Instead of bars and restaurants, saunas are the new place for investors and founders to socialise and raise money
3 min
When tens of thousands of software engineers, tech enthusiasts and salesmen descended on San Francisco for the annual Salesforce mega conference in September, startup founder Jari Salomaa had an idea: What if he rented out a sauna?
Salomaa was looking to pitch his startup Valo, which has built an artificial-intelligence tool that helps users on Salesforce’s platform. But an anti-alcohol movement that’s sweeping through the tech industry is disrupting work gatherings that revolve around drinking or eating. That’s leading Salomaa and others to try “social saunas,” where networking happens inside a steamy 200-degree box. In bathing suits.
The experience can take some getting used to. Bathrobes and bikinis can be distracting. It’s also very sweaty.
But investors and venture capitalists say it’s refreshing to have someplace other than a bar to gather and that business is getting done everywhere from a pop-up sauna in a Napa vineyard, to an 80-person sauna in New York.
Salomaa, 46, grew up in Finland where the sauna was part of everyday life and at his first job for Nokia in Helsinki, saunas were built inside the offices.
“There are more saunas than cars in Finland,” he said. “As many saunas as toilets.”
Still, he worried how Americans would react to hanging out in their bathing suits for a corporate event. “Scandinavians are more at ease with body images than the average American,” he said.
He thought about having one event for women and another for men, but the planning soon got complicated. In the end, Salomaa decided on a sort of social experiment: a coed gathering in San Francisco. He wound up with a wait list of 100 guests.
Salomaa imposed some sauna etiquette—bathing suits required and stay hydrated. And he started the event like any other investor pitch, by giving a PowerPoint presentation to an audience clad in bathrobes.
Attendees shared images of the event on social media, and soon Salomaa was fielding calls from friends in the tech industry, asking how they could do a similar event. He’s eager to help, but maintains some reservation about moving too much work inside the sauna.
“If it’s all talk about work, it kind of kills the vibe,” he said.
New social saunas have popped up in San Francisco, New York and Colorado this year.
They are built with stadium seating to fit more people—usually around 20 to 40 people—and conversation is often encouraged.
At Othership, a new sauna facility that opened in New York City’s Flatiron district in July, the sauna can fit up to 90 people. Lined with ambient lighting that can switch from warm red to neon pink, the sauna looks more like a nightclub than a place of tranquility.
Founder Robbie Bent, 40, said young tech founders make up a large part of his clientele. “They want to be healthier, meet like-minded people, and often don’t want to be out late,” he said.
The company hosts founder nights, as well as events for investors and founders to mingle. Othership says tech companies big and small are considering offering its services as a benefit to employees.
Othership has also offered to organise complimentary “team sweats” as team-building exercises. But according to Bent, they received pushback from human resources at companies across tech and Wall Street. Colleagues congregating in bathing suits wasn’t going to fly.
In response to these critiques, Bent designed a “corporate swimsuit”—basically a full-body rashguard for people to wear in the sauna.
Will Drescher, 29, built a social sauna in Boulder, Colo., after going to one in Minneapolis this year. “Neither me nor my co-founder drink,” said Drescher. “And we just thought, why don’t we have this?”
They built Portal, a “more DIY” option than the saunas popping up in New York and San Francisco, said Drescher.
“We wanted to bridge what’s happening in the coasts with what we’re seeing in the middle of the country,” said Drescher.
Venture investor Helene Servillon, 35, proposed a meeting with a founder of a tech company at Portal.
The meeting lasted an hour, which allowed them to cycle in and out of the sauna for three sessions. After learning more about the startup, Servillon said she plans to invest in it soon.
“VCs socialise a lot. If we only have two options—have a drink or a meal—that can just get really exhausting,” she said. When founders or investors ask to meet for happy hour these days, she will often counter-propose with a sauna or a hike.
Fintech investor Sheel Mohnot, 42, co-hosted an August social sauna event in San Francisco and attended an investor event in Napa, where a mobile sauna was wheeled on to the vineyard.
“The reality is there are always chances for people to feel uncomfortable, and more people are feeling that way about drinking,” Mohnot said. “We just didn’t have great sauna options here before.”
Not all tech workers have bought in. Laila Danielsen, chief executive of an AI software company, was invited to a social sauna event in October. She enjoyed the event and the environment it provided to have conversations, but she didn’t go into the hotbox.
“I don’t know if I’d necessarily put on my bikini to go out and pitch a VC, you know what I mean?” the 55-year-old said. “I’ll consider meeting them at the sauna after we close the deal.”
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Gold miners are emerging as a compelling way to navigate market uncertainty, with analysts pointing to strong cash flows, attractive valuations and rising profit margins. As gold prices stabilize above US$4,000 an ounce, mining stocks could offer investors both downside protection and long-term upside.
3 min
Gold is one of the market’s go-to hedges in rocky times. Don’t forget that gold miners’ stocks are too.
The stock market’s gains in 2026 belie the rocky macroeconomic picture: elevated inflation, heightened geopolitical tensions, and jitters about the artificial-intelligence trade. That backdrop, in theory, should be the time for gold to shine. Instead, the price of the yellow metal has tumbled more than 5% so far, after last year’s blistering 65% rally. In part, the U.S. dollar’s recovery has stymied gold, which benefited from the greenback’s weakness in 2025.
Even with the precious metal’s recent weakness, gold mining stocks could be the best way to profit from this year’s uncertainty.
Gold miners “are a valuable hedge against macro risks that would likely be damaging for equities,” BCA Research’s Noah Weisberger and Rishabh Shah wrote this week.
Concerns about the Federal Reserve’s next moves to tackle inflation, the increasingly crowded AI trade, and steep valuations for tech stocks are just some of the drivers that could help gold’s price get on even footing— and lead to even bigger gains for miner stocks.
These stocks’ prices tend to outpace gold’s moves, because the companies have fixed operational costs. So when gold’s price rallies, their profit margins soar, and vice versa. For instance, the VanEck Gold Miners GDX +7.39% exchange-traded fund has fallen 11% this year as the metal has slumped.
Now, gold’s price just needs to stabilize to help miners’ stocks take off, and that seems to be happening. The precious metal has recently found support above the $4,000 level, and has stuck in a narrow range since the end of June. But its price rose ever so slightly in July, ending a four-month losing streak for the metal. Technical analysis also suggests that gold is due for a comeback.
Barron’s recently wrote that the pullbacks for both gold miners and the metal itself are overdone. Senior technical analyst Doug Busch noted that the VanEck ETF is on the “verge of a breakout” and has the potential to hit $11o in early 2027, up more than 40% from its current price.
Gold miners also have more than their role as a market hedge going for them. Their fundamentals are solid, too, says Chris Mancini, portfolio co-manager of the Gabelli Gold Fund.
“Precious metals miners are generating substantial amounts of free cash flow given profit margins of over $2,000 per ounce, and are returning this cash to shareholders through buybacks and dividends,” he said in an email.
“Buying the miners is a cheap way to get exposure to the price of gold,” he added. His fund owns Newmont NEM +6.71%, a Barron’s stock pick last year, and Agnico Eagle Mines as top holdings, as well as miners Northern Star Resources, Endeavour Mining, and Kinross Gold K+8.59%.
Miners are better businesses than they used to be, the BCA team added.
“Capex is more disciplined, margins are high and rising…and they are largely independent of the AI story,” Weisberger, BCA’s head of equities, and Shah, a senior analyst, wrote.
That last part is key. AI is disrupting the software industry and many other services and information-oriented businesses, and investors have piled into AI stocks. But ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and other large-language models aren’t going to replace the need to mine for metals.
“Equity portfolios can benefit from exposure to quality that is uncorrelated to AI risk, and gold miners fit the bill,” the BCA team said.
They recommend that investors buy the VanEck Gold Miners ETF, which owns top miners such as Agnico, Barrick Mining ABX +7.24%, and Newmont.
An important bonus for big gold miners’ stocks is that their valuations are attractive after the gold’s pullback, too. The VanEck ETF is now trading at just a little more than nine times next year’s earnings estimates. That’s a big discount to its five-year average price-to-earnings ratio of 14, according to FactSet.
What’s more, the ETF is currently valued at a more than 50% discount to the S&P 500 SPX -0.17%, which is trading for about 19 times earnings estimates for 2027. Mining stocks have typically traded at just a 25% discount to the broader market over the past five years. So there is significant upside for the group if valuations move back toward normal levels.
One factor that complicates mining stocks as a market hedge, of course, is if stocks bounce back, which has been the case so far in August.
But both the market and economic outlooks remain cloudy, and investors remain nervous about the Fed’s next moves and AI stocks. Gold miners should do just fine, even if the anxious mood on Wall Street persists.
