How the Gathering Spot evolved over 10 years into an Atlanta civic hub
It was a clear, cool January night, and T’Keel “TK” Petersen and Ryan Wilson were running late to their own party.
That day in early 2016, Wilson and Petersen had stayed up all night working alongside cleaning and construction crews to turn the Gathering Spot from an active construction site into a passable event space for a 500-person celebration, what they considered their fledgling business’s debut to Atlanta.
Despite drywall seams still being visible and ductwork hanging from the ceiling, the co-founders didn’t want their first introduction to be an event canceled last minute, a promise broken. So, it was down to the wire to ready the main room of what is now known as TGS’ Northyards location near downtown Atlanta.
The walls were painted hours before the event started, and the bar top was glued on as guests began arriving.
Ten years and two months later, Wilson and Petersen were back at a party in the same room. But this time, instead of construction lights illuminating the space, architectural pendants filled the velvet-draped room with a soft glow as the two basked in what they had built.
The origin story of the Gathering Spot has been retold often. In 2013, while Wilson was in law school at Georgetown University, he sent an email to Petersen, his old college roommate. In the wake of protests following George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the killing of Trayvon Martin, Wilson had an idea to create a place for people to come together.
But what hasn’t been fully told are the ups, downs and myriad ways that Wilson and Petersen have kept TGS alive for more than 10 years and turned it into a thriving community and one of the new centers of power in Atlanta — and the country.
Petersen, TGS’ chief financial officer, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that more than a decade running the business taught him how to essentially wring water from a stone.
“There’s droplets in here, some way, and like, I will figure out how to make it happen,” he said. “If it’s at all remotely possible, like, we will crack the code as to how that can happen.”
Opening the business
As kids, Petersen and Wilson didn’t dream of being entrepreneurs. Wilson, who grew up in metro Atlanta, watched his parents build a successful business, but it’s not a future he envisioned for himself.
Petersen grew up in the U.S. Virgin Islands and knew he wanted to be a businessman, but he thought that meant wearing suits and working in a high-rise.
“We, I don’t think, ever woke up one day and were like, ‘We want to be entrepreneurs,’” Wilson, the company’s CEO, said.
“We were more in love with the idea of trying to build a place and a community, an effort that we thought could be helpful, and that took form, like, in the form of a business,” he said.
In 2015, Wilson and Petersen moved to Atlanta the day after Wilson’s law school graduation. The two were in their early 20s, but they put in the little bit of money they had and started pitching investors to raise the capital they would need to build out a new space from scratch. They got nearly 100 nos before slowly getting a few yeses.
“We never had enough money to do the thing that we were trying to actively do in the moment,” Wilson said. “We figured out how to raise enough and structure things in a way that would just get us to the next milestone.”
Eventually, they raised about $3 million for initial construction costs. In the fall of 2015, they hired their first two employees, Regan Harlin and Samantha Agoncillo, who are still with the company today.
“I loved the idea,” Harlin, the chief of staff at TGS, said. “I was young and wanted to take a risk on doing something that seemed exciting and joined the team.”
They began signing up members in the fall before the club opened based off just the strength of the idea, even though the space was still a hard-hat zone.
After the party in late January, it would be a little over a month until TGS was ready for daily operations. But on March 1, 2016, the hub officially opened its doors to the 128 people who had signed on as early members.
Then the work to keep the club and its community thriving really began.
Petersen said the business “has never been about what the two of us want TGS to be for ourselves.”
“It’s a place where you can meet someone that can help you develop professionally or socially beyond the thing that you could have ever thought of.”
Expansion, acquisition and lessons
The ensuing years were ones of growth and hard lessons, from figuring out how they were going to make payroll to eventually turning a profit. TGS’ membership base slowly grew from a little more than a hundred to thousands. Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, then a City Council member, joined in those early years. Event bookings started to increase as well, providing more revenue.
Then COVID hit, and a place with “gathering” in its name was blocked from its central function for months.
But far from being the death knell for TGS, 2020 ushered in a period of rapid growth for the business.
In 2021, it opened its second location in Washington, D.C., and then the next year, TGS went to the West Coast, opening in Los Angeles.
At the same time, WeWork, the country’s most prominent coworking hub and the business TGS had been compared to from a growth and valuation standpoint, was imploding.
TGS’ early investors began asking the founders about their plans for future growth, Wilson said. It was around that time TGS began talks with Greenwood, the Black-owned financial technology company whose founders include rapper Michael “Killer Mike” Render and former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young.
In May 2022, Greenwood announced it had acquired TGS. It was a headline-grabbing merger of two Black-owned Atlanta-based companies. But less than a year into the partnership, it turned contentious as the two sides traded lawsuits over issues related to money and control.
Petersen was fired by Greenwood in the summer of 2023 but soon rehired after an outcry from TGS members. The two sides settled their legal issues and tried to move forward with the partnership, but by the end of 2023, Wilson and Petersen had reacquired the business from Greenwood.
“What’s incredible about 10 years now is that when people look at the kind of errors of TGS over time, folks will immediately kind of go to the Greenwood era because that made national news,” Wilson said.
But he said that wasn’t the most significant time in TGS’ history.
“I’ll go to the era right before that and say it was impossible that TGS made it through COVID, opened a location in D.C. in ’21 and then opened another one in ’22.”
After buying back the business, TGS brought on new investors, Wilson said, including NBA legend Charles Barkley, rapper T.I. and Ludacris’ longtime manager Chaka Zulu. Over the decade, TGS has raised about $30 million.
In early 2025, TGS took over two locations in the Interlock building on Howell Mill Road, adding about 60,000 square feet to its portfolio: a rooftop restaurant and pool with 360-degree views of the city known as the Retreat by the Gathering Spot and a coworking space that had once belonged to WeWork.
“We were maybe on average hosting like five to 10 events a month in our first year,” Agoncillo, the national private events director, said. “We’re easily doing 60+ events during peak season at this point across all four locations.”
The decade to come
Though Wilson and Petersen had dreams of what they wanted TGS to be in the spring of 2016, they never imagined the people who would walk through their doors.
“We had aspirations to make it possible, but like, we’ve truly had the biggest figures of our time come to TGS,” Wilson said.
Guests and speakers have included then-President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, billionaire philanthropist Robert Smith, state governors, Fortune 100 companies and superstar musicians like Usher and Drake. LeBron James hosted his birthday party one year at TGS in Atlanta.
But unlike traditional private member organizations or country clubs, TGS has made sure “we haven’t built walls around it in a way where the community can’t come in,” Wilson said.
“When there was any moment where there’s been protest, our immediate reaction is, please know that this is a place where you can organize,” he said.
After the Fearless Fund — an Atlanta-based venture firm owned by Black women — was sued by a prominent conservative activist in 2023 alleging racial discrimination, the business community gathered at TGS to figure out how to support Fearless in its legal fight.
TGS also had a food program to serve dinner to students from a local Atlanta school every night for years and has given complimentary space to a number of nonprofits, according to Wilson.
When wildfires ravaged Los Angeles in early 2025, anyone in the city who needed food, access to the internet or just a place to shelter during the day could stop by the TGS LA location.
Petersen said TGS has now also become one of the spots for political campaigns to stop by “if you are serious about whatever office that you’re running for.”
When Dickens won his first term as Atlanta mayor in 2021, he held his election night party at TGS, breaking a tradition that typically saw those events held at big hotels. In 2024, the Harris-Walz campaign made multiple stops at TGS.
“Ten years in, if there’s something that we’re celebrating, it’s that, like, we were able to go from ideation to being significant and important,” Wilson said.
As he and Petersen look ahead to the next decade, they envision more locations as well as more types of spaces beyond member clubs. But he said the mission of TGS will stay the same.
“You know that you’re part of a community that is doing its best to stay on, advocating for progress,” Wilson said, “and talking about the most important issues of the day.”
About the Author
Mirtha Donastorg is a reporter on The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s business team focusing on Black wealth, entrepreneurship, and minority-owned businesses as well as innovation at Atlanta’s HBCUs.
