How PEERS grew into "location 2.5"

To build an office where people do AI together, we first needed somewhere to actually sit together.

To explain that, we have to go back a little.

PEERS began at our first location by Exit 1 of Seongsu Station. We ran it for two years, found our footing, and opened a second location where we are now. The first location eventually closed — a partnership issue and gentrification arrived at the same time.

Luckily, nobody scattered. Almost everyone from the first location moved over to the second. The space disappeared; the people stayed.

As that group kept eating lunch together and AI came up more and more, the space started to feel tight.

A desk that's good for focusing alone is not quite the same as a desk where you can glance at your neighbor's screen and ask, "wait, how did you do that?" Running a seminar or a workshop meant clearing out desks people were already using, and the place where we ate kept colliding with the place where we worked.

So we decided to make the space bigger.

As it happened, a unit on the same floor of the same building opened up. It used to be a training studio for semi-permanent eyebrow makeup, and the owner had to clear it out quickly for personal reasons. We took it over and expanded.

PEERS now has this floor to itself. Roughly 330 square metres including the rooftop. We opened it in early May.

It wasn't a new branch and it wasn't a move — we simply widened the place we were already in. So we casually call it location 2.5.

What we want to do with the extra room is simple. Sit at the same table and run our own work through AI, put a screen up and show each other what happened, clear a whole day to finish one thing — and, in between, eat together the way we always have.

For "doing AI together" to be a daily routine instead of a slogan, there first had to be somewhere to sit together. Now there is.

In the next note, the first experiment we ran in that room: the seminars.

From PEERS