Movements are humanity’s best-designed perpetual motion machine.

PATTERN5 builds them on purpose, for organizations that want their audiences to carry them.

Reuben Steiger on Movements Podcast

A shelf with a Shakespeare book, an open world map, a brass spyglass, a telegraph key, a small antique globe and books on artificial intelligence and virtual worlds.

The whole and the parts

A movement forms when members add their story to the collective and create shared meaning.

The movement is the whole. The members are the parts. Each story maps to a structure that people can only reach together.

The leader matters less than the first follower. And the unit that matters is small: two to twelve people, meeting often enough to notice how their piece changed the whole.

PATTERN5 does this deliberately for organizations. We find the part of a market that can carry the rest, and we help those people tell their story and see themselves in the goal. Believers become a movement. The movement becomes revenue.

How an engagement runs

  1. Find the part

    We locate the people in your market whose stories can carry everyone else. It is usually a smaller group than you expect.

  2. Gather the stories

    We convene them in groups of two to twelve. Each person writes down what they care about and why they showed up.

  3. Build the whole

    We tie those stories to a goal they can only reach together, then give it rules, rituals and a cadence so it keeps moving after we leave.

Reuben Steiger

Reuben Steiger

Founder and managing partner

Reuben Steiger is an entrepreneur and movement designer based in Princeton, New Jersey. For 25 years he has built places where people tell their stories to each other at scale.

He joined Linden Lab as Second Life’s evangelist in 2004, when it had about 20,000 residents, and helped grow it to millions while designing the community tools that seeded its virtual-goods economy. He then founded Millions of Us, a virtual-worlds agency that grew to 50 people building for Nike, Cisco, Sony and Warner Bros with early backing from Omnicom. His next company, Virtual Greats, licensed celebrity and brand likenesses for virtual goods and was acquired by Iconic Futures in 2013.

He has run IPG’s Emerging Media Lab in Manhattan, served as CMO of the design firm Method, worked alongside Steve Wynn as VP of Interactive at Wynn Resorts, and helped scale OVEN Digital to 300 people in 11 offices. He founded 8 and Up, which taught entrepreneurship to children in Princeton and New York. Since 2016 PATTERN5 has advised XR and AI companies through more than $500 million in liquidity events, including acquisitions by Microsoft, Apple and Epic.

He writes a weekly column on AI and democracy for The Contrarian and the Substack Fellow Travelers. He holds a BA in English Literature from Brown University.

Career

  1. 1999OVEN Digital
  2. 2002Wynn Resorts
  3. 2004Linden Lab, Second Life
  4. 2006Millions of Us
  5. 2007Virtual Greats
  6. 2010IPG Emerging Media Lab
  7. 2011Method
  8. 20138 and Up
  9. 2016PATTERN5
  10. 2026The Contrarian