Experiences · Universities · Companies · Incubators · Coffee shops

No more boring lectures and endless slides.

Play based community experiences for founders and innovators. Sessions that get a room building, drumming, arguing and talking — with their hands and their voices, not from a chair. In a lecture hall, an incubator, an office, or a coffee shop on a random Saturday.

Five formatsAny room, any group size
Why this exists

The people in the room are the point. Most events seat them and talk at them.

Some of it looks like a workshop. Some of it looks like a room full of adults playing. All of it is designed to do the thing a kickoff, an orientation or an away day is supposed to do and usually doesn't: turn random strangers into a genuine community that sticks.

Every session runs on its own. Together they form the OpenSoch Experience, a four hour arc that scales from a student society to a company offsite.

A room of founders and innovators building with LEGO at an OpenSoch session
Who we run them for

Anywhere people are expected to sit still and be innovative.

Schools & universities

Orientations, entrepreneurship courses, student societies and campus incubators — where most people are meeting their first collaborator.

Incubators & accelerators

Cohort kickoffs, demo days and the weeks in between, where a batch either becomes a cohort or stays a list of names.

Companies

Innovation teams, offsites and away days for people who have sat through the workshop-with-sticky-notes version already.

Coffee shops

Our own open community sessions — no programme, no badge required. Anyone building something can show up.

The four hour arc
Open Circles starts it. Open Coaching closes it. The middle is yours to pick.
Opens
Open Circles
Pick
Play-Based Immersion
Pick
Drum Circles
Pick
The Deep Dive
Closes
Open Coaching

Duration per module varies with group size, venue and the nature of the event — a ninety minute classroom version and a full day exist too.

The Full OpenSoch Experience

Five formats. One room in motion.

01

Open Circles

Nobody sits down.

Open Circles session
What usually happens

You arrive alone, take a seat, and watch the hall fill up. You listen to talks and panels from people further along than you. You haven't spoken to anyone. Then someone announces it's time to network.

What we do

The OpenSoch team meets you at the door and you don't get a chair. You stand in a circle with everyone else who walked in. As it fills, we run rapid-fire questions — short, specific, impossible to hide behind. Everyone speaks in the first five minutes.

By the time the session starts, you've already met the room.

02 Flagship

Play-Based Immersion

Same eight pieces. Sixty seconds. Go.

The one people describe to other people afterwards.

Everyone gets an identical set of eight LEGO bricks and one minute to build a butterfly. That's the whole first instruction. It works because it's absurd, because nobody can overthink it in sixty seconds, and because it reminds a room of adults that they used to be good at this.

Three people run it. A host opens, closes and moderates. A play expert facilitates the sequence. A coach connects each stage back to the work — a startup, a course project, a product team — in one or two lines, landing while the thing is still in your hands.

The OpenSoch Cycle
01
Banao

Same eight pieces. Build a butterfly. Sixty seconds.

02
Dekho

Stand up. Walk the room. You arrived with one idea and you leave with twenty-five.

03
Badlo

Your butterfly loses its wings. Here's more LEGO. Get it where it was going.

04
Bolo

Present your solution to the room. Ten seconds.

Badlo is the long one, and the one everybody recognises from their own work. Bolo is ten seconds because ten seconds is survivable — most people have never pitched to a room of strangers, and this is the version where the stakes are a plastic butterfly.

03

Drum Circles & Live Music

One community, one beat, no rehearsal.

Drum Circles & Live Music

Everyone gets a drum. We guide the room into communal drumming — the oldest group technology there is, and one nobody can fake their way through.

Staying on beat together requires trusting people you met an hour ago. People who arrived guarded stop being guarded, because you cannot hold a rhythm and hold yourself back at the same time. When it works, the room finds a flow state most people in it have never experienced.

We also arrange live music and original performances for events, festivals and campus nights.

04

The Deep Dive

Advice you leave having already applied.

Most sessions hand out good thinking that never gets used. This one doesn't let you leave with it unopened.

We take one strong idea — a pricing framework, a model for improvising under pressure — and everyone runs their own venture, project or team through it in the room, with one of our experts facilitating. You rework something real while you're sitting there.

Sources rotate. The format remains the same and the learning intensifies.

05

Open Coaching

The part where nobody wants to leave.

Open Coaching session

The closing hour of the full OpenSoch Experience. Our coaches are in the room and available one to one — no booking, no queue system, just people you can walk up to.

It's also the first unstructured time of the day, which is the point. By this stage the room has built together, drummed together and been heard by each other. Now they get to talk.

The conversations that start here are the ones that carry.

The whole point

Strangers in,
community out.

Booking

Plan an Experience

Available individually, or bundled as the full four hour OpenSoch Experience.

We work with schools, universities and their incubators, accelerators, and companies — and we host our own open sessions in coffee shops for anyone building something. Tell us the room and we'll tell you what fits it.

Also from OpenSoch
Coaching partnerships. Programme & curriculum design and embedded coaching for universities, incubators and companies. See Coaching →
Received
We'll be in touch within two working days.

Meanwhile: think about what you want the room to be like at the end of the day.

We'll reply with options and what each module needs from your space.