Inclusive Exclusivity - Self-Cancelling Greek Life And Our Broken Vocabulary Around Curation (Cafe Society Dinner Discussion #11)

It struck me that there is a third way between opening everything up to everyone and simply keeping traditional staid institutions & models — finding a way to have an inclusive system that allows for intimacy & curation (read: “exclusivity”) within it. Sofar Sounds as a system is incredibly inclusive. An individual Sofar Sounds event is incredibly ... See more

Within the next three years, there will be 4x as many citizen developers as professional developers, creating half a billion business apps. As the market becomes more lucrative, the competition among tech giants heats up.

At Airtable, we struggled with the high hurdle rate for the product: unlike SaaS products like Zoom, Dropbox, or Slack, Airtable’s product is incredibly complex. That Airtable has had such strong bottom-up adoption for such a horizontal, versatile product is astonishing. A key challenge for Airtable and its counterparts will be how to communicate t... See more

I felt that exclusivity & elitism had been unfairly conflated, but we’ve since stopped using the word exclusive because we realized that it created too many misunderstandings, and instead shifted our rhetoric in the direction of “curation.”

We recognized that there is nothing wrong with curating a crowd for a social club or an organization based on shared interests, motivations, identities, and yes, even ability to pay.

Exclusivity based on if you can afford something is not going away as long as we have a capitalist society. FOMO and exclusivity/curation is a natural part of how we gather, and trying abolish it is not a worthwhile endeavor, but the best institutions aim for a concept that I first heard expressed at Sofar Sounds — Inclusive Exclusivity.

At Maxwell we’re trying to reframe social clubs to be around this idea of inclusive exclusivity - you may not be able to get into the Soho Maxwell, maybe it’s full or you just aren’t friends with those people. Or maybe you can’t afford it, but that’s ok because we’re creating a system within which multiple Maxwells can be started at various price p... See more