Party.Space

» see party.space as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Party.Space was a room you could not reach any other way. Yurii Filipchuk and two co-founders started it in Kyiv in May 2020, during the first lockdown, on the bet that a grid of video rectangles is a bad place to hold a party. What they built instead was a browser 3D venue running on PlayCanvas, where a company's staff walked around as avatars in a space designed for the occasion. Their CTO came out of Ubisoft, which is roughly the pedigree it takes to make a rooftop load in Chrome.

The venues came as a catalog, each on its own subdomain, a rooftop and a horror academy among them, and live events ran at enter.party.space with the event name pasted onto the end of the URL. The client list is the surprising part. Wargaming put 300 employees into one room for a studio anniversary and Epidemic Sound brought 375 to a spring party. Grammarly used it to introduce its Vancouver office to its Kyiv office, staff who had never met in person. Google ran a Halloween quiz night on it, and Product Hunt held the Golden Kitty afterparty somewhere called the Doge Temple.

Money followed. A million-dollar seed closed in October 2021 with TA Ventures and ICLUB, then a $500,000 strategic round in June 2022 brought in Seed Club Ventures alongside the founder of Guild.xyz. That second round is where the story turns, because it came with a change of positioning: by 2022 Party.Space was selling into web3, running NFT auctions and DAO gatherings, on roughly $800,000 a year with 33 people on the payroll. When that market evaporated through 2023 it took the pipeline with it.

Nobody announced anything. In October 2023 the site was a full WordPress build of about fifty kilobytes with a blog and forty case studies behind it. By December it was a single screen, the case studies deleted, and its "try it for free" button pointed at a free Vercel preview deployment rather than the company's own infrastructure. The last archived capture of anything on the domain is 29 July 2024. Certificate renewals had run on a strict sixty-day cycle since 2020 and the August 2024 renewal never happened. The marketing site's certificate expired on 31 August and the venue hosts' certificates expired on 23 September, after which there was nothing left to connect to.

~ the dossier ~

~ the kyiv part ~

Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, twenty-one months into this company's life, and the team kept operating. They stood up a dedicated ukraine.party.space and ran a St Patrick's Day fundraiser on it, and they hosted the closing ceremony of the MetaHistory war-museum NFT auction. A virtual-event startup is not a wartime business by any reading, and what they had to offer was the one thing the situation had made scarce, which is a place to put people together who cannot be in the same building.

The Kyivstar sprint retrospectives further down the client list are from the same period. Ukrainian companies were holding their internal meetings inside a Ukrainian 3D venue while the country was being shelled.

~ what the client list says ~

The pandemic put me in the same video calls as everybody else, from a desk in Ankara, and not one of them ever became a rooftop. Turkish offices moved to Zoom and Teams in March 2020 and stayed there, and when people eventually came back they came back to the actual building.

Read the customer list closely and the business model comes apart on its own. Almost every name on it booked a one-off: an anniversary, a quiz night. Nobody in that list needed a 3D venue on a Tuesday. A company throws a party once or twice a year, and the rest of the year the seats you built stand empty, so you either become an events agency with a rendering engine attached or you find something people open every morning. Party.Space tried the second answer by shipping a virtual office, which put it against Zoom and Slack with a rounding error of their money.

~ the certificates ran out first ~

There is no farewell page here and no dissolution filing, so the closure has to be read off the infrastructure. Certificate transparency logs are public and every renewal in them is timestamped, which means a lapsed auto-renewal is dated to the second. The cadence held for four years and then stopped inside a single cycle, which is what an unpaid card looks like from the outside.

Filipchuk went on to found something called Goatstack.AI, which is already dead too, and then an AI market-simulation company in San Francisco. A stray Vercel preview deployment from the final months still answers today, a rooftop nobody can find, on a free tier that has outlived the company by two years.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »