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.

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

Dawn is a former Washington State Representative and a founding member of Vantage. Those are the facts, and they are not the point.

When she arrived on Thursday, she told me exactly what she was there to do. Some people walk into a party hoping to meet as many people as possible. Dawn was looking for two. Two right people, and she would have done what she came for.

Before she left, she found me to report back. She had her person. We need him, she told me, and he needs us. That sentence is the entire Vantage thesis, delivered in eight words by the most intentional person in the room.

And let me be clear about what kind of elder Dawn is. She is not a quiet presence in a corner. She is loud in the best way, a woman who does not mince words because she knows exactly who she is. Confidence like that gives a whole room permission to be honest.

I built Vantage because I believe rooms like Thursday should exist on purpose, not by accident. Watching Dawn work taught me something I did not have words for yet. Software can choose an introduction. It takes an elder to show a room what intention looks like.

Dawn, I am honored you were in the room. You called yourself the elder in the room, and you were right. Every network needs one. Ours is lucky it is you.

This piece was first published on The Vantage Point. Read the full version at https://www.joinvantage.co/vantage-point/the-elder-in-the-room

Vantage is not a networking group. It is a curated room. That has been the line since the site went up, and it has taken every choice we have made along the way to make it real.

Thursday night was the first time that room existed in one place.

Founding members came in from every corner of Seattle's professional life. Athletes and operators. Founders and physicians. Public leaders and creatives. Some of these people had crossed paths for years without an introduction that mattered. Vantage exists because those introductions should not be left to chance.

We took the 25th floor at Harbor Steps because the view is the argument. You can see the water, the stadiums, the cranes, the mountains, and the neighborhoods that most of the people in the room have been shaping for a decade. It reads as a city that is worth staying in and worth building for.

Every choice we made that night was a decision to remove friction that most events accept as unavoidable. Standing food is not a feature. Waiting at a bar is not a feature. Those things exist because most rooms are optimized for volume, not for the conversation inside them. We optimized the other way.

There is a phrase we use internally at Vantage that I would not put on the website. It is eye-level introductions. An eye-level introduction is one where neither person needs the other to be impressed. That is the only introduction worth making, and it is nearly impossible to manufacture at a networking mixer. The whole product Vantage is building sits on the belief that a curated room, hosted well, does that job on its own.

Thursday was the proof.

This piece was first published on The Vantage Point. Read the full version, including who was in the room, at https://www.joinvantage.co/vantage-point/what-we-built-at-harbor-steps