it's a legitimate preference for formats requiring presence.
• Teams building with Claude and other AI tools for consumer products. Understanding where AI doesn't add value, or where its absence is the value itself, is as useful as mastering use cases where it does help.

A Signal, Not a Trend

It would be easy to dismiss this as tech nostalgia or a marginal niche market. But the combination of institutional capital flowing into projects like Board and organic virality in maker communities around cyberdecks suggests something more structured: a segmentation of the consumer market where "screen-free" is becoming a coherent value proposition, not just a protest.

The volume of users willing to pay for that proposition remains uncertain. But that a founder with Putnam's track record is directing her next company in this direction is, at minimum, a signal worth following.

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EP Opinion: Money beginning to move toward deliberately disconnected experiences doesn't invalidate the value of digital tools, but it does require those building them to better justify why technology's presence improves, rather than simply complicates, what they're trying to do. It's a healthy pressure.