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

Then ninety minutes later, that same restaurant brings a tablet to your table, spins it toward you, and seven people you came with watch you choose a tip percentage.

One of those is a screen problem. It's not the one everybody is writing about.

I've been in restaurants since I was sixteen. Philadelphia first, working around chefs whose names you'd know, then San Jose, then private clubs on the West Coast, then Seattle. Fifteen years of standing in dining rooms watching what actually makes a night good or bad. So when the phone ban conversation started up again, I had opinions ready.

What hospitality is, before we argue about anything else

Service is what you do. Hospitality is anticipating the need before the guest has it.

That's the whole job. Mr. Smith walks in, and the greeting is "happy anniversary, let me take you to your favorite table." Nobody told him he was getting his table. He didn't ask. Somebody noticed a year ago and wrote it down, and now it's a Tuesday in September and he feels known.

Now run the other version. Mr. Smith walks in and the first sentence out of anyone's mouth is a list of what he can't do.

You've started his night with a no. And you made a nineteen-year-old deliver it.

The enforcement problem nobody plans for

Remember 2020, when we had young hostesses trying to make sixty-year-old men put masks on? Men who would not have asked that same girl for directions to the parkway?

That went badly. It went badly everywhere. And it wasn't a policy problem, it was a training-and-power problem, and the policy just exposed it.

Your phone ban does the exact same thing. If you haven't trained your team to handle the pushback, from a real place, with a real script and real backup from a manager who will walk over, then what you've written is not a rule. It's an ambush you scheduled for your youngest employee.

Where it actually works, and why

There's a bar in Philadelphia called Hop Sing Laundromat. My friend Lee owns it. It's nationally famous, and the no-phone thing there is absolute.

It works. It works beautifully.

Here's why: Lee sets the stage at the door. The whole thing is theater, he greets you himself, and the rule isn't an interruption of the experience, the rule is the experience. You don't stumble into Hop Sing. You go there knowing. People line up for it.

Then there's Green Bank, West Virginia, where the cell towers are effectively off and the town markets itself as a place to disappear. Also extreme. Also works, for the same reason. Nobody drives to Green Bank by accident.

The pattern: it works when the guest chose it. It fails when you sprang it.

And there's a version I love that costs almost nothing. A sign near the door, artfully done, about being present with the people you came with. No pouch. No host confrontation. You've put the decision back in the guest's hands, which is the one move here that doesn't violate what hospitality means.

Now the part nobody is saying

The tip tablet is worse than every phone at the table combined.

A server carries it over mid-conversation. The table goes quiet. Somebody has to figure out who's paying, which is its own small negotiation, and then that person takes the tablet and everybody watches. They watch the screen. They watch the percentages. They watch which one you pick.

It used to be a check in a folder. You left it, and whoever wanted it took it, and maybe that took ten minutes and that was fine. Ten minutes of nobody being reminded that this was a transaction.

I used to be able to hand my card to somebody and keep talking. You can't anymore. Now the meal ends with a device, a decision, and an audience.

So if you're going to tell people to put their phones away in the name of presence, start with the screen you own. The one you bring to the table yourself.

The math nobody wants to hear

Restaurants never had margin. Not before COVID, not after, not now with what wages and food cost.

Seattle specifically is having a hard time filling seats. Philadelphia is booming and can maybe afford an experiment. Most rooms cannot. And if you are already fighting for covers, adding one more thing a guest has to agree to before they sit down is a strange place to spend your goodwill.

I'm not defending the phones, by the way. I think they have hurt high-end cocktail bars, because the bartender is supposed to be the entertainment and it's hard to be the show when everyone's looking down. And I'm as guilty as anyone. I have video of fireworks on my phone that I have watched exactly zero times. Who is that for?

But a societal problem showed up in your dining room. It didn't start there, and a pouch on a podium isn't going to solve it.

What I'd do instead

Train the team, not the guest. Give your staff language for the table that's being loud or filming, and give them a manager who backs them up in the moment. That's four hours of work, one time.

Kill the tip tablet presentation, or at least stop spinning it around. Bring it face down. Leave it. Walk away.

And go find the things that make someone feel noticed. The anniversary. The favorite table. The drink that's already coming because you remembered. People put their phones down on their own when the room is more interesting than the screen.

That's not a policy. That's a standard, and standards are a management problem, which means it's fixable.

I spent fifteen years running rooms like yours, including as the youngest executive at the Columbia Tower Club. Now I walk into other people's dining rooms and say the four things nobody on your payroll can say to you.

See how that works.

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