A Physical Social Network℠

Yesterday, I saw a news headline to the effect of Mark Zuckerberg acquires 9-month-old startup for $2 billion. It’s hard not to feel small in comparison. We’ve been building Tavern for around three years, starting as grassroots community organizing, evolving into social and professional events, and then launching a membership program this past July, and it’s been successful but obviously not nearly on the scale of the headlines.

Many people spend not just three years but ten or twenty, or their entire lives, working on a project or a dream and don’t see the fruits of their labor for a long time – or ever. Artists are the best example of this. Van Gogh sold only one painting in his life – by any reasonable metric, he was not a successful artist in his lifetime. Yet here, after just 9 months, these founders have made billions.

But the idea that I’ve outlined here of measuring success in terms of achievement is just a framework that we’ve constructed, and there’s a better way to think about it.

There’s a beautiful interview with Kobe Bryant on the idea of failure. Here’s an excerpt:

I play to figure things out … Failure, it doesn’t exist … It’s a figment of your imagination … Everybody wants a happy ending, right? Let’s go through the reality of it, let’s look at a fairy tale, like Snow White. She gets a happy ending, she finds the prince … I call ****** on that, because two months later, the fact is they have an argument, and he’s sleeping on the couch. The point is the story continues, so if you fail on Monday, the only way it’s a failure on Monday is if you decide to not progress from that [on Tuesday] …

[Even if I had finished my entire career without winning a single championship, I would not have looked at that as failure] … I would look at it as being extremely disappointed because I had a dream, and I had goals that I wanted to accomplish, and if I don’t accomplish those goals, I have to ask myself why … poor leadership, failure to communicate properly with my teammates, have them put in positions to be successful, lack of preparation … if that was the case in my career, I have to sit, and I have to analyze that, and then, as I moved and evolved post-basketball into business or whatever, those same weaknesses are going to reveal themselves there. So if I don’t learn from that, I’m going to struggle here too. So I can take those situations and learn from those and have them make me a better person later in life. But if I don’t take that stuff and apply that someplace else, then that is [true] failure, which to me is the worst possible thing you could ever have – is to stop and not learn.

In the case of the founders who just got $2 billion, ‘success’ isn’t final; the story continues. It’s only now that the founders starts their journey of self-discovery, of who you are and who you become when you become a billionaire overnight. How will they treat their friends and family? Will their relationships even survive this sudden change of fortune? Will they make sound use of the money and use this opportunity to positively contribute to the world, or will they squander the money and the opportunity to do good and just buy a private island and sip margaritas?

For all the rest of us, any failures we’ve had are opportunities to grow; our stories continue, too. Didn’t hit your revenue milestones in 2025? Have a relationship that atrophied? Missed an important deadline? Reached for the potato chips instead of the celery sticks? Lost your cool when you shouldn’t have? The story continues, as long as you keep learning and commit to making yourself better today than you were yesterday.

Wishing our entire community a happy and healthy new year.

Cheers,

Benji Schwartz