Nightlife Lessons
How I Conquered the Business of Partying with Tech and a Glimpse into Its Future
Nightlife Lessons derives business wisdom from time spent behind the scenes at some of the hottest spots in New York City.
Drawing on time spent in New York City’s exclusive nightlife industry, entrepreneur Shane Neman’s business book Nightlife Lessons makes recommendations that apply across the business world.
After studying medicine, Neman, who had loved nightclubs since his childhood, decided to found and run a multimillion-dollar online platform that aimed to disrupt the nightclub events sector. Here, he shares his story about taking calculated risks and becoming a successful venture capitalist. He catered to celebrity clients, threw glamorous parties, and sold consumer information to major brands.
Neman was prone to questioning conventional industry wisdom, too, including the idea that nightlife events should be exclusive. In building his business, he adopted the perspective that it would be more profitable to appeal to a mass audience—and was rewarded for taking such chances. Still, he proceeded in a trial-and-error manner and made discoveries such as that high-roller clients delivered lower returns because of the time, energy, and money devoted to them.
The book contains dishy anecdotes about musicians, actors, promoters, club kids, drag queens, ravers, and mafia types. These colorful personalities leave strong impressions despite their brief appearances in the book. But in detailing the parties themselves, the prose is more abstract and generalized. Still, these active passages make the book’s predictions about the future of the nightlife industry, and its recommendations for how the industry should evolve, seem more credible, even if they extrapolate too much from present trends, as when the book puts stock in emerging technologies that have already have fizzled out.
More generally applicable are the book’s perceptive analyses of trade-offs and opportunity costs for business owners. It ponders big-picture issues like work-life balance and forming an identity outside of work. And in the end, Neman convincingly argues that any business can be transformed in the same way that his was. To illustrate this, he ends each chapter by sharing the widely applicable lessons that he learned from his experiences. Some of these lessons are aphoristic; one is a well-known, unattributed quote. Such familiar notions are often refreshed with personal details, though, including about Neman’s frenetic lifestyle. And the book concludes with an appendix that reiterates its takeaways for easy reference.
A memoir that contains insightful business advice, Nightlife Lessons derives wisdom from time spent behind the scenes at some of the hottest spots in New York City.
Reviewed by
Joseph S. Pete
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
