Memphis Orion | 7/17/26

I had a successful career building mechanical systems and technology companies. Like many entrepreneurs, I spent decades solving difficult problems, building organizations, and creating value. By my early fifties, I had achieved the kind of financial independence I once imagined would be the finish line.

So I retired.

I spent the next chapter traveling the world. I visited remarkable places, immersed myself in different cultures, and experienced the privilege of having nowhere I needed to be. It was exactly what I had worked toward.

It surprised me how deeply unfulfilling it felt.

Instead of thinking about where I wanted to travel next I kept thinking about what world I wanted to live in.

How can we live beside one another and be so disconnected? What do we believe in? How are we part of something bigger than ourselves? What human connections bring fulfillment? These are the conversations I found myself having repeatedly on my travels. I became obsessed with the questions.

When I eventually returned home to Denver, I saw my home city differently. I noticed how quickly we move. How we carry our identities, our demands, our devices, and our anxieties as we attempt to stay within shrinking margins of success. I realized how much of my own life had become about maintaining myself instead of simply being myself.

I had underestimated how deeply this affected me. I remember pausing in the grocery store and just standing in the buffet area. I stopped shopping and started observing. No one made eye contact. No smiles. No recognition. I was surrounded by people and felt invisible. Somewhere along the way we’ve become experts at presenting and tending to ourselves and let go of the ‘we’ found in spaces together. We’ve become incredibly connected and increasingly alone

I don’t believe cultures are built primarily by governments or by companies. I believe they’re built from thousands of ordinary interactions every day. The little gestures passing on the sidewalk. Holding a door. The conversations we have with people we don’t know. Little moments of courtesy and regard. The moments when we remember that, before we are customers, voters, executives, or professionals, we are simply human beings sharing a place together. We are dependent on and support each other in hundreds of ways. The health of this fabric is way more important than we acknowledge. We are in this together.

While traveling, I found myself continually drawn to bathhouses. While the thermal experience is so nourishing, more is happening. Across centuries they have served as places of restoration, conversation, reflection, celebration, healing, and civic life. They have been places where people paused long enough to nourish their bodies, and to participate in this cultural fabric. I stumbled into my first bathhouse and have returned again and again.

I’ve now visited bathhouses in more than forty countries. Every culture expresses them differently, yet they all share a remarkable common thread, they are a direct experience of the cultural fabric. I became fascinated by the relationship between culture and these spaces. Every culture shapes its bathhouses. And bathhouses quietly shape the culture in return.

I was in Denver, feeling alone, when my partner, Jon, asked a question that changed my life.

“What if we built one?”

In that instant, years of questioning suddenly came into focus. Because I realized we had an opportunity to build something that can nourish our guests on so many levels.

We can create a place designed around the idea: that when people put down their phones, slow their pace, and share physical space without the usual markers of status or success or achieving, something important happens.

We can access our birthright of being a human, together. We can remember that we, in our imperfection, belong and are supported in the collective.

Yes, we’re building a place that helps people return to their lives, physically restored, with quieter minds, more open hearted and more resourced.

Yes, we’re building a place where people slow down together. Recover together. Laugh with strangers. Share silence. Leave carrying a little more optimism than when we arrived.

Yes, these opportunities matter because humans are healthiest when they have places where they belong.

In addition, I believe we desperately need spaces that serve us being human together. The saunas, pools, steam rooms, are an ideal medium to allow something deeper to come forward. In the conditions of American life today, a place that helps us remember that making room for one another may be one of the most important things we can do. The future will ask extraordinary things of us. Whether the challenges are technological, environmental or cultural, I believe our ability to face them depends less on our intelligence than our capacity to trust one another and work together as we face what comes next. I don’t see us as a bathhouse. I see us as a civic health company whose medium is thermal bathing.

Coba is designed as a meaningful business that generates exceptional financial returns for our investors.We believe those returns are strengthened by creating something that contributes lasting value to the city. When a business contributes to the emotional life of a city, it earns trust, affection, and the privilege of being passed from one generation to the next. Businesses become institutions as they weave themselves into the identity of the places they serve. Every city has places where people spend money. Far fewer have places that become part of a city’s shared story. Our ambition is for Coba to become one of those places.

Coba is already becoming a meaningful business and is intended to be an enduring institution.

I believe places like this are strongest when they’re infused with the lives of the people who build them. I have committed so much of myself to this project, including enough of my own savings that, if we fail, I will need to return to work. This is my alignment to Coba.

This is the company we are building.

This is why I have devoted my life to Coba.

I hope you’ll help us build it.

Memphis