Portrait No. 001
Vivien Sin
CEO and Co-founder
The Third Place
I was an artist collaborating with chefs when I saw firsthand the labor of love brick-and-mortar owners pour into their restaurants and shops - and how steep the uphill battle for basic financial sustainability can be. At the same time, I saw consumers spending thousands on membership clubs, reflecting a society-wide hunger for connection. More than ever, we need third places that help us reconnect as humans - beyond political affiliations, industries, or cultural backgrounds. We need spaces that invite us to listen to the best version of the other side of the argument. That’s why I started The Third Place: a platform that gives local brick-and-mortars financial resilience, while democratizing access to communities where everyday people can find belonging and feel empowered to shape their neighborhoods. We are now in five countries helping hundreds of local businesses get new revenue streams that can cover their entire fixed cost, while enabling the creations of thousands of engaged communities where new friendships are forged.
In her words
“That’s why I started The Third Place: a platform that gives local brick-and-mortars financial resilience, while democratizing access to communities where everyday people can find belonging and feel empowered to shape their neighborhoods.”
Chapter I
The toughest challenges you've faced as a founder.
The toughest challenge is balancing between being a founder and being a human / fellow citizen. As a founder, you have to think about unit economics, focus for the company at its current stage, return-on-investment, and many other pragmatic things. As a human, you couldn't help but want to solve all of the problems you know you're capable of solving, these include items that are within the scope of the company, and ones that are outside of the scope of the company but are within your personal areas of expertise. Separately, as a multi-national citizen, there are issues at the local, national, or international level that I know I'm uniquely positioned to contribute to but have to hold myself back to focus on the company. I've also learnt over time that there's a very thin line between pattern recognition and over-generalization/ biases. At the application level, it’s far harder than most people imagine to design systemic solutions that harness efficiencies from patterns without slipping into harmful biases. This may not be the linear “challenge and conquest” story one might expect, but I believe the greatest challenge for any founder is internal: staying human while navigating mountains of data, trade-offs, and pragmatic pressures every day.
Chapter II
Your vision.
The world we are building is one where neighborhoods are vibrant with independent, financially-resilient local businesses, where individuals feel empowered to influence how spaces are being used in their neighborhoods, either by belonging to diverse communities built around local businesses, or by materializing their own brick-and-mortar concepts, and where brick-and-mortar are places of connections and belonging rather than mere transactions. This will happen in three phases: Phase 1. Offering local businesses a world-class tool to understand, nurture, and grow their community of regulars and to make financial sustainability a relative breeze. Phase 2. Enabling consumers to start, and partake in communities built around local businesses. Phase 3: Empowering any individual to conceive of and materialize their own brick-and-mortar concepts.
Chapter III
The impact you want to leave behind — for your industry, your community, and the women who come next.
I'd like to activate local businesses' potential to be not just places to get nourished physically, but also places of nourishment for the mind and the spirit, including making mainstream local businesses as places where new connections are forged. I want to enable 100x more creativity and diversity in how we use neighborhood spaces and a wider set of business models local business can thrive on. As for women, I'd like to see a flourishing of multi-generation wealth entities and family legacies with women at the center of its origin story.