Does IRL Matter For Community?
Why we won't live in Discords & the negative selection bias around events
Cafe Society is Maxwell Social’s Whenever-I-Have-The-Time-To-Write magazine on the intersection of community, society, web3, F&B and more — an anthropological look at the underpinnings of what makes the world tick and how tech is changing it, written by David Litwak (@dlitwak) and the Maxwell team. Maxwell is building a new type of social club in Tribeca, check out the photos on Instagram, if you’d like to apply go to www.maxwellsocial.com and if you’d like to book an event get in touch here.
The seed of Maxwell Tribeca really started 5 years ago with a dinner series we threw called SupperClub. Inspired by an article I read in Wired by the lovely Kristen Berman about No Small Talk parties, I asked 8 friends if they wanted to throw a “No Small Talk Dinner” and gave them each 3 invites.
It was a hit, and we realized there was something there and decided to scale it up to be a monthly thing — every dinner had 8 cohosts with 5-8 invites. We asked for everyone to share an embarrassing, funny or interesting story in advance and announced the funniest ones at the beginning of the dinner, switched tables in the middle and gave the same spiel at the beginning of every dinner: “You aren’t supposed to discuss sex, politics and religion in front of polite company — this isn’t polite company.” In a year and a half in 2017-2018 that I was traveling between San Francisco, New York and London every month for my first company Mozio, we scaled the dinner series to those three locations, popping up in wealthy angel investors households that were nice enough to let me store all my chafer dishes in their basements. It got so popular that we scaled certain cities up to 2 sittings in a night, 120 people total.
But we quickly noticed a problem…
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David (@dlitwak), Kyle, Joelle, Cara
Love the idea,good on you,if you build it,they will come.