Antonia Hellman is a co-founder and CEO of Toucan.

She is a senior at Stanford University studying political science, economics, and management science & engineering.

Prior to Toucan, her career experience has been in data science and political campaigning.

We have heard time and time again that what makes Toucan truly special is the way that people are able to connect with each other. Sure, this year has been difficult and lonely, but among the Toucan team and our users, we have seen something else.

The reason we built Toucan in the first place was to foster relationships and friendships among people regardless of where they are in the world. We wanted to create a comfortable place for networking and meeting new people that were not constrained by geography. After over a year, we’ve learned a lot that we’d like to share with you. Here are a few tips from our team and Superhosts on how to host a successful networking event.

It’s always great to have a theme or something that ties the people you’re inviting together. That gives anyone an automatic jumping-off point for conversations. If you are part of a 

, LinkedIn group, or organization, just create a Toucan event and send the link out to the other members. That way, your attendees have something in common.

, allows you to give yourself a short bio, share your website, and link your social media accounts. When anybody hovers over your icon or video, a small card will pop up. If they click your name or the “i” icon next to it, they will see all that information. This helps you introduce yourself to other attendees. It also makes it very easy to connect with others on social media and follow up after the event is over.

3. Create a “Start Here” Meeting Spot in your event space.

For people that are new to Toucan, it’s nice to have a 

 that indicates where they could gather to meet new people. The “Start Here” spot serves a dual purpose: it helps teach new users how the platform works (click & move to join/leave a group), and it gets the networking flowing from the get-go. I’ve had so many great conversations with interesting people that I otherwise may not have met in the “Start Here” spot. And once I single out some people that I’d like to chat with more, I just ask them to break off and form our own group. It’s that easy.

As the host of the event, you are the common thread that ties everyone together. You are the one that brought them to that space, so it’s really nice when the host gets up and says a few words. It doesn’t have to be long at all, just a short greeting message. Click the orange “Present” button at the bottom of your screen and select either 

(your face will be smaller and at the top of everybody’s screen) or 

(your face will be large and in the middle of the screen). Say a quick hello to your attendees, mention any special guests, give a toast, explain the basics of how to use Toucan, and/or give an overview of the event. It’s up to you!

From my experience, it’s just great for everybody to interact in some way with the host of the event, and 

 makes your attendees feel as though they get that moment with you.

Ever wonder how to host a successful virtual networking event? Antonia Hellman, Toucan's CEO, has written up a how-to for making the most out of your networking event! 

Networking on Toucan Events

Toucan co-founder.
Rabbi, driving instructor, and acrobat in parallel universes.

 yet, let me know! Happy to grab a coffee or a glass of wine. I’ll show you around.

Our Events product is awesome for planning and running large events, but for day-to-day use, Spaces is the bomb. Having a 

 seems like a small thing, but to me, it’s night and day. Now, when I schedule a meeting with someone, all I have to do is create a calendar invite and drop in my Space URL. No more having to do the work twice by also scheduling it on Toucan.

Maybe I’m lazy, or maybe I schedule too many meetings 🙂. In either case, I now use Toucan Spaces many times a day with no friction at all.

I like to personalize things with the artifacts: books, CDs, artwork, and bric-à-brac I pickup here and there. As I’ve complained before, digital life is robbing us of the ability to surround ourselves with all these things. Sorry, but NFTs don’t make the cut.

I can’t bring all my things into my Toucan Space, but I get around that limitation by abusing the Meeting Spots feature.

In large events Spots are meeting places. In my Space they are signposts of things I care about right now. If you come for a visit, you’ll see Spots floating around with the names of 

. That’s the music I’m currently playing during my hikes. You’ll also see spots with the names of 

 I’m reading, and you’ll very quickly get the idea that I’m on the undisciplined end of the reader spectrum. As of now I think I have five books going in parallel. On occasion I’ll add a spot with 

You can bet that as soon as our designers give me the ability to add even more things to my Space, I will!

Lots of meetings! I know that sounds boring, but it usually isn’t. When things get dull I have the uncanny ability to offend people, which has a tendency to spice things up.

I also hold “brainstorming” sessions to work through new ideas. They aren’t always very brainy, but they tend to be collaborative, even if it’s in a let’s-waste-time-together kind of way.

My primary use of Events was for hangouts, both professional and personal. Now I use my 

, even though it’s currently limited to 50 people. Some people will be surprised to hear that I don’t host bigger hangouts, but the ability to offend people does, it turns out, impact the number of people who want to get together with me on a casual basis.

Events are limited to two hours. That’s not enough. I like very loooong events.

One of the best days of my life took place in New York. It was a real-time reading of Lolita. Dozens of people were given a section of the book to read. Each brought his/her own voice to it, although 

 obviously produced the common thread. People were encouraged to leave for meals, bathroom breaks, etc. I sat through the entire novel.

I’ve sat through “Einstein on the Beach” several times. Watching 

Peter Brook’s nine hour production of “The Mahabharata”

 was also one of the best days of my life. You won’t be surprised if I tell you that the Ring Cycle operas are amongst my favorites.

As I said, I like long events. I like anything that distorts my sense of time. Events didn’t do that for me. I was forever bumping up against time limits. Spaces – ironically – have freed me from that time constraint.

One of these days I’m going to organize a reading in mine. Current candidate is 

 a close runner-up. If you’re interested, let me know.

One founder explains how he uses his Toucan Space.

How I use my Toucan Space

: the baker in question is my oldest daughter, so my reporting will be even more scrupulously accurate than usual. 😉

Every week Toucan hosts an online social for friends, family, ex-colleagues, investors, and the otherwise Toucan-curious. Normally these events are like a cocktail party. People show up, chat with each other, maybe have a drink or two – depending on their timezone – and “go home”. A few times our CEO has organized a Jeopardy game which 

This week we decided to try something completely different: a baking class.

We invited Delphine Murphy, a professional baker who’s baked and managed production at one of the top bakeries in the US, 

, as well as at one of the top bakeries in the UK, 

. She taught many bakers. This was her first time teaching a roomful of civilians. We learned to make French baguette.

If you’ve been following Toucan you know that we live all over the world, and that we don’t have a physical office, so naturally this class was online, and naturally we ran it on Toucan.

Starting with the punchline, it was a smashing success.

We got a few things wrong – it was our 

 online class after all – but Delphine rolled with the punches, and our audience was forgiving.

The week before the class we sent out the list of ingredients so everyone attending could be prepared.

: keep your audience’s environment in mind.

The list of ingredients was in grams because that’s how bakers work. It’s much easier to adjust ratios precisely using weights rather than volumes. But of course most of the North Americans attending the class didn’t have scales, so we needed to make some last minute conversions for them.

Once everyone showed up and was settled, Delphine got started. The first thing she had us make was a poolish. A what?! To a lot of us the word “poolish” sounded like a bug, or a disease. In fact, it’s just a starter that’s used in a lot of French baking. Easy enough to make. It’s not creepy, and it didn’t make anyone sick 😏

We’re all guilty of this. It’s easy to forget that “normal” people don’t use a weird French word to describe a mixture of flour, water, and yeast!

One of the coolest things about the class was the way it was set up. Delphine used two cameras, one pointed at her face, and one pointed at her hands. When someone’s giving a class or a lecture, we all want to see them of course, but if it’s a cooking demonstration, it’s even more important to see their hands.

Making bread is all about manual manipulation. From mixing, to kneading, to shaping, to scoring – another word I learned – it’s all about technique, and those techniques all require hand motions we don’t make in our everyday lives. Having a camera show us what Delphine was doing on her work surface turned out to be critical.

I mentioned “scoring”. Scoring means cutting the top of the dough so that it doesn’t explode in the oven when you bake it. “Explosion” may be an exaggeration, but Delphine made it clear that we shouldn’t forget to score our dough if we wanted the finished product to look like a baguette!

Baking, it turns out, is a rather physical, and sometimes violent, activity. Besides 

 our dough against our work surface while 

 it with a force that would make a sports masseur blush. Most of us got more exercise during that class than we have during a whole year of lockdown. Bread bakers must be a fit bunch.

I mentioned that we had two cameras. We broadcast the one of Delphine’s face in a bigger format than the one of her hands. This was a mistake. Her hands were more important than her face.

One of the great things about running a baking class on Toucan is that we all had the opportunity to chat with other students while we were working. When I got confused about how much water to put in the poolish, I just asked a friend. The way Toucan works I could do that without bothering the rest of the class, or interrupting the teacher.

The later part of the class got very social as people moved around showing each other how well (or badly in some cases 😬) their shaping had turned out. To people who were new to Toucan, this was a bit bewildering. We’re all used to Zoom lectures that don’t allow us to interact with other participants. Being able to hear a lecture 

 talk to your friends at the same time is a bit novel!

: teach people about Toucan before starting the class.

For those of us who are familiar with Toucan, this seems unnecessary, but it’s really not. In a way, this is just like the jargon lesson. Just because the platform’s dynamics are obvious to us doesn’t mean they’re obvious to everyone.

Even though we had never put on a cooking class before, we got fantastic feedback from this event. A lot of people even requested that we invite Delphine back to teach us how to make something else. I think we will.

Delphine sent out after the class. It includes both weights and volumes for the ingredients, so should work almost anywhere in the world!

If you want to be kept up to date, and want to be sure to know about our next online baking class,

We invited a professional baker to teach us how to make baguettes. We learned a ton!

Toucan's First Online Baking Class

I love space. To watch my reaction to it. To feel space crush me. To feel space free me.

Almost always space makes me feel. In extreme cases space connects me to a flood of memories the way a madeleine connected Proust to his.

In my life, I’ve been lucky enough to live in some extraordinary spaces. I want to tell you about them, and then I want to tell you about the 

.
My stories might wander a little bit, but I promise you it won’t rival 

My parents briefly lived in a ruined stately home, heavily damaged during the unification of Italy. By the time they lived there it had been well-restored, but the restoration respected history. It didn’t try to hide better days, and it didn’t try to hide the damage inflicted by Napoleon’s army.

The hallway to my bedroom had been destroyed. It wasn’t rebuilt. To reach it I had to go outside. The exterior walls of my room were pockmarked by grapeshot. Often I wondered how many people died defending those grounds.

As wonderful as this preservation-by-omission might be, it didn’t compare to the treatment of the living room. The original villa was three stories high. When its roof was destroyed by fire, it collapsed and tore through the two floors below it. Miraculously the exterior walls remained undamaged. Instead of rebuilding the missing floors, the restorers decided to re-enclose the space with a glass roof. I’ve never spent time in an indoor space that felt more outdoors. The light, and therefore mood of that living room was the light and mood of the sky. During the day, no artificial light could compete with whatever might be happening on the other side of that glass. Only at night could the room provide any intimacy at all. My parents were careful to light the space with low pools of light in order to bound the space, once again, to human proportions.

I moved to Brooklyn Heights when it was still so rough that shopkeepers kept shotguns under their counters.

In those days I spent a lot of time in junk yards, and my favorite junk yard happened to be under the Brooklyn Bridge, on the Brooklyn side. Thanks to my obsession with decay I got to know the area, and found an apartment in the old headquarters of the Brooklyn Railway.

It was an odd space. Both stunning and oppressive.

It was stunning thanks to the outlook. Twelve very large windows facing Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridge. It was oppressive because its proportions weren’t human. Thirteen foot ceilings covered in cross-hatched beams felt low over a large empty space.

This was my first lesson in space manipulation. Working with a friend, a very talented architect, we divided the loft into what I now realize were smaller spaces that respected human proportions. These opened up on larger spaces framed by windows. This transition made the ceilings feel higher. By reducing the average distance between a room entrance and the windows, the outside became an important part of the interior. This became crystal clear when another friend, a photographer, turned the apartment into a camera obscura to project the outdoors onto the apartment’s walls. Watching cars cross the now upside-down Brooklyn Bridge was magic.

I was born in Argentina but my parents left when I was 9 months old. At 18 I failed to report for military service, so was officially a deserter. I couldn’t enter the country without being arrested, so I didn’t. All of that changed when the brutal junta fell after the Falkland Islands. Finally, I could go back. It took years for me to make the move, but one day I did.

Buenos Aires is mysterious, a city with many personalities. I assumed that my time in Italy and Spain would help me get my bearing. It didn’t. It wasn’t until I lived in Switzerland, many years later, that I finally understood how Latin chaos and Teutonic order can combine to create what I found in Argentina.

After a few months living in a neighborhood called La Boca, famous for its football club, I decided that I wanted to live in Barracas, a down-and-out part of the city whose hay day had long passed. My Argentine friends were horrified.

In the 19th Century it was a relatively well-to-do area. The house I found had been built by a prominent doctor. It was in disrepair, to put it mildly. For decades it had been occupied by several families of squatters. Despite that, many of the original tiles, mouldings, ceilings, and floors survived.

The wealthier immigrants to Buenos Aires brought with them the ideal of a house built around a central courtyard. Unfortunately, the lots in Barracas were long and narrow, so only half a square house could be built on each.  My house was like that, the inner courtyard inexplicably bisected by a wall. The property on the other side of the wall was more-or-less its mirror.

The house was designed like a traditional Andalusian home. Going from one room to another always required going outside. None were directly connected.

Rooms were dark, because their only source of light was a French door. Despite this, the rooms felt comfortable because their proportions were classical, close to Le Corbusier’s 

Needless to say, this house was a puzzle. Somehow I needed to figure out how to bring light into it. I found inspiration in very different places. 

, an American artist, taught me how to remove surfaces to fuse the inside and outside; 

 taught me that removing corners opens a room up to nature; 

, a Uruguayan engineer who was actually more of an architect, taught me to use brick to construct organic shapes to funnel light.

Working with a friend, another architect, and some very patient craftsmen, we came up with some wonderful solutions.

To bring light into some of the rooms we punched oval holes into the rear walls, above eye level. The walls were 40 centimeters thick and we used that thickness to create an inward funnel, a technique used by Dieste in one of his churches.

Turrell builds spaces in which the edge of walls and ceilings directly connect with the sky. No frames and no glass. Thanks to Turrell I decided that these light sources shouldn’t be windows. They should be holes that directly connected the people in the house to the sky. During the winter I covered the holes with glass from the outside, but as soon as the weather warmed, nothing stopped the rain from getting in.

Holes in walls was one thing, but we decided to go even further by putting a hole in the ceiling of the dining room over the dining room table. We used the same inverted funnel pattern by building a 10 foot cone on the roof. The cone was covered in brick, again, a nod to Dieste. The hole at the top of the funnel created a beam of light that traveled through the dining room as the sun made its way across the sky. The cone was angled so that the pool of light formed a perfect circle in the middle of the dinning table on the summer solstice. The cone could be covered with glass in winter. During the warmer months, we let the rain in. The floors were poured concrete and the table steel, so it didn’t matter, unless you were hungry during a rainstorm.

My obsession with connecting inside and outside had reached its logical conclusion.

On my only visit to Falling Water, a house in Pennsylvania built directly over a stream I noticed that Wright had put windows in the corner of many rooms. This was unusual, and I didn’t understand why he’d done it until I opened one of them. Having the corner of a room disappear opens it more than any flat window could. The last thing I did before leaving Buenos Aires was build a guest house with large sliding glass doors that met at the corner. When opened, the house felt like it was inviting the garden to come inside. The effect was so wonderful that I hope to do it again some day.

I now live in a tiny mountain town (pop. 38) outside of the city of Spoleto. My house is small. The old part of the house was built in the 16th Century. Peasant construction. Stone. The newer part of the house was built in the 19th Century out of bricks made from volcanic stone.

When I bought it, a housemate and my brother stripped some of the crumbling plaster off the walls of the kitchen and re-sealed the stone. This exposed the original construction but kept some of the subsequent embellishment. I like walking into this kitchen and seeing the connection to two distant pasts.

A lot of the renovation in the house was done by the housemate I mentioned earlier, a dear friend who died of pancreatic cancer. Now I am alone upkeeping an always-decaying structure and am constantly faced with eradicating or preserving my friend’s work. Almost always, as he did in the kitchen, I choose to keep some of his work exposed. A few months ago I redid our bathroom but left the door frame and painted beams untouched. This slight decay amongst the new reminds me of my friend.

I’ve read that a well-constructed essay first presents its important themes and then elaborates on them. I’m afraid I’ve just done the opposite, which is probably why I write blog posts instead of more serious things.

I’ve told you about spaces I like and I’ve told you why, but I haven’t been explicit about the three themes that run through my relationships with spaces: light, proportions, and history.

Light is easily the most important element in any space. Light makes space. Light transforms space.

In Rome, daylight made my parent’s living room inhuman. Remember that the room was three stories tall, visually exposed to the sky. This is no more welcoming than a cathedral. Awe inspiring, yes, but not comfortable, or inviting. Its absence at night shrank the room to human proportions. A miraculous transformation.

In Brooklyn, light invited our gaze towards the East River, but only when the space was constrained enough to encourage the escape.

And in Buenos Aires light had to be coaxed into otherwise windowless rooms through oval portholes to the sky.

Everyone has something to say about building and room proportions.

The Greeks patiently explained to their descendents why proportions mattered. The Romans paid attention. We lost our way during the well-named Dark Ages. No dwelling is less inviting than a medieval castle. The Renaissance re-read the Greek instructions and applied them with great zeal. In modern times our early 20th Century Modernists paid particular attention to interior proportions.

Well-proportioned rooms make us feel good.

A friend once said to me, apropos well vs. badly executed dance moves: “they won’t notice, but they’ll know.” This is also true of space. We don’t have to think about or even know about spatial proportions for them to affect us. They just do.

In this trio of themes, history stands alone. Unlike light and proportions, this one isn’t fundamentally emotional. It’s either intellectual or sentimental.

The bullet holes outside my room weren’t beautiful, but they made me think about the people who died there. This removed me from the present enough to give me a different perspective of myself.

Today, being reminded of my friend as I wander around my house is wonderful. By seeing his work, I stay connected to him.

As much as I love the physical world, I spend almost all of my time in virtual worlds. My industry is brand new, and our products have no physical form. So how do I reconcile my love of space and history with the work I do?

This week I’m very, very pleased that Toucan introduced 

Until now Toucan users could only run discrete 

. For people who used the platform a lot, a large portion of our user base, having to create an event for every get-together was cumbersome.

As of now, our users can reserve their own 

, which will be reachable via a custom URL. Scheduling an 

 will be as easy as creating a calendar invite and including the URL to the space. E.g.,

Small spaces are ideal for families, interest groups, and even small startups. Larger spaces will be needed by large event organizers, schools, and larger businesses. Small spaces are free.

Everyone who has used Toucan knows that meeting people on Toucan is different from meeting people on any other video platform. This is because 

underlies everything we do. All of our design and user experience work has the primary goal of making people feel better, the same way that human proportions make people feel better in physical spaces.

We know we’re succeeding because the feedback from people who use Toucan for the first time almost always tells us on how it made them feel. Here are quotes from first time users:

“I finally enjoyed an online happy hour.”

“I really felt connected to the people I talked to.”

This kind of feedback thrills us the same way we imagine an architect feels when people talk about how wonderful they feel when entering a space she designed.

Space and light are fundamental to the way people feel about physical space. I didn’t believe there was a digital analog until I discovered one of the earliest computer graphics artists, a woman named 

. Before becoming a digital artist, she was a painter. In her paintings she manipulated two-dimensional planes of color in ways that anticipated what would soon be possible with computer-generated graphics. Her paintings and her digital work helped me understand how small the gap between the physical and the digital really was.

But Sacerdote went one step further. She introduced motion into her work. Ironically, the software she used was too primitive to allow her to move her digital shapes, so she created stop-motion animations of her physical paintings. She was a genius, well ahead of her time.

, like physical spaces, require movement. In physical space, humans produce movement. In virtual space this isn’t possible. People sitting in chairs on a video conference call don’t move. So how could we possibly animate our 

? Sacerdote showed us the way. In a Toucan 

, participants’ two-dimensional representations move, as do other artifacts in the space. This movement feels natural because it is governed by a physics engine. All Toucan spaces are alive the same way that a physical space is alive when it is filled with souls and light.

Our work with light is less advanced. We haven’t yet tried to imitate real light sources. Instead we have focused on colour palettes and the emotions they elicit. Our current palette falls somewhere between restful and exuberant. This isn’t always appropriate, so you can expect changes in this area soon.

When you are in control of a physical space, the first thing you do is decorate it. Today we allow you to decorate your space with spots and attendees. In time this will evolve as well. We want our hosts to make their space their own, to reflect their personality, or their company’s personality.

The malleability of software is a double edged sword. Complete freedom is the death of creativity, so we will slowly develop materials and constraints that allow our hosts to fully express themselves as they might in the physical world.

The only aspect of spaces that I haven’t yet addressed is 

Thanks to Sacerdote I realize that today’s digital language didn’t start with early graphics software. It is connected to physical abstract geometric art, which is in turn connected to plastic arts through history. This is aliberating idea since it allows us to explore a deep well of human expression when working on our software. It may be a stretch to think that our clusters of circles are connected to Australian Aboriginal paintings, but I happen to know that our lead designer spent time in Australia. It isn’t possible that she wasn’t influenced by the dynamic geometry of Aboriginal paintings.

Although we can connect the language of computer graphics to the language of pre-digital graphics, we need to zoom in to see how 

 support the creation and preservation of culture. History connects discreet human endeavors across large spans of time. Culture connects them across much shorter spans.

Every family, every friends’ group, every company, every institution has a culture. Within a Toucan 

we see the evolution of culture. Over time people who belong to a space will start greeting each other in similar ways, use emoticons in a culture-specific way, and ultimately use the 

The same way that we admire the preservation of the past when physical space is renewed, newcomers to a Toucan 

 will notice and be influenced by the culture – or past – of that 

At Toucan we are not trying to replicate the physical world but we are doing our best to understand it in order to continue its natural evolution in the digital realm.

I realize that this has been a long, somewhat disorganized wander through some of the many ideas that have helped us birth Toucan 

To paraphrase Blaise Pascal, I would have written a shorter essay, but I didn’t have time.

One founder's reaction to Toucan's new Spaces. 

Toucan’s New Spaces

In the beginning were the boxes. You know the ones I mean. The boxes through which we meet when we can’t meet in person.

As many do, we hated the boxes. Stiff. Boring. Confining. The way Orwell might have imagined future human community.

So we worked and worked until we came up with a video meeting interface that felt comfortable, dynamic, social and, above all, human. This took some time. We went down many dead ends. But the final result makes people happy, so we know we got it right.

We then developed the first version of Toucan: 

The Toucan platform made it easy for people to host and attend events. They could be scheduled, configured, and managed.

Hosts used the Toucan platform to create events, thousands and thousands of events. Some were big, 200 person quiz nights, job fairs, all-hands; some were smaller; and some were very small, groups of friends getting together to catch up, co-workers brainstorming, lovers wondering when they’d finally get to meet again in person.

When we started building our social-first video platform, we focused on what allows us to be social beings:

As I said earlier, our interface work was primarily focused on 

. A few metrics tell us that we’ve been successful. Users spend more than twice as much time on Toucan than on any other video platform. 93% of event attendees speak, which is extraordinary. How many times have you attended a Zoom event and not spoken? Worse, how many times have you attended a Zoom event and not been allowed to speak?

“Shut up and engage!” no one ever said.

. When we talked to our hosts, they confirmed what we suspected. They wanted a permanent place in which they could spontaneously gather. They wanted a permanent URL that led to their own meeting place, a place to which they could invite one or one hundred people, whenever they wanted.

We listened to them, and today, we’re introducing 

 are a radical change, but like all true revolutionaries, we’re changing things quietly.


 our hosts and their attendees have grown to love over the past year. This is intentional. We don’t change things for the sake of change.

. We’re giving our hosts what they’ve been asking for.

It would be absurd if you had to give your friends new instructions every time they wanted to come visit you. Luckily, your home’s address doesn’t change. A Toucan 

’s address won’t change either. If on Monday I tell my friends that they can find me at 

, they’ll also be able to find me there if I invite them on Sunday.

People will want personal spaces – maybe more than one – and professional spaces. These will be unique, like email addresses, phone numbers, or social media accounts.

Ultimately, the distinction between host and attendee will disappear. Everyone will be a host of their own space, and visit others.

Sometimes you need to lock your house, and you probably don’t let random strangers through the door.

If you need to invite a bunch of people to your 

 and don’t want strangers showing up, you can send your guests an access code that’s only valid for a certain period of time.

If you’re a host, you’ll be amazed by how much easier you’ll find inviting and meeting people on Toucan.
If you’re an attendee, you won’t notice much difference to the old 

. But that’s going to change. We’re building a lot of new tools for our hosts that are going to make your experience on Toucan more productive and more fun.

Toucan introduces Spaces, permanent locations for events and casual meetups.

Introducing Toucan Spaces

TL;DR: We’re better together. And we’re lucky that we can say that.

Before I dive in, I’d like to clear something up. Ethan Hellman, the vivacious, dashing, brilliant 20-year-old co-founder of Toucan, is my brother. And he’s 2 years younger than I am. It’s important to me that people know this, as the older - and wiser 😉 - sister. But, also, we get asked about our relationship 

. No, we’re not twins. And no, we’re not married.

Now that that’s all settled, I’d like to address one of the questions I get asked most frequently: “What is it like to start a company with your brother?”

Honestly, at the very beginning of Toucan, there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that Ethan would be an excellent co-founder. He’s smart as a whip, incredibly personable, and the most driven person I know - not to mention, hilarious. Neither of us had started a company before, so we were both walking into something very new and unfamiliar. We were both slightly intimidated by what was to come, but we knew that everything would be ok since we were in it together. We walked into every new experience with a smile and an open mind.

Was I at all worried about starting such a massive project with my brother? Yes, of course. You hear horror stories of siblings or family members starting companies together, having destructive disagreements, and never speaking to each other ever again. I heard a few of those early on, and I will not lie; it scared me a little bit. But then I remembered that every family is different. And as we progressed with Toucan, we started coming across more and more people who told us that they, themselves, either started companies with their siblings or funded companies with sibling founders. There 

people like us out there in the world, and many of them have seen great success. The important lesson: There are tons of stories out there. Everyone can speak from their own experience, but that doesn’t mean that 

experience will be the same. People usually try to be of assistance whenever they can, but sometimes the anecdotes can be unhelpful or even counterproductive. Being able to discern which those are is a skill.


I think that I should give some background information on my relationship with Ethan. I mentioned in the first paragraph that I am 2 years older than he is. For a significant portion of my life, I used to reminisce about those 2 years that I spent as an only child. (Of course, I couldn’t 

remember any of it, but the concept seemed nice.) I got irritated easily, I took a long time to learn how to share, and, just like any little kid, I didn’t like the fact that I didn’t get my parents’ full attention. Ethan and I fought all the time as children and probably drove our parents crazy. We both were, and still are, extremely competitive, so to say that there was a sibling rivalry is an understatement.

But I have a theory. With siblings that don’t get along perfectly, as the age gap between them becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of the total time that they have been alive, their relationship gets better. They can understand each other better. They can put aside any petty disputes and cherish each other’s company. They can have real conversations. And that is exactly what happened with me and Ethan a few years ago.

I won’t bore you with the cheesy young-adult-novel-version of this story, where two siblings find common ground and grow to appreciate each other, but that’s pretty much what happened. A real-life encapsulation of this shift is our tennis game. We used to play tennis against each other and try to make the other either cry or collapse on the court - whichever came first. But around my sophomore year in high school, we realized that we’re actually far more formidable when we play doubles 

Just like in tennis, we’ve found that we’re much stronger 

 in business than we would be alone. We laugh all the time about how, looking back, we used to argue incessantly. Contrastingly, in the past year, we have hardly ever disagreed with each other. We’re on the same page and can practically read each other’s minds. I guess that’s what happens when you’re working with the person who knows you best in the entire world.

The two most vital and valuable aspects of our relationship - both professional and familial -  are trust and respect. Growing up together for the past 20 years, we have seen each other’s highs and lows, and we know what makes the other tick. We know how to make the other laugh, and we understand each other’s boundaries and capacities. And because of that, we are acutely aware of what we can each put on our plates and when to step in to help out.

Looking back on this past year, I am so proud of how much Ethan has grown and how much we have been able to accomplish together. I was inspired to write this piece because I recently witnessed an unfortunate spat between two young siblings. It reminded me a little of what my relationship with Ethan 

to be like, which is why I felt that it was important to write this. Ethan is my absolute best friend, and he is a phenomenal co-founder, leader, confidante, and support system. Truthfully, I probably wouldn’t have admitted that 10 years ago. I am very lucky to have grown up alongside such a fantastic person and to have progressed to a place in our sibling relationship where we can declare with pride that we are, in fact, better 

“What’s it like co-founding a company with your brother?” Antonia Hellman writes her response to the question on everybody’s minds.

Ethan Hellman and Antonia Hellman as children

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