People ask, reasonably:
"Who's behind this, and why should I trust it?"
Fair question.
Here we are.
Elle Beecher Hogan
Founder
I'm the connection architect: designing the conditions where people can hit it off, then getting out of the way.
I spent seven years at Meta and a lifetime building popular communities before I had a word for it. (My first one was on Neopets in elementary school.)
I was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 for this work, which is lovely, but the metric I actually care about isn't quantifiable. It's the smile transformation: week one arrivals look cautious and a little scared. Week twenty regulars glow.
I created The Board Walks in 2022 because I needed it first, and I keep building the world around it — The Friday Debrief, Whimsy World, The Board — for everyone who ever stood in a full room and quietly wondered, "is this it?"
I share a letter from my inner world on Wednesdays.
Cameron Hogan
Head of Expansion
Cam is the reason the magic travels.
Elle built the first room, and after they met and fell in love in 2024, Cam built the infrastructure that lets it exist in over 15 cities without losing what makes it special.
As co-founder of The Board and Head of Expansion for the walks, he's the architect behind the global growth — the systems, the host relationship management, the careful machinery underneath the soulful part.
Cam is also the first man to host the OG Austin walk, breaking a long streak of women hosts, and he brings the same curiosity to a spreadsheet that he brings to a conversation about whether babies have souls. (Real walk topic. Same morning as a conversation about the economy. That's the range.)
Elle and Cam are partners — in the work and in life — which means the culture of this thing is born and raised from their many conversations about human nature.
Cam contemplates on Thursdays.
Why the rules exist
The no-phones, no-pitching, no-dating, be-curious, don't-trauma-dump structure isn't bureaucracy.
It's the fence around the garden.
Every rule exists because we watched what happened without it. (Seriously. Elle experimented with the walk's format like a mad scientist for the first year.)
The fence is what lets people relax enough to be real.
We're trying to build true intimacy locally, scale it globally, and then protect it well enough that it can grow without going hollow. This means that we regularly give social feedback and respectfully ask misaligned people not to return to our spaces; we are well known for our unique style of community management, and we've helped multiple organizations learn and implement it.
Our willingness to have crucial conversations is why dozens of walk regulars around the world have told us:
"All the communities I've been in eventually went to sh*t... except this one."
We've been tending to this garden every week since 2022. That's the job we're best at. We take it seriously.
And we have a lot of fun doing it.
The world, in one glance:
The Board Walks are where it happens.
The Friday Debrief is where we tell you what happened.
Whimsy World is our media home for great conversations.
The Board is the private room.
And underneath all of it is one idea:
The right environment changes who you get to be.
