Why we started Eleven Dunbar
The modern third space for immersive, community experiences
Why We Started Eleven Dunbar
My last chapter didn’t unfold the way I imagined. But I’m long past trying to predict how life should go.
With everything in this life, there is a beginning, a middle, and an end. What matters is to keep moving forward with an unbending belief in life, and a sense of joy in being here at all.
This past phase came with its share of wins, losses, reinvention, laughter, play, long walks, deep talks, and a lot of honest reflection. And one of the biggest learnings was simple:
The magic doesn’t start with vision decks, titles, or ambitious goals. It starts with people.
If I look back at the peak moments of the last 15+ years, they were always the same: community, storytelling, imagination, and that strange kind of shared aliveness that happens when people feel safe enough to be real and bond through play and laughter.
That is what I care about. And that is what I want to build around.
Out of that realization, and through reconnecting with my close friend and now co-founder Justin Davis, something new emerged: Eleven Dunbar.
But to explain what it is, I first have to explain why.
Why Eleven Dunbar
Eleven Dunbar feels like an accumulation of my past 15+ years.
At one point, I went deep into game design. That question led me into years of exploring play, learning, and human systems. I studied game design, not because I wanted to make games forever, but because I wanted to understand something deeper: what makes people willingly engage, learn, and grow for hours? What creates momentum, belonging, and the desire to come back?
Out of that exploration, I created a creative storytelling card game that used play to unlock creativity and imagination in educational and real-world settings. It was an attempt to build containers where playful learning felt natural again.
Later, my focus moved toward the emotional layer. I worked on ways to help people understand and navigate their inner world, so they could build deeper relationships with themselves and others, and move through life with greater clarity and confidence. Different domain, same root: humans want connection, and they want tools and spaces that help them become more whole.
When I connect those dots now, it feels obvious.
Around the same time, Justin had been walking his own path through technology, creativity, and years of building in fast-moving environments. We both reached a similar realization from different directions: achievement without depth feels empty, and creation without connection doesn’t nourish. When we reconnected, it felt less like starting something new, and more like recognizing that our paths had been circling the same questions all along.
People don’t just want information. They want experiences that change them.
They don’t just want productivity. They want meaning.
They don’t just want “connection.” They want belonging.
And one of the fastest paths into belonging is play.
Not play as entertainment.
Play as a vehicle for bonding, learning, and expression.
Play as a way to lower the mask.
Play as a way to reconnect to curiosity, creativity, and each other.
Eleven Dunbar is what happens when everything I’ve learned about play, learning, emotion, and community finally converges into one container.
What the name means
The name Eleven Dunbar brings together three intentions.
First, the Dunbar number (150). It’s the idea that humans can only maintain a limited number of meaningful relationships. Not thousands. Not “followers.” Real relationships. People you know, trust, and grow with. We wanted the name to carry this sense of human scale and intentional community.
Second, we wanted it to sound like a place. Not a product. Not a platform. A destination. Like a hidden address. A door you step through into a different kind of atmosphere. Something that feels almost physical, even though it is built around people, not walls, like a gateway into another layer of experience. A bit like the moment in Harry Potter when you discover Platform 9¾ and realize there’s an entire world existing just beyond what you normally see.
A place of magic, wonder, curiosity, and connection. Something that feels familiar, and that you leave more nourished than when you entered.
Third, eleven reflects the unique energy of the two founders. When we looked into the numerology of Justin Davis and Gerhard Molin, both names resolve to the master number 11. In many spiritual traditions, 11 represents intuition, awakening, and higher awareness. In physics, M-theory speaks of an eleventh dimension, a layer of reality beyond the immediately visible.
For us, eleven points to that extra dimension of human experience. The part of life that isn’t purely transactional or practical, but meaningful, relational, and human. The layer where identity softens, people become real, and something larger can form.
Put together, Eleven Dunbar becomes a place you go to experience community at a human scale, with depth. A kind of gateway, not to escape the world, but to enter it more fully.
And that matters, because this is not an app. It is not an AI company.
It is a membership-based community built intentionally at a human scale, where relationships can actually deepen.
Why Now
We are living in a strange moment.
We are more connected than ever, yet many people feel more alone than before. We have tools, platforms, and networks, but often lack belonging, shared purpose, and real presence.
At the same time, artificial intelligence is rapidly changing how we work, create, and build. Many traditional skills are being automated. Specialization alone is no longer enough.
As AI expands, the uniquely human parts of life become more important, not less:
The ability to form deep relationships
Emotional maturity
Creativity and taste
The capacity to hold nuance
The ability to collaborate across differences
Yet these are exactly the areas where many people feel underdeveloped or unsupported.
We also lost something over the last few decades: the third space. Places outside of work and home where people gather regularly, build trust, and grow together.
Eleven Dunbar exists in response to this moment.
Not as nostalgia, or as escape. But as a conscious attempt to rebuild human-scale community in the age of AI.
What Eleven Dunbar Actually Looks Like
Eleven Dunbar is the modern third space for immersive, community experiences.
It is intentionally limited to 150 members, the Dunbar number, the scale at which trust, coherence, and meaningful human connection naturally emerge.
Not a mass network. A living ecosystem.
A space where creative expression meets authenticity, and where relationships deepen into long-term transformation.
As a member of Eleven Dunbar you will gain access to three spaces: The Relation Space, The Eleventh Space, and The Integration Space.
The Relational Space - How we connect
Small, hand-selected circles of high-agency humans who challenge, support, and expand one another.
This is where real relationships form, and where conversations go beyond updates and into what actually matters.
Ideas, collaborations, and opportunities don’t need to be forced. They emerge naturally when trust exists.
Over time, these circles become your people.
The Eleventh Space - How we play
Connection alone isn’t enough. People bond through shared experience.
This is our playground.
A space to experiment, create, and explore, often using AI as a tool for expression, not productivity. We call them digital crayons.
People build small things, stories, games, ideas, experiments, not because they must, but because they can.
Play lowers defenses. Curiosity returns. Creativity unlocks parts of us that ambition alone cannot reach.
The Integration Space - How we transform
This is where growth happens as an interdependent journey through sharing, reflection, support, and presence.
This is where insight turns into action. Where we support each other through transitions, challenges, habits, and change.
We practice interdependence, not independence, not codependence, but the ability to grow as individuals while being supported by a network.
We share what actually works: rituals, habits, practices, and tools that help us live what we learn.
Play, AI, and Digital Crayons
One thing we discovered during this process is how healing it is to create without a practical goal. To laugh. To be silly. To allow the inner child to reappear and be expressed.
To build something silly, without the pressure of outcome. To follow curiosity. To explore an idea just because it feels alive.
AI makes this more accessible than ever. You no longer need ten years of coding, filmmaking, or design to express an idea. But tools alone are not enough. People need environments where experimentation is safe and encouraged.
That is part of what Eleven Dunbar offers: a playground for adults. A place where creativity is not performance, but expression.
The Kind of People Who Thrive Here
We believe a new kind of human skillset is becoming essential.
Not the narrow specialist, but the adaptive generalist. Someone who:
Has breadth across domains
Develops depth in at least one human dimension
Cultivates taste
Has agency
Can connect dots others don’t see
These people can integrate technology, creativity, relationships, and meaning. They can move across roles, learn continuously, and collaborate effectively.
We call this archetype the adaptive generalist.
Eleven Dunbar is designed as an environment where adaptive generalists can find each other and grow together.
If you want to hear the energy behind this, the story, the laughter, the why, Justin and I talk about Eleven Dunbar in depth in Episode #83 of the podcast. Listen here.
An Invitation
This is an invitation to Founding Members.
We’re looking for the engineer who secretly writes poetry. The CEO who wants to learn how to play again. The artist who is curious about how AI can expand their soul’s expression.
You can apply here: elevendunbar.com
Over the next weeks, we’ll share more about our journey and about Eleven Dunbar.
If something in this resonates, reach out. I’d love to hear your story, how you bring play into your life, or simply have a chat.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Love,
Gerhard
ps. In episode #83, Justin and I talk about Eleven Dunbar in depth
Thanks for reading!
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AI has been used to refine structure, grammar, and flow, but every idea, sentence, and story originates from human experience and intuition.