Nightlife Lessons
How I Conquered the Business of Partying with Tech and a Glimpse into Its Future
Everything Shane Neman needed to know about business and life he learned in the gritty, chaotic New York City nightclub scene.
In Nightlife Lessons, Neman gives you the opportunity to go behind the velvet ropes so you can too. With keen insight, humor, and heart, the three-time startup founder and venture capitalist expresses in this surprising business book how grit and aspirational thinking can remake any industry.
In the days before social media and camera phones—just after his failed first business—Neman had no capital but a big idea: elevate the outdated event promotion and hospitality worlds into the digital age. The answer is JoonBug, which blended his love of partying and nose for technology to become a multimillion-dollar stepping stone to serial entrepreneurship and even a stable, loving personal life.
Neman's network includes a wide range of players: drag queens, ravers, club kids, and celebs; the business set and bridge-and-tunnel partiers; and New York's club owners and event promoters. Using Neman’s tech innovations, all find each other at an assortment of venues, from dilapidated warehouses to Swarovski-studded alcoves of luxury. Nightlife Lessonsis packed with thoughtful takeaways from Neman's rise to the top, ideas for how the industry should continue to grow, and predictions for partying in the years to come as tech keeps changing.
Neman’s road to business success is an inspirational journey through New York’s hot spots. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere . . . and take it with you everywhere.
Shane Neman
Shane Neman is a serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and real estate developer. After dropping out of NYU Medical School and failing at his first startup during the tech-bubble bust of the early 2000s, Neman started over. He built his second venture, JoonBug, into a multimillion-dollar digital events powerhouse that thoroughly disrupted the outdated events and hospitality industry. He subsequently founded a successful SaaS business, EZ Texting, the largest business SMS software platform in the United States.
Now, as a venture capitalist, Neman is a prolific backer of startups, including Impossible Foods, Athletic Greens, SandboxAQ, Cirkul, Flexport, Convoy, Prose, Kraken, Obe, Deep Sentinel, Anvyl, Future, MapAnything, VinePair, Hyperice, and Gupshup. He is also an investor, developer, and manager of various real estate properties from commercial shopping and industrial centers to large residential buildings, running a portfolio of over twenty properties in major metropolitan cities across the U.S.
Although a lifelong New Yorker at heart, after thirty-eight years Neman moved to South Florida, where he currently resides with his wife and kids.