With two successful neighborhood pool halls up and running, each now with a beer and wine license, a realtor friend, Bob Fleming, showed us a former nightclub space in DC just south of DuPont Circle. At 14,000 square feet, Buffalo Billiards would be a monster project for us to tackle, so we decided to take just less than half of the space, which was still more than twice as big as either Bedrock or Atomic. As we started to design it, I woke up one night thinking that if we took the entire space, we would only need a few strong Fridays and Saturdays to cover the extra rent, so Mark and I mulled it over and went all in. We pulled out all the stops and raised $800,000 from what Mark called the Three F’s—friends, family, and fools. I rallied every artisan I had worked with in my short contracting career, including my brother Seth, his misfit crew, Stephen Pelszinski, and the builders from Red Ant, and we attacked the gutted space with blind energy.