When Jamie Snedden moved to San Francisco from London in late 2021, it occurred to him that he didn’t actually know how to make friends. In college, an abundance of common areas and extracurricular clubs had made it easy to meet new people. Now, working remotely for a startup, he barely left the house. He considered roving between coffee shops, but identifying potential pals there seemed as random as shooting darts. “If you don’t go to the office every day,” he said, “the world isn’t giving you many opportunities.”

So Snedden decided to build his own thing. In early 2022, he opened Groundfloor, a startup that’s part co-working space, part friendship factory. The flagship location sits on a gentrified block of San Francisco’s Mission District beside an Everlane store and a high-end yoga studio. Before the pandemic, it had been a daycare center. Now it serves more or less the same role for lonely millennials.