Something a lot of people find surprising about me as a founder is that I credit so much of what I know about building companies to my time spent waiting tables and running dining rooms.
I grew up in the hospitality industry, specifically restaurants, after being raised in a big Italian family where everything happened around a table. I’ve taken all of those learnings from over fifteen years of traditional service and applied them to building companies from zero.
Fabrik is the third.
What I kept finding, in both worlds, is that the most important variable, the thing that made restaurants work and companies stick, was whether people felt truly welcomed, like they belonged.
Over time, that feeling has become harder to find and easier to deprioritize. And now, in order to get it back, belonging is becoming a business. An actual economic category that we are calling “the Connection Economy.” And it’s one of the most important emerging markets of the next decade.
Over the last ten years, we made everything more efficient.
We worked from home so we didn’t waste time commuting. We ordered groceries or meal kits so we didn’t have to go to the store. We moved our social lives to screens so we could stay connected without going out.
And it worked. We got more efficient. But in doing that, we lost the small moments that used to create connection. The hallway conversation on the way to the bathroom or the barista you saw every morning on your way to work. The bartender at the bar downstairs who knew your name. The opportunity to have a serendipitous run-in with someone you haven’t seen in a while or maybe a stranger that you were meant to meet. In a lot of ways, we engineered the opportunity for magic out of our day-to-day lives.
And what is wild is we didn’t notice what those moments meant or were doing for us until they were gone.
I watched this happen in a very specific way.
Before we started Fabrik almost three years ago, I helped build Spacious, a network of drop-in workspaces inside empty restaurant dining rooms across New York City. The idea was simple - we took spaces that sat unused during the day and opened them for people who needed somewhere to work.
We were building for productivity, but in doing that, something else happened that we didn’t plan for.
People started meeting each other. They started building companies together. They became friends. They dated - some even got married! Because they were moving between locations across the city (a unique part of the Spacious model), there was serendipity in the idea of who you might run into every day.
Communities made Spacious their home. People who worked differently, who were building brand new ideas from their brains alone and looking for a room full of other people who saw the world the same way. They gravitated to these spaces.
We didn’t design for community but it was a by-product of what we built because we opened the doors to hospitable spaces and welcomed members in, to just be.
In 2019, the business was acquired. Shortly after, nearly all 50 locations closed. If you walk by the corner of 16th St. and Union Square now, seven years later, you will still see a giant yellow Spacious logo on the side of a building. If you look in the windows, you will see a moment totally frozen in time.
Just months after that, COVID hit and we were all quarantined in our houses and apartments.
The communities that had formed inside those spaces tried to survive without them and I hope that some did. What I know for sure is many came back smaller, some disappeared, some went virtual. All have a different feeling and most scattered.
It was a masterclass in what happens when you take away what’s holding community or relationships together. Proximity and Serendipity.
While this is true about Spacious, it is also true of an entire generation.
For most of human history, belonging was delivered by institutions that didn’t charge for it. Your neighborhood. Your church. Your office. These weren’t products. They were just where life happened naturally in close proximity to where you lived.
Today, most of them are gone or weakening. And as they do, people are losing the regular human contact that builds real relationships over time.
In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, declared loneliness a public health epidemic. When the government names something a crisis, it means the systems that were supposed to prevent it have failed.
And then AI became mainstream and sped everything up.
For the record and to get this out of the way, I think AI is extraordinary. But it can’t create belonging. It can’t replicate the moment you find a room full of people who just get it. The need to connect is what makes us human, and AI won’t touch that.
Automate everything else and human connection becomes the rare thing. Rare things get more valuable over time. Capital is starting to notice.
Most buildings have physical infrastructure. Most companies now invest in their employees’ physical and mental health. But social infrastructure? Social health? Kasley Killam, a Harvard-trained social scientist and leading expert in social health, calls it the next trillion-dollar wellness industry. The systems that help people build actual relationships? Nobody owns it.
Connection is unstructured, unmeasured, and unmonetized. That gap is a market.
The Connection Economy is what’s forming to fill it. It’s not one type of business. It’s a whole category spanning industries that have never really talked to each other. Soho House figured out one version. Hines, one of the largest real estate companies in the world, just started embedding belonging into their portfolio as a line item. Chief figured out another. All three are signals that something structural is shifting.
When the institutions that used to deliver belonging for free start to fail, the market steps in.
I’m a mom to a three-year-old and a six-week-old. I’ve been building Fabrik since my son was four months old, alongside my cofounder Gwen Wiscount and an incredible team, because I want my kids to live in a world where people are connected and still meet in real life.
The Connection Economy doesn’t have a playbook yet. The category is still being defined. Nobody agrees on who the players are or what this looks like at scale.
We’ve been working to change that at Fabrik. Belonging Capital is where I’m documenting what we’re learning while we continue to build.
This is the business of human connection. What happens when belonging earns its place in the economy? I’ll be here finding out.
Jaclyn Pascocello is the co-founder and CEO of Fabrik, building belonging infrastructure for the places where people live, work and gather. She is a mom of two and lives in New Jersey. Belonging Capital is where she documents what she's learning while she builds.
Thank you for the shout-out, Jaclyn! I'm looking forward to following along.
Thanks for this perspective on this shift. Belonging is a key human need. But my question is: do we really want it to be privatized like this? Pardon me if I'm misinterpreting, but I'd rather co-ops and other organizations move to create spaces that don't (necessarily) involve the exchange of capital, considering that a sense of belonging is something that is good for the community.