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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!

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David, Joelle & The Maxwell Team

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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!

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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!

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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!

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David, Joelle & The Maxwell Team

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??

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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

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.”

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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.

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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

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.

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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

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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.).

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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.

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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.”

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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 . . .

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And follow us on Instagram for more regular updates!

David, Kyle & Joelle

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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 . . .

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

David, Kyle & Joelle

When I graduated university in 2010, several of my attractive female friends still adamantly refused to join dating apps — they thought the apps were for girls who weren’t hot enough to get approached at a bar. A few years later they were all on them — our society finally admitted to ourselves that it didn’t matter how hot you were dating was HARD. We ALL needed help.

I believe we’ve hit a similar turning point in how we view friendship. Bon Appetit recently published an article about the rise of the Gen Z dinner party series, and we’ve finally started to admit to ourselves that even if we have a ton of friends, by about age 25 you’re no longer going to the same house parties as your college friends anymore and seeing them every weekend — they’ve started moving away, coupling up, having kids and while you may have many friends you no longer have a real GROUP of friends.

So we reminisce about our college years and painfully try to schedule a once a year reunion on our Whatsapp channels, while stabbing in the dark scheduling that catch up dinner with the few friends still around.

Maxwell has been open almost 16 months now and for even longer than that we’ve been experimenting with the best way to solve that ultimate problem, to build that sense of community we all look back on so fondly in college and earlier parts of our lives. How do you build an actual group of friends in modern adulthood?

The most valuable thing we’ve done has been putting 9 person, members-only dinners every Monday and Tuesday at the core of our membership program.

It hasn’t been the parties, the salons or intellectual programming — just simple, 3 hour, super small 9-person, members-only dinners that build real connections, a membership integration process with the goal of actually creating camaraderie.

But this wasn’t always the case — we had to evolve our thinking over the past year.

The Story

When we first started Maxwell, and even before we launched, we experimented a ton with how to get the word out about what we were trying to build.

In the 10 or so months leading up to finishing construction we did hard hat tours to pitch the vision.

When we launched we did one big launch week to drive demand and interest. We’ve thrown massive parties with tons of cool people. We’ve done curated dinners with prospective members to meet existing members and get a taste for what membership is like. We started rituals like First Fridays.

And we launched intellectual salons and discussion groups with prestigious organizations.

While all these have been a lot of fun, generated revenue and provided reasons for members to come to the space, all these have frankly been mediocre at best at recruiting NEW members.

An Initial Focus on Curation

Initially we thought that the key to scaling Maxwell was to create as many curated opportunities to meet amazing people as possible. Curated parties, curated salons, curated dinners.

Curation, curation, curation. People would “get it” if we just got as many amazing people as possible in the room at the same time.

But for the big parties people would think, “Ok, lots of attractive people and a beautiful space . . . but why join for parties, there are lots of places to party in the city.”

During the dinners guests would meet good people but . . . maybe they also met good people at a dinner at their friend’s spot the week before that they didn’t have to pay a monthly membership fee to attend . . . why should they join . . .

Salon attendees would appreciate the intellectual discussion but maybe they already belonged to a couple other salon or discussion groups or book clubs.

Yes, we got members from these various events, but they tended to be people predisposed to our pitch already, they weren’t necessarily seeing so much as they were believing.

We realized we had a problem — if what we were showing off every night, highly highly curated events, wasn’t convincing people to join, maybe this wasn’t in fact what they were looking for.

After some soul searching we came to a pretty big conclusion — we realized people don’t want to just attend a great event with great people.

People Want To Join A Group of Friends

Our job wasn’t curation, cool people get invited to plenty of curated events.

It wasn’t even make friends, the average socially functional person might have plenty of friends.

The job was to form a cohesive friend GROUP.

Even amazing people have trouble keeping a local friend group together.

We realized we had been so focused on curating amazing events and parties we had lost the plot a bit — a series of events doesn’t make up a community, or even add to it unless you’ve properly integrated that community.

A 20 person dinner where 18 of the members who attended actually knew each other super well converted the 2 new attendees to membership. But a 20 person dinner that was only half members, and the members hadn’t all met each other yet, converted no one.

So a couple months ago we decided to refocus.

We started doing members-only 9 person dinners every Monday and Tuesday. The mission was simple — by the end of summer, we wanted every member to know another 50 members through attending 5 dinners each.

Stitch the community together, person by person.

Why 9 people, why not 30? Why members only — if the purpose was to expand membership why not include prospective members?

We basically realized we had to eat our Wheaties, we had to “do the work” — the focus shouldn’t be on recruiting new members AT ALL — it should be on binding together a group of existing members so tight that someone looks in and goes “I want to be a part of THAT.” The focus should be on creating the ultimate group of friends.

A 30 person dinner was too big — it invariably became a room full of individual conversations, and you’d leave meeting a couple new people — but a 9 person dinner is small enough that there could be one conversation at the table and you’d actually meet 8 new people that night.

And if the point was bonding, getting ahead of ourselves and including people who weren’t fully bought in yet (prospective members), or trying to bond too many people together at the same time simply didn’t work.

We had to do the unscalable work, no shortcuts.

The Score Takes Care Of Itself

The lesson of Bill Walsh’s great book on football is ultimately that if you stick to the basics, the score will take care of itself — you don’t try to “win a Super Bowl” you just learn how to block and tackle and refine your skills, and at the end of the day if you nail the basics, you succeed with the higher order goals.

What we realized is that when you create an actual group of friends, the recruiting takes care of itself. People can sense when they walk into a house party and they are one of the few people who doesn’t know a lot of other people. They can sense the camaraderie that they aren’t a part of. They can sense the in-group that they aren’t included in, and they want to join.

And if a member reaches 50 connections with fellow members, when they show up at one of the bigger parties they will not only feel more at home as they recognize a bunch of people, they’ll be able to be community nodes, connecting new members to other members they know, scaling the communities hosting capabilities, recruiting new members.

Just do the actual job of binding a community together and the recruiting takes care of itself.

The community binding naturally leads to community building.

Community Not Utility

We’ve been adamant about never making a utility play from the beginning — we didn’t want to be a glorified co-working space, a restaurant or a gym. We felt that if someone joined because they could post up with their laptop, it would be fake product market fit — they didn’t want to join the community they wanted a cheap co-working spot. So we eliminated those services — Maxwell is only open weekday evenings and weekend all day, in short, the social hours, and we don’t have a restaurant or a gym. People who join do so for the right reasons, community.

But on some level we realized we had still been playing the utility game — by focusing too much on fireside chats, or big parties, or cocktail hours we were still providing a utility, one of connecting people yes, or of partying or creating opportunities for one’s social life, utility that was certainly CLOSER to our community mission, but a utility nonetheless.

Our focus on creating this group of friends, this real core community, is the final evolution in following our own anti-utility propaganda and embracing the fact that the real reason people are joining Maxwell is to belong.

As always, follow us on Instagram and apply for membership here.

David, Kyle, Joelle

Some of this is for obvious reasons — I’m a Jewish founder as is Joelle, and both Kyle and Joelle grew up in New Zealand and Germany respectively and I have EU citizenship — communities tend to be built around overlapping venn diagrams of similarities, so it isn’t exactly shocking that the identity of many Maxwell members overlap with our own.

But I think there is a deeper explanation other than just our personal identities — I think there is a reason that each of these demographics just seems to “get it” easier than others.

Expats often come from countries with frankly more social cohesion and tradition — if you’re Spanish you may belong to a Txoko, a small eating club where you cook your own food prevalent in San Sebastian, Spain, or an old school British social club that has done a better job of standing the test of time than the U.S. ones.

The act of simply being in a foreign land also means you are more adventurous, and gives you extra impetus to find your own people — many of my friends most happy and community filled times in their post-college life were actually when they were abroad, one of a few Westerners in China, as they fell into an instant community of all the other lost and confused foreigners. They didn’t belong, but they didn’t belong together.

Jews have been othered for so long that there is a degree of “expat” feeling built in from a young age — post October 7th there is a camaraderie I haven’t ever experienced before but underlies a deep bond. Despite not being bar mitzvah’d and having a non-Jewish mother, when I moved to New York 6+ years ago my Jewish friends immediately started inviting me to shabbats, Purim parties and various Jewish galas.

I hadn’t experienced such a degree of people wanting to do something for you simply because you were “one of us.” But as many Jews are secular and don’t consider synagogue to be the center of their spiritual or social life I know many feel as if they also don’t have community centers.

Post October 7th I’m happy to say we’ve become a real hub for that community.

Good startup founders are also creative thinkers who are open to new ideas — the article I wrote a few weeks ago about our biggest challenge being the narrative, the lack of a good community schema for someone to latch onto when they are trying to understand what exactly it is we are doing, makes it obvious that perhaps the entrepreneurs most likely to consider wacky new ideas might be able to most understand what it is we’re doing.

Aside from those major three, there are some other smaller trends we’ve noticed — MBAs spend 3-5 years without a college community post graduation before getting it on steroids all over again for 2 years and seem to also understand and have bought into the idea of joining something mainly for the smart people and community involved. People who have been in a fraternity or sorority, and sometimes people who have gone to specific schools like Princeton or Harvard that have a tradition of eating clubs or finals clubs, also seem to just “get it.”

Our goal is that our message can reach more than just this demographic of course, but it’s always good to look at your early adopters and ask why, and we’ve been fascinated by the centers of gravity in our community.

As always, sign up for membership here and follow us on Instagram here.

David, Kyle & Joelle

This was the latest in a huge effort we’ve begun at Maxwell to make our spot the center of intellectual discussion and high culture in the city.

I’ve previously written about how much I hate the faux intellectual and cultural programming that much of our city institutions engages in when I spoke about my cringe-worthy experience with Chainmail Breakdancing at The Met’s Apollo Circle.

In summary, I think most intellectual and cultural events are full of people who think they SHOULD like this stuff instead of actually like this stuff. Most junior councils for whatever museum or arts org are full of people who mostly want to go to a swanky party and pretend they are Blair Waldorf in the city because they are clinking champagne glasses at The Whitney. The attendees at the classical music concert are really just trying to impress the girl they brought, the participants in most “salons” are really mostly interested in hearing themselves talk.

I’ve had a fear of doing anything performative at Maxwell — I took ballet when I was little, and I almost became a classical musician out of high school (practiced 5 hours a day at one point), so I almost view anyone pretending to do something cultural or artsy or intellectual without really understanding what people in that world want as bordering on cultural appropriation.

So it has been a mission of ours to build TRUE cultural and intellectual programming into the backbone of what we are doing at Maxwell, and the Open to Debate partnership was just the most recent.

One of our member’s, Johnathan Bi, recently released a lecture series that he’d filmed mostly at Maxwell with a live audience consisting of members and friends focused on all the Great Books. Johnathan left his position as Joe Lonsdale’s Chief of Staff to investigate our “intellectual heritage” and create this lecture series, which he recently announced here at GreatBooks.io.

We’re working on a fireside chat series with UATX, the startup university out of Austin that Joe Lonsdale and Niall Ferguson started, after already doing two events with them last year.

And several prominent foreign relations, cultural exchange and political think tanks are starting to throw regular events at Maxwell and making it their second home.

The Open to Debate night was an example of another tenet — engagement, not consumption.

If you wanted to listen to a lecture on philosophy you could just, well, listen to Johnathan’s lectures online. Open to Debate has a podcast with their Oxford style debates. There are plenty of opportunities for pure learning, to have someone talk AT you, instead of WITH you.

But the point of being in the room is to not just consume but engage, to be able to ask questions, to discuss whats going on with like minded people in the room with you, to meet fellow travelers who share the same passions and interests you do.

As we grow we’ll continue adding more and more intellectually engaging partnerships to our programming, please reach out if you represent one of those types of orgs and have something creative you’d like to discuss, and as always, we’re looking for our own intellectual fellow travelers so apply for membership here, and follow us on Instagram here.

David, Kyle & Joelle

No. The biggest challenge is that it is hard for most of our generation to comprehend what we are doing because if you are a millennial +/-10-20 years, you haven’t experienced a truly positive community model — most of us didn’t grow up in a small town, rituals around churches and synagogues were not as core to our generation’s upbringing, we didn’t have our prom after party at the local American Legion or Kiwanis club and our fathers weren’t part of a bowling league or the local Italian American Mens Club.

But our mind operates on schemas, X for Y, Uber for Groceries, and it’s hard to paint a picture using analogies without capturing many of the negative stereotypes attached to our formal community models as well.

If I say Maxwell is kind of like a secular synagogue someone might go “ew is he starting a cult?” If I say it is like a Harvard Finals Club, Princeton Eating Club or a college Fraternity/Sorority they might say “ok so he’s an overgrown frat boy.” If I use the words private club, many down to earth people roll their eyes as they have heard the pitches for Zero Bond and Casa Cipriani and tune us out immediately.

It’s a narrative minefield.

The fact that our generation (I’m 36) hasn’t had very many good positive examples of non-douchey, non-misogynistic, non homophobic community structures has proven by FAR the most challenging hurdle to overcome as we build membership.

There is a loneliness crisis, 1 out of 5 millennials say they have no close friends and 3-7 years are taken off the average life span due to loneliness, but how do you get a generation who has never experienced positive community models to realize they need it?

Bundling & Unbundling

There is a famous line by an executive named Jim Barksdale about the only two ways to make money in business is bundling and unbundling.

He was referring to examples like Tower Records 12 song albums unbundling to individual iTunes songs, re-bundling back to an all-inclusive Spotify, but it holds true for community as well.

I think a lot about a friend who approached my cofounder a couple years ago and said she didn’t “get it” — was Maxwell for romance, friendship or career, which one?!

I thought it was the perfect question to illustrate our generation’s misunderstanding around what community actually is — you would never join a Church or the Italian American club and ask that — you could get all three, or none, of those things from your experience, but you joined because you believed the overall experience of belonging to one of these organizations could deliver happiness across a bunch of different spectrums.

I realized we had unbundled our community experience.

We now go to Tinder for sex, Hinge for relationships, Chief/YPO/EO/Hampton/Round for career, Bumble BFF for friendship .

50 years ago when you joined a synagogue you didn’t ask the Rabbi if the purpose of the synagogue was to find you a co-founder. But if you were a member for 10 years you may very well find the love of your life, your business partner AND a bunch of friends as well!

Our generation doesn’t get how communities should work.

Real communities are bundles, and Maxwell is a bet that we can assemble a modern (non-racist, non-homophobic, non-religious, non sexist) community bundle again.

The Loneliness Epidemic

This deserves an entire other post but I’ve been reading the book “The Genius of Israel” recently and there were so many aha moments around community, but in short Israel’s happiness index is regularly in the top 10 despite having rockets launched at it regularly, and their rate of suicides and depression is one of the lowest in the world.

The key? A sense of national identity and community that leads people to see the military draft not as a requirement but a right — people are in despair if they aren’t allowed to serve in the IDF because it is such a core part of the national identity that people feel robbed of being able to belong to a country when they are prevented from participating in one of its core rituals.

One of the most attacked countries in the world has made their othering into a strength — if the world insists on a constant struggle of us vs them, they’ve used it to build a solid sense of “us.”

The key isn’t more technology or better mental health professionals it is a sense of belonging and the purpose people get from it — in short Israelis are simply less lonely than most every other modern democracy and it’s the overriding factor in their happiness.

Both Revolutionary & Derivative

There is a strain of conservative reactionary thought that recognizes a lot of what I’m saying and goes “yes, 100% agree, and this is why we have to bring back Christianity.”

I don’t believe that’s the right way to think about it.

Bundles unbundle because the former bundle doesn’t make sense anymore — why buy the entire Taylor Swift album from Tower Records if you really only want to listen to Shake It Off on repeat.

The bundle of Christianity, with its community yes, but also its problems with the role of women and LGBTQ communities, politicization, outdated social rules and more, have become less and less relevant to younger generations.

The key isn’t to cling to old models and apply a fresh coat of paint, but honor those models, learn from them, and iterate.

I often say Maxwell is both revolutionary and derivative at the same time — if you compare us to Zero Bond and Casa Cipriani what we’re doing seems downright quirky and liberal.

But if you look at how literally every other community was run 50 years ago, you could say we’re deeply conservative, modeling the club off the models that have worked for thousands of years.

Our generation has been searching for the new key to happiness and the answer is simply that it’s what it has always been — a sense of purpose in belonging to a community.

Over the last year I’ve stopped using those analogies as much as I used to — I’ve started speaking more in feelings and aspirations — every person has a community fantasy.

For some of us it’s the urge to buy a bar with your friends. I’ve also heard the “we should all move to the same cul-de-sac” community fantasy, and the “lets all pick the same retirement home” fantasy.

For everyone it’s different but everyone is trying to recapture that sense of belonging and comfort and sense of home that some of us had during college, but all of us desire at our core.

Maxwell is our community fantasy, a spot full of socially functional nerds who like to talk about real things, a spot that hosts both Friday house parties and nuclear risk game nights, is home for dinner discussions on global warming and ice luges, our high-brow/low-brow fantasy clubhouse.

If this intrigues you at all, throw us a membership application, we’re always keen to connect with people who have been searching for what we’re building.

Cheers,

David, Kyle & Joelle

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When we first started Maxwell an early question we had to ask ourselves was whether or not we’d have lower prices for women. I was told that women were used to drinking for free, and that it would simply be harder to convert women as members if we didn’t account for this societal reality.

The women drink free thing has always bothered me and reminded me of a famous saying in the tech industry usually attributed to Facebook and social networks: If you aren’t paying, you are the product.

I always think of one of my few true New York nightclub experiences, a spur of the moment decision after a big group dinner on a Tuesday. Of the group that joined it was mostly women and me and one other guy, curious to experience a particularly infamous club we had heard a lot about. At the door all the women were let in for free and my friend and I had to pay $100 each. When we found our friends they had been placed at a table with a bunch of guys who had purchased bottle service. The guys were gracious enough to let us hang out there too, but it was a weird experience — it was almost like along with the bottle of Grey Goose they also provided women as part of the service.

But in the same way I rolled my eyes at people who wouldn’t pay for Facebook adopting a “how dare they” attitude to Facebook’s advertising endeavors, I’ve also always thought it was a bit rich when someone insists that no, no, they weren’t part of the package, nothing to see here . . .

This societal dynamic was a worry of ours when we first started — it’s important as an entrepreneur to take the world as it is, not as you’d like it to be, and taking a moral stance on equality if it was just simply not the way the world worked wasn’t going to get us anywhere.

We’ve thankfully found the opposite to be true — it turns out there are PLENTY of women who don’t love the weird expectations and transactional nature of nightlife. There are plenty of women who don’t want to accept a free drink from a man because it might give them the wrong idea/make them feel obligated.

If anything, this has sorted more elegantly on the type of members we want around — equal partners, not moochers. And ironically by eliminating this opportunity for guys to simply “pay” for the attention of women, it attracts better guys too — men with an actual personality instead of men who rely on a 5k bottle service to bribe women to give them a chance to talk to them.

Our fear that “this was the way the world worked” was unfounded.

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And we’ve extended this to our view on celebrity memberships as well — when we first started we dangled some free memberships to notable people. It served its purpose, it helped get some much needed sponsorship dollars so I don’t regret it, and we made a few new friends that way, and the ones who didn’t ultimately resonate just disappeared.

But recently we’ve received a few inbound requests from notable people to get free memberships and we’ve said no. Often they or their reps make the point that they got free memberships at Casa Cipriani/Soho House/Zero Bond, etc., and they’d expect the same from us.

On one level it makes sense — some of these people literally get appearance fees, you could argue that charging them to show up when they usually make money to show up simply doesn’t make sense.

But that’s exactly the point — when they get an appearance fee they are the product!

These celebs will bitch and moan about how they don’t have privacy anywhere but then flock to a place that offers them a free membership because it is literally using their celebrity status to get Page 6 mentions and entertain random gawkers who want to say they saw Tom Brady in the corner booth.

We’ve taken a pretty radical stance — no free memberships for celebs, no discounts for women.

We think it’s a high risk, high reward strategy — it means that we gave up a bunch of chances to hang out with famous people, yes, and I’m sure there are a bunch of women who can get free drinks at Marquee who will not be coming to Maxwell as often.

When it comes to getting the word out this has certainly made our job harder.

But that’s ok, because slow and intentional growth with members around for the right reasons is more important than rapid, unfocused growth catering to the wrong type of customer — we’ve realized there are plenty of women and celebs who are more than willing to buy-in on an equal footing and those are the new friends we want to make.

If you’re one of those friends membership applications are here, and follow along on instagram:

Cheers,

David, Kyle & Joelle

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Below are some of the highlights from the year and what we’re excited about going forwards.

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The High Brow Highlights

We’re JUST kicking off our intellectual programming but have hosted the Austin University affiliated Cosmos institute and are the NYC home for Johnathan Bi’s philosophy lecture series as he films out an amazing set of content for the next couple years.

The massive success of these two events and some smaller intellectual discussion series led to us literally hiring a head of book clubs and dinner discussions as an actual position, and we can’t be more stoked to build this out in the new year — the goal is 30 dinner discussions, lectures and book clubs, mostly on Sundays and Mondays, to feed the brain of our members and meet more intellectually curious prospective new members.

Intentional Sports & Entertainment Programming

We started figuring out how we want to do our interest programming and have divided it into a Head of Sports and Entertainment Partnerships and a Head of Industry Partnerships (more career, tech, vc, etc. kind of dinners, etc).

This was colored by a couple amazing events, one a member inspired F1 Watch Party for the Mexico Grand Prix together with Red Bull bringing in Driver Simulators . . .

And the other was an amazing party with Andy Roddick and Chase Travel for the U.S. Open Quarterfinals.

How we partnered with forward thinking orgs to launch unique, intentional content that was still highly personal is how we’re scaling going forward.

The Low Brow Highlights

It wouldn’t be a social club if there weren’t parties, and boy did we have parties — we got to know Faces for Radio . . .

And Hot Date (twice) . . .

Helped Beau Cruz launch his song . . .

And even got a couple members of NSYNC performing in the space.

This year was about building the foundations.

Next year will be about growing Maxwell Tribeca into an amazing community with the most enviable programming, the most beautiful space in the city and most importantly, the best people.

Thanks for an amazing year, throw us an application and follow us on Instagram, and looking forward to meeting you in the new year.

Cheers,

David, Kyle, Joelle

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