Apply To Join Maxwell!

Every year we’ve done a Maxwell summer camp upstate.

Last month Maxwell members independently organized a ski trip without any help from our team.

Each time we do something like this we hear rave reviews of the bonding that happens and members bring those relationships back into the club and show up more often.

But while I’ve recognized the value of retreats, I have not always viewed them as a core part of the organism, the ecosystem, that we’re building at Maxwell.

I’ve admittedly at times rolled my eyes at organizations that are based on taking you out of your community to build community.

But recently I’ve started coming around more and more to the idea that these experiences are not ancillary but core to every true community.

Because real life is too hectic to expect people to concentrate on each other, you need to remove people from their daily and weekly stresses and put them into a fantasy land in order to facilitate real bonding.

In many ways this is obvious — the times of life we bond the most is when we’ve been able to cluster ourselves away from real life’s stressors.

We move to small communities for 4 years during college and live in a fantasy land where the harshest consequences of spending more time partying and bonding is a failed grade.

We go to summer camp as kids, little worlds with their own mini economies, dining halls, entertainment facilities, drama and create lifelong “camp friends.”

Some of our best bonding moments that build the relationships that drive the rest of our lives are built by constructing temporary fantasy lands that allow for that bonding.

Recently I’ve participated in a couple think tank fellowship programs and I noticed myself that no matter how many dinners they threw or meetups they had, it wasn’t until the weekend trip came up that any true bonds were really formed.

We’re starting to lean more heavily into smaller more regular retreats at Maxwell — more summer house shares, more weekends away, more ski trips.

If you’re interested in learning more, apply for membership!

Apply for Membership!

David, Joelle & The Maxwell Team

Apply for Membership!

Recently a member churned.

When I told another member who had met him, his response surprised me.

“Not surprising — it never really seemed like he found his people.”

I realized he was right — while an overall conceptual fit for the community, he hadn’t attended enough events, been integrated into the right groups that he may have gotten along with and it was clear he hadn’t really developed a group of friends within Maxwell.

He hadn’t fallen into a clique.

We’ve realized recently that the engagement and longevity of a member is directly correlated to if they find their place within the club, or if they fall into a clique.

The bad reputation of the word “clique” is not deserved — just like the word “exclusive” has come to be equated with elitism, cliques have come to be associated with backstabbing queen bees.

But your affinity for a wider organization is often directly linked to whether or not you were able to find your people within that organization, and that usually means your group of 5-7 people.

We noticed that members who seemed to find that group were the most active, and we’ve recently taken steps to encourage more clique formation — there are now 10 different dinner and cooking clubs, each run by 2-3 members individually.

We pay for dinner or the ingredients, and the member leads are in charge of reaching out to other members to invite them to dinner.

The goal is to explicitly create more cliques by empowering the most committed members to build smaller groups of friends around themselves.

Many communities inadvisably try to make things “one big happy family.”

We’ve had a couple decades of propaganda that community is all about being inclusive, probably as a reaction to all of the historically racist, sexist and overall discriminatory community orgs that our generation has rejected (things like Italian American Mens Club, etc.).

We see images of Burning Man and radically open and welcoming events and communities and think that some sort of Kumbaya culture is the key to future happiness and belonging.

But as Priya Parker likes to talk about in her book “The Art of Gathering,” sometimes who is NOT in the room is just as important as who is in the room.

Privacy (exclusivity by another name) is necessary for intimacy.

A community is only as strong as the cliques that it’s built on top of.

If you’d like to find your clique within Maxwell, apply for our Spring cohort here!

Apply for Membership!

David, Joelle & The Maxwell Team

Should we go all out to make sure an average member was in the space once a week?

Or was the important thing that members were able to use the space for their own hosting and that they felt empowered?

Should we make sure our members had a place to go for their most important “special moments,” i.e. New Years Eve, Halloween, etc.?

Was it the small intimate dinners where people had real convos that were important, or was it the once a year big retreats, or regular co-working days.

Should the dinners be more focused around interests or more focused on getting people to be vulnerable and connect in an emotional way?

Interested in learning more? Apply for the next membership cohort!

Apply for Membership!

We kept on changing our mind because we kept on thinking of it like we were trained to think about DIGITAL social networks.

The famous example of this is Twitter’s realization that if they got you to follow 20 people right when you joined it massively stimulated engagement.

They drove everything to a single KPI — followers.

Because everything was downstream from that single metric.

We kept on hearing similar stories of how other IRL membership organizations hung their hat on a core experience that was THE REASON people joined.

The club of a relative of mine spent 50% of their budget on the yearly Christmas party and made it so iconic that people kept their membership every year despite not even having a clubhouse.

Summit series had great initial success focusing on big events like Summit at Sea and even bought a ski mountain to throw retreats every weekend.

Organizations like YPO, EO, Hampton and Chief have had success running monthly small cohort dinners that are very interest/career based.

Annabelles in London is known for 5 super elaborate can’t-miss parties every year.

We were looking for our equivalent, one metric, one structure, an overarching KPI that is a north star that is the underlying community driver.

What was THE REASON to join!

But recently we’ve realized that thinking like this is a massive red herring.

Communities are more like bodies than tech platforms.

And a body can die for countless reasons linked to the failure of simply one of their interconnected parts.

No one goes “if we just make sure the heart is healthy we don’t need to worry about the brain.”

We understand everything is interconnected and the failure of any one of those parts can lead to death.

Community is all encompassing so your strategy for building community needs to be as well.

Retreats have their place to massively accelerate bonding.

Weekly rituals help develop habits and a sense of place and home.

Quarterly traditions & yearly special moments help re-engage the members in crazy times of their lives, the ones who just had a kid and need a bit more than “Friday happy hour” to rationalize getting a baby sitter.

I think the clubs that hang their hat on one or two things often become more services than true communities.

When you pay for a membership to a club that throws one yearly party you are basically just paying a yearly party subscription.

Summit Series ended up having to sell their mountain because at some point retreats weren’t enough to sustain a community.

Monthly meetups around specific interests, like YPO, tend to become more group therapy, mentorship and networking than real community.

But the communities our parents used to enjoy weren’t just one thing.

Your local church had Sunday services, Christmas mass, bible study groups AND bible camp.

The Italian American Mens club had it’s weekly drinks at the club but also the yearly heritage festivals.

Communities are ecosystems, not services.

And counterintuitive to most startup advice, when you are building them that means you have to actually focus on more than one thing at the same time.

If you want to learn more about the organism/ecosystem we’re building at Maxwell, apply for membership, our Spring cohort is wrapping up!

Apply for Membership!

David, Joelle & The Maxwell Team

Apply for Event Sales @ Maxwell

Some background . . .

A couple years ago I was interviewing someone who used to work at Butter, the famous NYC spot featured in Gossip Girl.

He told me about how they did all these pop-ups at Coachella and more and I was impressed, but when I asked him how he closed those amazing deals he said: “Oh, they approached us. Everyone wanted to work with Butter.”

I sighed -- of course. He wasn’t necessarily some brilliant sales person, the spot and brand sold itself!

This is shockingly common -- most event sales people rely on their PR firm or reputation to drive leads and just close the inbound leads.

While Maxwell has a ton of inbound, we always want to grow faster so that left us asking, what was our archetypical salesperson who could actually add value?

Answer: The Wealth Manager Archetype.

Truly great event sales people are just like good wealth managers -- they build their book through connections and convert that trust into business. They are constantly networking, building real life relationships. And they are at a particular bank because that is the best “platform” for them to monetize those relationships.

Maxwell is building a sales team full of people who behave like wealth managers, and Maxwell is the best possible platform for those salespeople to monetize their relationships.

Because despite the growing prevalence of AI SDRs and cold emailing campaigns, relationships matter.

A true relationship means when a client has a last minute booking with a lot of moving parts, they call Maxwell because they KNOW we will take care of them, not nickel and dime them, and make sure they’re happy.

A true relationship means when a venue cancels an engagement party last minute and the bride needs someone to take care of them, they can trust that they can speak to a smart, intelligent person who cares about a long term relationship who will bail them out, not get pushed through a massive corporate hierarchy and be an anonymous lead.

I spend zero of my time on actual sales at Maxwell yet I account for a significant chunk of our revenue simply because people know that if they text me with an important ask I can make sure they get an immediate answer.

An answer from a real, thinking person, not someone just following a sales rubric.

We’re expanding our sales team and if you want to work alongside the most thoughtful and intelligent set of hustlers out there, hit us up!

Apply for Event Sales @ Maxwell

These nights are very lucrative — in one night we can make more off of an event than we’ll make off of membership fees all month.

So occasionally I field the question of why don’t we just turn the club into a permanent event space — why bother with members at all?

And I realized this question is at the center of why every community space has ultimately failed — no one has figured out a sustainable and lucrative way for membership and events/alcohol (or whatever the true moneymaker is) to sit side by side and succeed long term.

Why prioritize a member who pays $3000 a year when we can many multiples of that in one evening??

Subscribe now

Other venues have a similar calculus, and it’s why every bar that starts with the tagline “Cheers where everyone knows your name” degenerates into bottle service bros and influencers — why prioritize regulars at the bar and their comfortable experience when you can crowd people in and charge $5k for bottle service?

We realized it only makes sense to sacrifice for your members if you choose the right members.

Avoid Tourists

We asked ourselves the “why are we doing this” question a couple times too — of the $3,000 a year a member pays a lot of it goes to free dinners and drinks and events and comedy shows that we at best break even on, so at one point we asked ourselves why were were putting all this effort in for something that made us a fraction of the profit of private events.

When a member churns after all that effort it can feel like unappreciated charity.

We realized that these members hadn’t stuck around for a variety of reasons.

Some had viewed the membership as a party subscription, and when they got engaged, had a kid, started a company etc. they just didn’t feel the need to stick around anymore.

Some hadn’t been to enough events or been integrated properly enough and so only viewed Maxwell as “this place I’m a member at that throws some cool events.”

Some loved the idea of Maxwell but life intervened and they kept on missing events despite their best intentions, preventing them from truly getting to know the other members and they came to the end of their first year not *really* knowing the other members, the ostensible reason they had joined, and threw in the towel, sick of paying for something they just couldn’t find the time to use.

We realized we had a tourist problem.

These members were happy to experience the club on their own terms but were not really looking to truly immerse themselves in the culture.

Find Your Permanent Residents

The members who stuck around were different.

These were members who had built a core group of friends within the club, they had reached escape velocity with enough other members to consider this their own spot.

They had started to consider Maxwell a part of their identity — I’d notice them say “we” instead of “you.”

I’d hear about them going on vacation with each other and planning independent outings.

And those members convinced their other friends or significant others to join.

We had noticed that a member who viewed us transactionally, a tourist member, didn’t bother to get their friends or family to join — the thinking was “well I have a membership so we can just go under my membership, don’t bother.”

But members who “got it” understood that it wasn’t about attending an event or being in the space but being part of something and I’d see their friends start to gradually join little by little as they ranted about their experience.

And we realized that if we doubled down on these members, the membership equation actually started to make sense.

This person was someone who was paying $3000 a year just like the other person who churned, yes, but the big difference is that they would likely pay $3000 a year for the next 15-20 years because they weren’t planning on being Maxwell tourists, but Maxwell permanent residents.

To use nerdy tech language, the CAC (Cost of Customer Acquisition) made sense if the LTV (Lifetime Value) was 20 years * $3000 a year instead of just $3000.

With these numbers a membership can start to compete with the private event rental money for priority.

Why does this matter?

We Have To Make Community Worth Investing In

While this may seem crass and transactional to discuss I truly believe that if you are to build sustainable community models, you have to make investing in community as lucrative as using the same physical space for something else.

Expecting bar/restaurant/club owners to take one for the team when they’re constantly besieged by every real estate, regulatory and business complication that leads to 95% of them going out of business is unrealistic.

We need a model whose incentives align to build community AND make money.

What we realized eventually at Maxwell is that a community is only worth investing in if that community will invest in Maxwell — i.e. if we have a realistic view to a member having a high LTV, or sticking around for 20 years.

So we changed our entire recruitment strategy.

We force members to invest in us or we decline to invest in them.

This investment happens at every stage, a longer application process, multiple interviews, a cohort program, and now a requirement to come to a certain number of events or we literally kick you out.

One of the main insights behind requiring attendance was that on a night by night comparison members always lose — “break even on a members dinner” will lose to “get paid $25k by a brand” if you are evaluating your payoff on just that evening.

It ONLY makes sense if “break even on a members dinner” results in a member that sticks around for 20 years because you used that night to build real customer loyalty.

And that only happens if those members show up, consistently, and invest in those friendships alongside us.

If you’re sick and tired of private members clubs that are glorified subscription restaurants and co-working spaces and want to invest in a real community . . .

Apply For The Next Cohort

The Maxwell Team

So today we’re opening applications for our next cohort — Deadline June 15th!

Apply for the Summer '25 Cohort Here!

The Summer ‘25 Cohort will be a bit different.

1. We’ll kick off end of June with CAMP, and into July with a series of intimate dinners and merge into the Fall ‘25 Cohort for a full cohort experience. That means summer joiners will have a special program & also be full members of the fall cohort too. We wanted to find a way of integrating new members this summer while recognizing people are traveling a lot and it won’t be the full cohort experience. So it will be more like a cohort-and-a-half for our summer joiners!

2. We’re changing the interview process. 2 interviews (instead of 4) & attendance at one event. We were honored to receive a ton of applications this last time around but our 4 interview requirement massively overloaded our team and our members and caused delays. So we’re iterating!

And if you need convincing . . . this is what the space looks like during golden hour.

We’ve got a fun summer planned and looking forward to getting to know a whole new slate of friends, so make sure to get your application in by June 15th!

Apply for Membership Here!

David & The Maxwell Team

Camp Fires. Color Wars. Cover Bands.

We’re partnering with Matchbox — who will throw a singles night and make (platonic) seat assignments for the bus ride up, Othership — who will help us decompress on Sunday morning with a meditation and breathwork session, Chase Tucker, a former Peloton instructor, who will teach a HIIT class on Saturday morning for those of us not too hungover from Take Your Shoes Off, the ultimate cover band whose traveling up to perform for us, Dionysus is curating the Saturday lakeside DJ set while Jake, the owner of Dirty Taco cooks us some late night midnight munchies tacos by the water.

But the part I’m MOST excited about is the color wars. Red vs. Blue. Just like you remember.

Early bird tickets end June 3rd, and there is a special "BFF Ticket” for you and a friend that is only $790 for two people.

Apply To Attend Camp!

All tickets include food, alcohol, transportation & lodging, and feel free to view a comprehensive overview of what you’d be getting yourself into here:

While we believe deeply in the value of day-to-day and week-to-week engagement to build community in our space in Tribeca, we also think there is an important place for retreats — smashing like-minded people together for 48 hours of organized fun is an accelerant to friendship that can’t be duplicated in your normal day to day life.

We’re thrilled to partner with these other orgs that share our cultural values, many of which we’ve worked with over the past couple years at Maxwell.

Looking forward to seeing you at CAMP!

The Maxwell Team

I get asked a lot what my favorite event at Maxwell has been. I used to talk about the 80’s Apres Ski party with a cover band or about our intimate dinner series/salons, but recently I realized my favorite event is a non-event — just hanging out with the close friends of mine who are members.

On some level we understand that 2nd homes are made to be lived in, not “attended” — The fantasy of Friends was Central Perk where they spent most of their time just hanging around shooting the shit . . .

The fantasy of How I Met Your Mother was MacLarens, THEIR bar, THEIR booth.

Yes occasionally these characters went to other events of course, but the allure was the regular spot with a welcoming scene where they felt at home.

When we first started Maxwell we were very focused on what amazing events we could throw. We still aim to excel at our events of course, but a lot of our focus has shifted to how do we create the best “non-events,” or dare I say, the best “scene.”

Subscribe now

I think many people like myself have a visceral reaction to the word “scene” — it evokes the nightlife-y, aggressively single peacocking type or the Soho House Instagram-In-IRL scene.

But that doesn’t mean all scenes are bad and we’ve tried to build a “social dinner party/Aperitivo full of friends” scene as we’ve evolved the club, a distinctive Maxwell down to earth scene.

That means less of a focus on what we can curate for members, top down, and more of a focus on how we can inspire usage of the space bottoms-up.

It means launching new initiatives — member leaders, those heading up our committees, have the privilege of hosting open bar happy hours on Fridays with other members, empowering them to act like “owners” of the space.

Every new member gets a free 10-person open bar, and ~1/5th of every member’s monthly fees goes towards credit in a custom POS system that we’ve built for members — all schemes to get members “living” in the space more regularly.

And we’ve launched our own little “coworking club” on Fridays — as much as I’ve been against Maxwell becoming a glorified co-working space, a regular intentional meet-up for our entrepreneurial members has its uses, and we now have a private chef every Friday with a simple menu of Pancakes only.

Slowly but surely we’re creating our own Central Perk/MacLarens, and for those of you who are looking for their own 2nd home, applications for Summer ‘25 Cohort are open!

Apply to Summer '25 Now!

David & The Maxwell Team

“The average American has fewer than three friends,” he said. “The average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it’s like 15 friends or something.”

His solution? AI friends! Fake friends!

The world will adjust to the demand for AI friends, he said, and we will “find the vocabulary as a society to be able to articulate why that is valuable and why the people who are doing these things, why they are rational for doing it and how it is adding value for their lives.”

I had to laugh.

It reminded me of some of the early pushback I got when we started working on Maxwell during the pandemic — I had techies assert that IRL interaction was over. Virtual event companies like Hopin raised at billion dollar valuations, sure that group conference calls were going to replace IRL events, only to implode a couple years later.

It all struck me as so absurd, and the type of tone-deaf reasoning that lends credence to the out-of-touch tech guy stereotype.

Now giving Zuckerberg a little benefit of the doubt he did go on to say the following about the value of IRL:

“There’s a lot of questions that people ask of stuff, like, ‘Okay, is this going to replace in-person connections or real life connections?’” he continued. “My default is that the answer to that is probably no. I think that there are all these things that are better about physical connections, when you can have them, but the reality is that people just don’t have the connections and they feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like.”

Zuckerberg is directionally right that people DO have very few friends, but the solution isn’t fake friends anymore than porn is a solution for romantic relationships or cocaine is a solution for true happiness.

And what Zuckerberg is talking about something even more noxious than porn.

It’s OnlyFans.

OnlyFans for Friendship

What I find most depressing about OnlyFans is not the porn part of it, it’s the fake intimacy. Users regularly tip the stars they subscribe to and pay a premium to be in chats, to get happy birthday messages and more.

To feel a connection.

It’s a pitiful imitation of the intimacy that you would have gotten from a real romantic relationship packaged up for you. At least with traditional porn no one is fooling themselves, but OnlyFans has broken the 4th wall and by engaging with the audience, enabled the most vulnerable among us to dive deeper into our romantic delusions.

“The Stripper ACTUALLY likes me I swear”-as-a-service.

Subscribe now

Zuckerberg’s vision would do the same for non-romantic relationships.

I’ve never been a hater of Facebook/Instagram or social media in general — I think they can be wonderful tools to stay connected to friends, discover beauty and humor in the world, and a lot of criticism leveled at them is better leveled at humanity as a whole — Reddit did not create the shitheads that started a crusade against a TikTok Cancer survivor.

We have a tendency to blame our worst impulses on external enablers instead of recognizing the dark underbelly of humanity that periodically comes out regardless of whatever technology is available at the time.

But I believe there is a line between enabling more connection, which I think social media largely has done, and faking connection.

In the same way that we understand that drug inspired dopamine hits are not the pathway to long term happiness, or wanking it to a cam girl/guy isn’t a pathway to romantic fulfillment, we need to understand that AI friends won’t be a substitute for real friendship,.

It’s just community masturbation.

If you don’t want to live in a world where an AI friend is psychologically jacking you off feel free to apply for our Summer cohort!

David & The Maxwell Team

Apply For S25 Cohort Here!

As we grow as a club we’ve been experimenting with all the best ways to build true community and we’ve been thrilled at how running a 3 month cohort has bonded our new members together. Today applications are officially open for an April 15th start date for the S25 Cohort! Applications will close on April 1st.

What do you need to know?

1. Maxwell Isn’t A Private Club, We’re Building A Modern Co-ed “Fraternal” Order

Maxwell is not a private club full of people who don’t speak to each other or who are showing up just to sneak a peek at the latest celebrity. We’re building a modern (co-ed) “fraternal” society – our members cook, dine and drink together every weekend, providing an opportunity to make lifelong friendships. You belong at Maxwell and Maxwell belongs to you.

2. At Maxwell You Join In Cohorts

Cohorts are your new NYC family -- you dine, drink and co-work with them and they are your support system within the club. In order to join 50 other cohort mates for 12 events over three months we require 4 interviews with existing members. As we’ve evolved Maxwell we realized a core truth — people were signing up for the structure. There is something intuitive about this — you go to business school for the structured way you’ll meet your classmates (lets be real, it’s not for the education), you sign up for a fellowship at institutions like CFR or the Atlantic Council or Partnership for New York City because you want to meet the other participants and the fellowship gives you the structure to do that. It’s no different at Maxwell — we’ve vetted 49 other amazing people for you to be lifelong friends with, and built the structure that allows you to get to know them.

3. The Core Activities: High Brow, Low Brow & Everything In Between

Intimate 10 person Members Dinners to get to know your cohort and other members. Boys Whiskey & Steak and Girls Dirty Martini Nights. Comedy Cellar, NY Red Bulls & Knicks games Off-Sites. Family Dinners cooked with other members. And of course our Iconic Parties like our Rodeo Party (mechanical bull: check!) and the Apres Ski Party.

If this all sounds appealing, remember applications will close on April 1st, so . . .

Apply For S25 Cohort!

And as always, follow along on Instagram.

David, Kyle & Joelle

But no fear ranked higher than the one of being pegged as “overgrown frat boys.”

So I avoided all analogies that could be possibly link us to college Greek life. I thought it was the kiss of death for attracting the type of down to earth, intelligent and conscientious people we wanted to have as members, and to growing a serious organization that we hoped one day would scale worldwide.

Subscribe now

So we stuck to private club analogies. We were the REAL private club, not like these gated restaurants or glorified co-working spaces. Private clubs how they USED to be, back in the day, but without the racism and sexism and antisemitism and without, without . . . etc.

When someone bothered to listen long enough they got it, but we realized that the vast majority of our members and people we wanted as members considered the private club scene in NYC to be unbelievably douchey, so “like a private club, but not douchey” was a real uphill battle — most people just tuned us out the minute we said private club.

In addition, investors HATED it — the MOST successful private club was so financially unsuccessful that its brief public debut is likely ending soon with Soho House being taken private due to the sad fact it hasn’t made a profit in 30+ years. We’ve written at length what bad business models these clubs are — combining hotels, restaurants, gyms, memberships, bars, spas, etc. all under one roof and expecting to excel at all of them when many of them have direct conflicts of interest, yet we kept on starting the analogies for what we were doing from this place of weakness. “Yes we’re doing this shitty business model, but . . . NOT shitty!”

So I started lightly testing out comparing what we’re doing to college fraternities, sororities and adult fraternal orders, and I was pleasantly surprised — people finally “got it.”

I’d start by being like “look, I realize this can come off the wrong way but it’s kind of like an adult fraternity, a Princeton eating club or a Harvard finals club” and wait to see their reaction.

Every single time I’d get a chuckle and then someone telling me what positive experiences they had in college, how they so miss it and that was EXACTLY what they were looking for again. Weren’t we all?

Everyone was always very aware of the negatives of college Greek life, but you could love your experience while also rolling your eyes at the excesses.

Investors also started to get it — while many of them weren’t intimately familiar with the original “adult fraternities” — Rotarians, Kiwanis, Elks, Moose, etc. they could understand that they definitely were NOT private members clubs with bothersome, low margin, high cost restaurants attached. And there are STILL 45,000 Rotary clubs in the world! Yes, literally. One of these clubs has 45,000 locations worldwide, despite being wildly unattractive to anyone under 60.

So while it wasn’t necessarily a POSITIVE analogy for investors right off the bat, it was more of a neutral one and we weren’t working to combat preexisting negative prejudices — investors were more pleasantly surprised that this model they hadn’t really paid attention to or known much about turned out to be HIGHLY scalable. It’s better to be refreshing a functional & scalable but outdated & unknown model (“your grandfather’s fraternal order") than trying to reeducate people on a model they KNOW they don’t like (“douchey private clubs”).

In retrospect our biggest miscalculation was thinking that being associated with college Greek life was worse for us than being associated with private clubs.

It turns out many, many, many people have extremely positive experiences in fraternities and sororities in college.

Almost NO ONE has had genuinely positive experiences with private members clubs.

In retrospect this was obvious — in our first couple years of operations I don’t think ONE person went “so it’s like a college frat, ew” it was mostly “Not a fan of Soho House, how are you different than Soho House?” We should have been listening to the negative associations being leveled at us way earlier and stopped accepting the “private club” frame of reference.

Since then we’ve realized that by staking out a radical position — “we’re building an adult (co-ed) fraternity” it has jolted people into actually paying attention and evaluating what we were doing more from first principals.

And for the much greater than expected slice of the population that has no problem admitting that they had a great time being part of those types of orgs in college, it resonates much more deeply.

So if you want to join an adult (co-ed) fraternity, applications are open for Spring ‘25 and we’d love to hear from you!

Apply to the Spring '25 Cohort!

And as always, follow along on Instagram for regular updates!

David, Kyle & Joelle

It was a quick “fuck yes” and last Saturday our members and legendary cartoonists, some of whom had been cartooning for almost 50 years, mixed and mingled and watched a standup comedy routine in our living room.

As a thanks for hosting they made us our very own Maxwell cartoon and all signed it . . .

Ronny Chieng of Crazy Rich Asians/The Daily Show fame popped in at the last moment to test out some new material . . .

And the cartoonists conducted an Elsa Maxwell trained seal inspired live caption contest for us as well.

It has always been our goal to create a true New York icon here in Tribeca, the type of spot that in 50 years people talk about how our generation’s version of Warhol used to hang out there, and events like this contribute towards building that culture.

We’re launching our Spring ‘25 cohort soon, so. . . .

Apply for Spring '25 Cohort

And if you want to check out some of Michael’s cartoons, follow him here:

David, Kyle & Joelle

Why are we producing our own content now? Two reasons . . .

Top Of Funnel Audience Building Is Invaluable

In the process of building Maxwell we realized the top of funnel problem of membership recruitment and general awareness is way harder than most people appreciate. It may seem simple — throw enough parties, get enough people in the space, and membership will take care of itself — and to some extent that is true — engaging with the product in the space certainly works. (Side note, if you’re interested . . .)

Apply Here

But not as fast as you think it would if what you are trying to build, like we are, is SUPER specific. We’re not like any other private club and explaining what we’re doing requires a learning curve, one that many people don’t stick around long enough to learn. And we want members who want to commit to contributing to build the community, and that means even if they are a good fit personally, they might not be circumstantially — perhaps they just had a kid, live in deep Brooklyn, just raised money for a startup, etc. and can’t make that commitment now.

We’ve committed to not making the *utility* pitch and keeping a super high bar, but a high bar means that focusing on volume and awareness becomes all the more important.

People also don’t realize how long it takes for hospitality brands to achieve mindshare. I’m shocked how often I hear someone tell me about a hotspot that opened recently only for me to tell them it has been around for 4-5 years.

If your overlapping venn diagrams of friend groups look something like tech, downtown, jewish & expat you might think we’re more well known than we are, but we learned that those demographics are VERY specific and that if you aren’t in those demos you might not know we exist, and relying on word of mouth isn’t scalable.

Subscribe now

Built If Bought

The second reason is that over our first two years running Maxwell we had a ton of false starts with famous magazines, media, etc. that wanted to partner with Maxwell. The idea was they’d bring a super cool crowd and because of their brand they could unlock sponsor dollars to pay for cool events. Members could attend a super curated, paid for event and Maxwell would get coverage and money. Win win win.

But the not-so-secret truth about these media properties is none of them have any money, and every event that was pitched to us was always what is referred to in the industry as “built if bought” — i.e. the event would only go off if they found a sponsor to pay the bill.

Not one of these ever got off the ground.

Why wouldn’t we just throw these events and parties and close the sponsors ourselves? Well with our 6k Instagram followers at the time (now up to 21k!) we weren’t exactly an attractive media partner, and that was a necessary part of the equation — distribution to eyeballs OUTSIDE of those in the room for the event is as important to these brand sponsors as the people inside the room.

So we asked ourselves — what if WE created the media part of the equation. It would allow us to sell into sponsors ourselves and fund unique and cool experiences at Maxwell, free from all dependencies on budget conscious media properties.

So we started brainstorming on exactly how we’d do this by asking ourselves . . .

What Is Uniquely Maxwell?

In a sea full of copycat content what could we do at Maxwell that no other spot could do? What was irreverent and didn't take ourselves too seriously, participatory but still classy and fun?

We never wanted any series we did to be overtly about Maxwell itself — THIS blog, Cafe Society, is our propaganda.

No, our digital content needed to be “soft power” — no mention of Maxwell or our mission, just the subtle message of “this is the cool shit that goes on here.”

Midnight Munchies emerged as the obvious candidate.

There is something about late night munchies that is just so on-brand. Perhaps it’s the quest you sometimes have to go on to satisfy a late night urge and the camaraderie that entails. Or it’s the ham-fisted way you might be stumbling through making a basic dish while you are inebriated. Or maybe it’s the hanging out in the kitchen, recapping the night, that speaks to the intimacy we’re trying to build at Maxwell.

But the idea of hosting a late night cooking talk show during a party is a perfect fit for our brand.

No one has kitchens like Maxwell. No one has a house party vibe. No one has a venue that can be as participatory, bringing the audience into the show, as we do.

We decided to give it an “in the party” vibe, similar to how Mad Money is on the NYSE floor and you see things going on in the background, but instead of the stock exchange it’s a house party.

And we saw the success of formats like Chicken Shop Date and Hot Ones and felt that there was an opportunity to do something similar — irreverent down to earth but personal and intimate content.

Our first video is just a couple minutes — and the current plan is to release Midnight Munchies in two forms — short form fun 2 minute reels and at some point longer 10-15 minute content that includes a more substantive, but still irreverent and fun, interview.

If you have an idea of someone who belongs on the show, hit us up, we’d love to hear from you!

Hope to see you at the next Midnight Munchies, and as always if you’re interested in membership . . .

Apply Here

David, Kyle, Joelle

Subscribe now

There is the obvious reading of this — people always want what they can’t have, to get past a velvet rope.

But in building Maxwell we’ve realized that velvet ropes aside, the best communities have high barriers to entry that go past psychological tricks. It’s not just about having high degrees of curation or costs — erecting barriers works to create a vibrant community in unsuspecting ways.

People Value Things They Work For

I’m sure that for a membership to the most prestigious golf club in the world there were 100 other equally famous names to Eli Manning vying for the spot. Hell, he isn’t even the most famous Manning. But I’d bet that after years of having to ask favors to get onto the course he found some way to be top of the list for the next openings.

Having to work is a feedback signal for quality — you not only value your membership more, you will use it more.

High costs are not a substitute for this — apparently the LA County Golf Course has a 250k initiation fee whereas Augusta has only (*only*) a $40k fee. But August is way more prestigious.

Recently we increased the umber of member interviews required to get into Maxwell from 2 to 4. We realized that even when WE knew that someone was a good fit immediately it wasn’t a good idea to just immediately green light them.

Psychology is a bitch — if something comes easy very often we don’t value it.

Working For It Increases Usage

Whether or not it makes logical sense, loss aversion/sunk costs are a real thing — if you’ve paid a lot of money for something you will try to utilize it. If you’ve gone through 4 interviews to gain access to a community, you are more likely to use it, and you are less likely to drop it quickly if you don’t get instantaneous satisfaction — it was a bother to get in, so I’m going to give this thing a go.

If the quality of the product depends on usage, or repeat interaction, this is extremely important. If people expect to get community after a dinner party or two they are going to be sorely disappointed — community requires repeated interactions over extended periods of time, and mutual investment from all parties. A many-to-many network’s value is derived from the engagement of the other people in the network, so making sure every node of the network is bought in is particularly important.

Working For It Means You Aren’t Special

If you’re joining a community you don’t actually want be special — you want to join a community of peers, not a community where you are by far the coolest person there.

It’s why I’ve always found it funny that clubs clamor to give out free memberships to celebrities. In my view they are basically admitting that the celebrities are special and that this ISN’T the standard person they get at the club. It’s a trick to get normal people to clamor to join. And it only works because the celebrities are also promised that no one from the “community” will bother them/talk to them.

Like any new business the urge is to grow as fast as you can. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’d LIKE for things to move faster. But we’ve realized that the levers you want to change shouldn’t be to make it easier for members to join — we do everything we can to increase top line demand (email marketing, instagram etc.), but we’ve realized that making it harder, not easier, on an individual basis to join is counterintuitively the best way to build a solid community of amazing people.

If you’d like to work for it, membership applications are open.

Join The Club

And follow along on Instagram for regular updates.

Cheers,

David, Kyle & Joelle

Rob McElhenney of Always Sunny in Philadelphia fame teamed up with Ryan Reynolds to revitalize a Welsh soccer team that was once in the Premier League but had fallen on hard times and dropped 6 divisions — so far they were no longer in the official professional leagues (Europe has a promotion and relegation structure foreign to the U.S.).

Subscribe now

Over three seasons the series documented Wrexham’s attempts at promotion back into the upper divisions but also stories in the local community — a group of fans that has a rock band, a disabled super fan, the people who work at the club, etc.

Wrexham isn’t alone. Charlton FC was acquired by Americans a few years ago, Bournemouth was acquired by an ownership group that included the actor Michael B Jordan, and Birmingham has an ownership group that includes Tom Brady.

I believe the obsession with buying lower division European soccer teams reflects something deeper than a renewed enthusiasm in sport.

In a more secular world, we’ve lost our churches, synagogues and mosques as central gathering spots, and with them the weekly rituals and sense of camaraderie that comes with them.

But sport provides this — it gives you the iconography, an identity, to stamp on your chest, a group of fellow travelers, something to root for, rituals in the form of games once a week, and a place of worship (the stadium), and even occasionally, a god (Messi, Jordan) to worship.

And when you think about the increasing interest in sports, our idea that people want communities they can actively contribute to instead of passively participate in doesn’t seem so ridiculous.

Sports fans buy jerseys, they buy tickets to support, they participate in fantasy leagues, they debate, they analyze. They are invested, and it’s a core part of their identity.

Is Community the Ultimate Luxury?

My budding “sports = church” theory culminated with Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH and one of the top 5 richest men in the world, purchasing Paris FC, the lower division rival to Paris St German (owned by the Qataris) a few months ago.

If you believe the rise of sport has little to nothing to do with sport but about community, what Arnault is really purchasing is a modern church. And Churches are GOOD businesses — the Catholic Church is supposed to be worth between 75B and 250B.

If you want to go even deeper he’s purchasing the ability to create identity. What are luxury fashion brands if not a way to show your identity, and the soccer clubs are already figuring out that there are ways to monetize this identity that go way past sport.

My team, Arsenal, launched a fashion collab with Aries a couple months ago, their first.

And Arnault’s Paris rivals, Paris Saint-Germain, have been doing this for a while now.

Arnault’s purchase of Paris FC is the acknowledgement that the sense of identity and belonging, being part of something, is actually the ULTIMATE luxury.

And a great business as well.

If you’ve enjoyed this article and want to find another, admittedly non-athletic, way of being part of something cool . . .

Join The Club

And follow along on Instagram for more regular updates.

David, Kyle & Joelle

I graduated college in 2010 back when OKCupid was the most popular dating app. Online dating hadn’t been normalized yet so most of my female friends refused to join the apps, or admit that they did so, because they felt they were “hot enough to get hit on at a bar.” It took a few years before everyone realized that it didn’t matter how hot you were, finding “the one” was very difficult.

Subscribe now

I feel like we’re in a similar place for “the ones,” now — friendship, and if you don’t believe me look no further than The Atlantic, which seems to realize that in addition to Trump, one of their highest performing topics is friendship.

And it’s not just the Atlantic — Bon Appetit is getting into the game as well.

Talking about community and friendship seems to deeply resonate with people.

And it makes sense — loneliness takes 5-7 years off the average human lifespan and we’ve never been so disjointed from each other — as each generation becomes less religious, our multicultural and sexually enlightened predisposition has meant traditional institutions like Italian American clubs or single sex clubs like Elks or Moose are out of date. We’re trying to find a way, anyway, to connect with other people.

We get it. We’re tackling it our own way at Maxwell by building our own campus with it’s own set of rituals, for *our* people.

If you’re curious, feel free to apply to . . .

Join The Club

And follow along on Instagram for more regular updates!

David, Kyle & Joelle

“When I graduated college and moved into the city I had a ton of friends! I was invited to pregames and house parties every weekend and we had a crew of girls/guys, a group chat, and a regular cadence of hangouts. But by the time I was 25 that group started fragmenting. One friend got married, another had kids, another was promoted and was working 80-hour weeks, another just moved to Brooklyn. Now we get together maybe once every few months if we’re lucky and it’s really a struggle to do even that.”

Subscribe now

We draft off of the college experience for years but we’re becoming more and more aware that our society is not built for consistent social interaction.

In fact one of the biggest lessons you learn leaving college is just how much work college was doing for you behind the scenes — you didn’t have to sort through tons of schedules because you were likely to run into people on campus or at parties. You didn’t have to figure out if you were likely to have something in common with these people because you both got past the admissions committee (an over simplification as I didn’t love everyone who went to my Uni but still).

Our communal institutions used to do similar work for us — if you were part of a Church, Synagogue or Mosque you had regular rituals built in every week. If you were part of an Italian American club you had an instant thing in common, your ethnicity, with everyone who walked in the room.

The difference between the communal life of luxury that we lived in college becomes all the more stark when we start anonymous city life.

We’ve written about how these institutions are no longer around for obvious reasons — the organizing principal of them all was either race, sex or religion, and our generations care about that less and less. We won’t signup for a community if the catch is that it’s only for people of your same ethnicity — we’ve evolved past that.

But we need new structures and institutions, and that’s what Maxwell is building — the group of friends that invites you to the house parties and pregames every weekend again. If that sounds intriguing to you . . .

Join The Club

And follow us on Instagram for more regular updates!

David, Kyle & Joelle

Subscribe now

It’s also a genuinely hard question to answer — try to do it for yourself: in a sentence or two describe your friend group? Difficult, right? I’m friends with people for a variety of reasons ranging from shared ambition, shared experience (college), shared world view/sense of humor. Why you like someone can be hard to put into words.

But we’ve found one question works well as a starting point: do you want to spend 3 hours at the dinner table with this person?

That can mean this person is so intelligent that they have a ton to talk about. It could mean they are really lovely and a great conversationalist and even if they don’t have THAT much to say they are a good listener and a good asset to the table.

It certainly means they aren’t boring. And they definitely aren’t the type of insecure person who needs to dominate the conversation and hear themselves talk the entire night.

This simple question has been the guiding light for our membership selection process, and I think whatever core question you are asking yourself when trying to vet a new member reveals the soul of your organization — if it’s mainly a nightclub where people don’t ACTUALLY talk to each other, the litmus test might be “does this person improve the LOOK of the club,” and thats how you get a club full of beautiful but vapid members (cough cough Soho House cough cough). In college, the admission criteria to certain societies might be best described as “is he a good drinking buddy.”

For us, we’ve always been crystal clear that we want conversation and connection to be at the center of the club, and asking ourselves if we wanted to spend 3 hours at the dinner table with this person has proven to be a pretty good sorting mechanism.

Think you want to spend 3 hours at the dinner table with us?

Join The Club

As always, subscribe for more updates and follow along on instagram here!

David, Kyle & Joelle

But our early efforts at actually facilitating member contribution were a spectacular failure.

When we first launched, our member contribution strategy pretty much amounted to asking members who among them wanted to throw a party or event, and letting them do whatever they wanted.

Subscribe now

Invariably this would result in disaster.

1. Went Off The Deep End. A hired DJ blew out a speaker in the first week, other parties just didn’t have the proper controls on crowd, vibe, etc.

2. Caused Severe Event Anxiety. Members would throw brunches or dinner parties that were elaborate and get overly stressed out (“Will anyone come?! Does everyone like the food?!”), and often resort to relying on our staff to fill in the gaps, or end up throwing a sub-par event. After, scarred from the experience of how hard it actually is to throw a good event, they never hosted again.

3. Unappealing to Other Members. Just because you wanted to do a sound bath meditation doesn’t mean the rest of the members wanted to as well.

We realized we needed more structure.

My co-founder Kyle started talking about our job as building the “Scaffolding of Contribution” — what structures, rules and best practices do you enforce so that members are set up to succeed and make sure their efforts not only give them personal satisfaction but advance the club mission to build camaraderie among the members.

In retrospect this is kind of obvious — you don’t join a church and they go “however you want to contribute, knock yourself out!” — they have bible study you can sign up for, Sunday school you can volunteer at, a choir you can join, etc. When you enroll in University there are tried and true methods of getting involved, either a sports team, or the marching band or Greek life or the co-ops, no one goes “feel free to start your own sports team, we’ll give you the field.” (Unless you’re the ultimate frisbee team.)

Those institutions built the structure, the scaffolding of contribution, and let you slot into it, and we realized we had to do the same, and as we sorted through what worked and what didn’t we came up with a few principals.

Find Your Formats

We realized some obvious things early on — yoga or meditation sessions required a ton of furniture movement, tended to generate zero bar revenue (we are still a business and that matters) and were not things Maxwell was really built for — if you want to go to a Yoga class go to a yoga studio, they will deliver that product a lot better than we will, but Maxwell was built to throw the ultimate dinner party, hangout session and cocktail party, so we leaned into that and became better at saying no to things that just didn’t align with what the space was built for.

But we realized it went beyond saying no to pop-up Yoga classes — we asked ourselves what was the actual goal of a Maxwell ritual? The inconvenience of moving furniture aside, it wasn’t to provide a workout class — we’ve been adamant from the beginning about not leaning into the amenity flywheel, the purpose of the club, and therefore every event we put on, should be to provide an opportunity for camaraderie and community, an opportunity to connect, and importantly, connect with other members.

So we experimented with various dinner formats — buffet/self serve dining vs sit down dinner, catered vs private chef vs cooked by the members, open to guests vs completely closed vs guest limits, and realized that the format that accomplished our goals of member bonding was a members cooked, sit down dinner with a +1 maximum.

Subscribe now

Maxwell can comfortably sit about 60 at several long tables in our Grand Room, but we’d occasionally have dinners get up to 120, which would lead to people fighting for surfaces to eat on. We’d make more money, yes, but in reality the amount of money we’d make from 60 extra people on dinner paled in comparison to other ways our business makes money, and as our goal was member bonding & camaraderie we decided forgoing that short term revenue was an investment and forced everything that was officially a Maxwell dinner to be sit down so people took the time to have an actual conversation with each other.

Catering the food was fine but having members cook not only allowed us to save money (that we passed onto members), but it was a group activity that bonded 10-15 members together as they went grocery shopping and spent a few hours drinking wine while they seasoned the chicken.

And we realized that if we went to all this effort and there was anymore than 50% non-members it didn’t do the necessary member bonding we were striving for — our members would just meet other non-members, and the membership camaraderie flywheel we were trying to create wouldn’t kick off.

We understood our goals and figured out the format we’ve started calling “Family Dinner” — our once a month, members cooked, open bar, one guest maximum, sit down dinner.

Build Rituals With Broad Buy-In

Early on we also tried to launch a few traditions that were close to my heart like Premier League Mornings (I’m an Arsenal fan) — we thought we could pull it off as something like 1/4th of our membership base follows European soccer. But when we really drilled down to it most of them didn’t follow “European soccer” they followed Arsenal or Barcelona, so instead of 40 or so potential club members as attendees on a Saturday morning, we’d end up with the 6 Arsenal fans who were interested, 4 of which were out of town or had a conflict during the Arsenal-Tottenham Derby, and I’d end up by myself with one other guy bro-ing out.

Maxwell is ~20% Jewish (and 2/3 of our cofounders including myself are as well) so we again thought that launching a monthly First Fridays Shabbat was a layup. But we found it more difficult than we thought as the young downtown Jewish community in New York is incredibly tight (especially post October 7th) — there was always another Shabbat someone’s friend had invited them to so we couldn’t always rely on our own members to power it (though they’d ALWAYS show up to the after party).

Almost any effort to get more specific on interest, ethnicity, etc. we’ve rolled back to either work with additional partners (First Fridays is run with a rotation of various co-hosting Jewish organizations) or we do it when there is high member demand (Euro Finals, U.S. Open Finals, etc.).

What worked was sticking to things that could appeal to 100% of the club and making those our tentpoles that we push to members and give them an opportunity to participate in.

Sticking to a dinner that wasn’t catered to only Jews, or rituals that didn’t ultimately appeal to 6 members of the club who followed whatever team was playing a big game that weekend, was important to make sure our efforts, and the opportunity cost of reserving a room, weren’t for naught.

Distribute & Atomize the Risk

Finally we had to de-risk these events as we came to realize that deputizing anyone to do anything independently was almost sure to fail — we had too many members approach us about doing a really cool party, we’d say yes, only to have them drop out last minute when work got overwhelming, or move forward and have attendance be anemic.

It was wildly frustrating — we were giving up other forms of revenue to make room for these member events and they weren’t being executed on properly.

So after we chose the rituals with the most buy-in and the formats that were most likely to succeed, we focused on building committees around them.

We now have a Family Dinner Committee, a Salon Committee, a Trip Planning Committee (for summer camp, ski weekends and more), a Party Planning Committee (for the big marquee parties) and the Membership Committee. They meet once every 1-2 months and help plan things asynchronously.

We realized that making sure a committee was bought into an event before we green-lit it, deputizing the entire group with joint responsibility once we did, and guilting people to not let their fellow members down led to more accountability and ultimately more successful events.

Outside of events, we also realized that one of the highest value ways to make members feel empowered was to simply entrust them with vetting new members. It’s de-risked contribution (worst case scenario the meeting doesn’t happen), and members loved having a say in the future of the club.

It took us a while to get here and it took us longer because we initially decided to empower members before installing these guardrails.

But now that we have them it’s unlocked a whole new level of enthusiasm.

If you think you’d like to join a committee . . .

Join The Club

As always, subscribe for more updates and follow along on instagram here!

David, Kyle & Joelle

Over the past year+ we’ve been developing, bit by bit by bit, a one-of-a-kind membership program based on many of the insights we’ve shared in this newsletter — Maxwell Social is more than just a beautiful space that throws great parties; it’s our clubhouse where we host our boys/girls nights, host the discussion with our favorite podcaster and plan ski weekends and summer camps all with the tightest group of friends in the city. We’re designing a vibrant, members-only experience nestled in Tribeca, designed for those who understand that life is richer with meaningful connections.

Join The Club

We’ll be releasing a series of articles over the next couple months diving into a lot of how we’ve built out our membership program but for now, to essentially answer the question of “what does being a member ACTUALLY mean?” here is the summary . . .

The Plans

Monday Night Dinners: Every Monday a private chef cooks an intimate dinner for 10 members to get to know each other.

Family Dinners: Once a month our members cook get together and make a home cooked meal, igniting that warm, familial vibe we all crave.

Boys Nights & Girls Nights: Once a quarter we host our guys and girls nights (think Whiskey & Steak or Eloise at the Plaza) — opportunities to cut loose with the guys/girls.

Retreats: Think nostalgic summer camps and ski weekends alongside Hamptons house shares for those blissful salt and sun-soaked weekends.

Fireside Chats & Salons: Last night Professor Galloway was over filming his Raging Moderates podcast. Tomorrow Nate Silver is coming over — just the latest ways we’re executing on our mission to create the city’s center of high culture and intellectual discussion.

And of course the . . .

Parties: iconic bashes like The Rodeo Party and our Halloween blowout, designed for those nights when you want to let loose with your closest friends.

Join The Club

The Process

Maxwell welcomes just 10-15 new members each month, ensuring every addition is thoughtfully considered. We require every new member to interview with four existing members — this isn’t some faux douchey process, we’ve simply realized that growing slow and integrating new members into the community BEFORE they join creates a super solid foundation.

Once you’re in we encourage you to dive in and connect —join a committee, get your hands dirty, and—just for good measure—receive some exclusive swag.

The Philosophy

As we’ve written about EXTENSIVELY in this newsletter, Maxwell isn’t just a glorified co-working space or a gated restaurant. We’re building a community (no, really)—a real one, with traditions, shared experiences, and a unique sense of what’s cool. Our namesake, Elsa Maxwell, renowned for her parties for royalty and high society figures of her day is also credited with the introduction of the scavenger hunt and treasure hunt for use as party games.

The core of any successful space are the people that fill it. So in a world where genuine connections can feel elusive, we’re crafting an environment that invites you to be yourself while also inviting others into your story. It’s not just about what you do; it’s about who you do it with.

So, if you know, you know—Maxwell is more than a place; it’s a movement toward something meaningful. We’re creating a space where relationships flourish and memories are made. Curious? Apply to join, we’ll leave the door open for those who feel the pull. Welcome to Maxwell.

Join The Club

David, Kyle & Joelle
Instagram
www.maxwellsocial.com