• REC Philly, the creative membership company founded by childhood friends Dave Silver and Will Toms, closed in December 2025 after a decade that ran from fraternity-basement concerts to a 10,000-sq.-ft. complex in Center City.
• Two outside shocks hit the company: a Miami expansion backed by Sean Combs shortly before his arrest, and a pandemic that redefined what physical space was for.
• Silver’s launch party for his new self-published book, “Life’s a Hike,” drew former members, employees and family for a reunion, proving business impact isn’t only about profit.
One sunny May evening, Dave Silver stood squinting into the sunset in front of maybe 50 people in folding chairs. His parents and his sister were there. So were former employees, former customers and a decade’s worth of Philadelphia creatives.
“Everything I was worried about losing,” he said, “is in this room.”
He was there to launch a book. It felt like a reunion.
Silver cofounded REC Philly in 2014 with Will Toms, his childhood friend from suburban Bucks County. For about a decade the two built one of the strangest and most beloved corners of Philadelphia’s creative economy. REC closed in December 2025. Technical.ly covered the closing as a business story, because that’s what it was. The book launch room in May recapped the past in a different tone.
We have a thin vocabulary for this. A company continues, or it fails. One is typically done proudly, the other quietly. That binary works fine for a widget manufacturer, but badly for whatever REC actually was.
REC went through more forms than most companies. It started as a college party operation — fratty and charming Temple-era friends booking bands and DJs. It became a record label, which crashed. It found its heart as a hub for musicians in a half-finished warehouse near Kensington, where I remember touring a warren of cluttered rooms filled with 20-somethings of every race producing albums most of us would never hear. Then, with angel investor money from a group of well-known Philadelphia tech founders, the glow-up: 10,000 polished square feet in a Center City mall rebranded the Fashion District. Lit in red and black, the recording booths and a photo studio were near a stage sponsored by Live Nation.
Underneath the flash, the business was a creative agency sitting on top of an underpriced membership community. What many members experienced was something else entirely: a home, a team, an identity — and very good bomber jackets.
Solopreneurs and tiny firms stitched into something larger
REC’s members came to embody a generation of the city’s young independent creatives. They were musicians and poets, filmmakers and photographers, influencers and product designers, all of whom balanced art and business. Some 6,300 Philadelphians were gig-workers who got most of their earnings from creative fields when Technical.ly analyzed the category in 2022, and a good number visited REC’s space on East Market Street.
Then two external shocks rocked the tiny business with a devoted following.
The company signed a big lease expanding to Miami with backing from Sean Combs, whose music-fashion empire subsequently collapsed around a sex trafficking arrest. And a pandemic arrived that rewrote what people wanted from physical space. REC’s Center City Philadelphia flagship opened in December 2019 and had roughly three good months, Silver said. No model emerged that brought in more money than it cost, at least not quickly enough to account for mounting debt and lease obligations.
Inside the chaos, the team forged a tribe. To be sure, it wasn’t all love. Over the years, Technical.ly heard from the occasional member or employee who felt short-changed or overworked. In 17 years of reporting I have never found a business without those complaints, which is exactly why they’re hard to weigh. The criticism is real and the affection is also real, so a fair accounting has to hold both.
Silver, Toms and their collaborators were young, curious and inexperienced — occasionally lost, but, in my decade of collaborating with them first around Philly Tech Week, always determined to connect their community of independent creatives to bigger stages. In a way, they defined the onrush of new business formation in the American economy: solopreneurs and tiny firms stitching together into something far larger. A third of Americans contribute freelance income, and the so-called “creator economy” is projected to be worth half a trillion dollars by 2030.
What’s happening today nationwide was taking place within REC’s many forms over the last decade.
Fittingly, Silver hosted his book launch at Indy Hall, which has championed coworking as a community of people, rather than a real estate strategy, since 2006.
Founded by Alex Hillman, a web developer turned community-organizing evangelist, Indy Hall’s coworking community grew slowly like a hermit crab through three successively larger Old City spaces, helping define N3rd Street. A few hundred people and a few thousand square feet came to represent the very heart of a new kind of Philadelphia economy. Yet the pandemic nearly killed it too. Hillman and team closed the space and went online, then reopened in Northern Liberties. This month Indy Hall celebrates 20 years.
Hillman stayed people-first and small. REC took outside investment and chased a repeatable model. One of those companies still exists, which is not the same as one of them being right. As one longtime fan of both Indy Hall and REC mentioned to me at this book launch: “Two things can be two different things.”
Could REC have survived had it not expanded with Diddy to Miami? As only a creative agency leveraging local creative talent? Or a leaner membership coworking model? Over coffee last year, Silver told me, “Perhaps.” But especially for a first-time founder, as I personally know, it’s impossible to disentangle how one step leads to the next one.
Instead, Silver and his stylish cofounder Toms suffered the social, emotional, financial — and in Silver’s book-telling, spiritual — consequences of closing a business. They aren’t alone. Half of American businesses don’t last five years. REC doubled that length, growing a community in tow.
‘Something can be good, and also end’
To combat the survivorship bias of reporting only on perceived business “success” Technical.ly often reminds of the very real risks entrepreneurs take — and often lose.
Pro-entrepreneurship culture must welcome both business starts and business closings, to encourage more of the same. Closures have long been a part of the American system, though the share of Americans going through bankruptcy has been rising fast in part because of businesses gone bust.
Still, Silver said, the contractual and financial matters of business closure aren’t as hard as the emotional ones. After cutting members and employees, vendors and investors, dropping leases and contracts, Silver went on a long hike — the Camino de Santiago in northwestern Spain — and self-published a slim book of lessons, barely 80 pages in a font size generous to older eyes. The honest verdict: The travelogue with business tips couldn’t be as insightful as the group that came out for Silver’s informal REC reunion.
Dave Silver speaks at his “Life’s a Hike” Indy Hall book signing (Christopher Wink/Technical.ly)
To understand that, I turned to an idea that isn’t Silver’s.
“I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned ‘forever’ into the only acceptable definition of success,” went a 2022 Tumblr post by Helen Bright: “I just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good.”
Failed businesses keep proving her point. The founders of Infonautics, a 1990s suburban Philadelphia infotech company that was simply too early, held years of get-togethers. Nobody much remembers that short-lived internet company, but their alumni have gone on to noteworthy work. They also formed lifelong friendships and shaped Philadelphia in ways few others know.
“Creative journeys can end up becoming jobs,” Silver told the room, “and we don’t always love those jobs.”
His grief came in late 2024, he said, when he and Toms knew the end was coming but still had to play it out. What he wasn’t sure of was whether people knew him separate from REC.
He got his answer in folding chairs, with the sun in his eyes.