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. The Shop, the SODO country club for car enthusiasts, signed as our founding flagship, with more rooms joining at the launch. 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.
Which brings me to the part I am proudest of, and the part that changes the culture.
At the front of Vantage is a free public directory of Seattle businesses and nonprofits. Hundreds are already listed, at no cost to them, ever, built to be found by the AI answer engines people actually ask now. The memberships fund it. We call it the civic engine: the membership is the fuel, the directory is what it powers, and it feeds the city.
Here is why that matters beyond the listings. Our industry's default culture has always been taking and gatekeeping. What do I get for my dues. Who is allowed in. Vantage flips the default: giving is top of mind, structurally, from day one. The first thing our members' money does is make other people findable. Not as charity, as architecture. Giving first is how you become trusted in a world drowning in noise, and trust is the only moat left that holds.
The curation does not go away. The room is still by application, the introductions are still made by hand, and the clubs still get to be exactly what they are, which is wonderful. Depth in one room. What is new is the and: one membership that connects the rooms, and a front door the whole city can walk through for free.
So that is the bet, and it is the question we are throwing a party about on July 23:
What if the new competition was collaboration?
If you run a room in this city, we built this for you too. And if you run a business anywhere in Seattle: the directory is free, it always will be, and your listing is waiting.