Collaboration is the new competition

I spent seven years inside great rooms.

Private clubs in Philadelphia, San Jose, and Seattle. Most recently the Columbia Tower Club, seventy six floors up, the best view in the city. I ran those rooms, and I loved them. I still do. A great club is not a luxury product. It is a place where a handshake means something, where your kids meet your mentor, where the city does business face to face. The rooms are magic.

But from the inside, I watched the same thing everywhere I went: strong rooms full of remarkable people, all competing for the same members, none of them connected to each other. Not because anyone was doing anything wrong. Because nobody had ever built the layer between them.

Then the Columbia Tower Club closed, and Seattle did not just lose a club. It lost connective tissue. The people never went anywhere. The thing connecting them did.

There were two possible answers to that. One was to build another room and join the competition. The other was the one I could not stop thinking about: yes, and.

Yes to the clubs. And the layer that connects them.

That is Vantage. It is not built against the city's rooms, it is built with them. Your Vantage membership includes a home base at the club that actually fits your life, and the network does what no single room could do alone: it makes the introductions on purpose, across every room in the city.

And Vantage was not built by a company. It was built by its founding members. The old club's board leadership came back for this. Former Police Chief Carmen Best signed on as our Founding Civic Anchor. Founders, artists, athletes, operators. The people who make a room worth being in decided to build the thing that connects the rooms.

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This piece was first published on The Vantage Point. Read the full version, including the part I am proudest of, at https://www.joinvantage.co/vantage-point/collaboration-is-the-new-competition