Operators first, builders second.
We've spent the last decade building software for people who bring others together — first inside the venues and events, then for them. Pencil is what we built when we realized this category needed both.
A small team of six builders.
Half have run events, restaurants, or fitness studios. Half have shipped at scale. Most have done both.
Mira Okafor
Former Director of Operations at Meridian Events (4,200 events/year). Before that, three years building logistics software for Live Nation. Studied hospitality management at Cornell.
Jonas Reyes
Founding engineer at two YC companies; one acquired. Spent his weekends running a 600-person climbing club for six years and built half its software himself.
Anushka Mukherjee
Eight years at Anthropic and Hugging Face on applied teams. Former GM at a boutique fitness brand with 12 studios — the original inspiration for Circuit.
Cal Park
Designed product at Notion and Linear. Now spends most days mapping guest flows and event run-of-shows on grid paper for whichever venture needs them.
Naledi van der Vorst
PhD on coordination in high-pressure service environments. Joined to make sure the systems we ship don't quietly break the things that make these experiences worth having.
Theo Nakamura
Ran field operations at Basecamp Outdoor School for four years. Now keeps the studio running and makes sure every engagement has a clean handoff.
An honest origin story.
this is the version we tell at dinner.
Mira and Jonas met backstage at a conference in 2022. She was running ops for a 3,000-person event. He was the volunteer who'd just spent his weekend rebuilding the speaker scheduling system because the existing one crashed under load.
For two years afterward, they did the consulting version of this work — building one-off systems for event producers, restaurants, fitness brands. Watching the same problems recur, watching the same generic SaaS tools fail in the same ways. They tried just being a build shop. It was good work but it didn't compound. They tried just starting a single venture. It worked, but they kept seeing problems that needed their own products and didn't fit inside the first one.
Pencil is the version that holds both at once: a build practice that earns us the right to know what to build, and a venture portfolio that turns those lessons into companies. Same team, same thesis, same notebooks.
If the framing sounds familiar, it should. Studios have done it before. We just haven't seen one do it for this category, and we think this category is the one.
People who've been operators too.
Studio-level checks from a small group. We picked them for the work they've done in the category, not the size of their fund.
In our corner.
People who've actually run the kinds of businesses we're building for. They pick up the phone.
Daniela Aguirre
Twenty years producing large-scale events across three continents. Tells us when our designs treat logistics as overhead instead of the product itself.
Marcus Bell
Opened 14 restaurants and helped define modern hospitality. Our reality check on what AI can and absolutely should not touch in guest-facing systems.
Sasha Lin
We'll name her when she lets us. Built the member experience design system underneath the largest boutique fitness brand in north america. Sees flaws in our flows we can't.
Dr. Yusuf Khan
Our north star on evaluation, model selection, and the gap between 'the demo worked' and 'this should ship to a venue running 400 events a year.'
Priya Venkat
Scaled a tour operator from 12 guides to 200 across four continents. Knows where coordination breaks down in experience businesses and why the obvious solutions don't work.
Henry Ohaeri
Has spent a decade documenting how in-person experiences are evolving. Pushes back when our narrative gets too clean or too tech-centric.
Pick the right pencil.
Brooklyn HQ · remote-friendly · in-person Wednesdays. We mostly meet at our clients' venues. The good ideas come from there anyway.