There we were, a lonely team of design and tech guys frolicking in the crisp white powder and magisterial wilderness of Powder Mountain in Eden, Utah, when it was announced that Summit Series was building a 500-home village right-smack next door to us—the very first permanent resort in the US dedicated to the exchange of entrepreneurial ideas. Whoa. Imagine our sleepy little town suddenly awash with inventors, artists, technical savants, pants-suited nonprofit founders and Richard Branson, all happily sipping cocoa and possibly flying around with solar-powered jetpacks. It’s all too exciting to think about! Welcome Summit Powder Mountain!
We love Powder Mountain, and we love the buzz and camaraderie of the start-up spirit. We were just beginning to miss all of the excitement of the meet-ups and idea-exchanging opportunities in California, so you can imagine how thrilled we are to have a huge playground of social, artistic and technological innovation right in our back yard.
The idea behind the venture is to give Summit a 365-day-per-year home base. Sure, there will certainly be an exclusive resort, but the community that is built around it will be a kind of social experiment—sort of a NASA/Moulin Rouge/Algonquin Round Table utopia, only with conferences and pitch meetings.
Summit Powder Mountain came to being through the purchase of fairly inexpensive land that was set for massive development in 2005 before the crash of the real estate market made that an empty dream. The majority of the funding came from the sale of plots of land to wealthy investors looking to build vacation homes. The ski resort, the startup investments and the hosting of conferences will likely bring in enough revenue to make the endeavor a profitable enterprise.
Previous Summit Series conferences have been legendarily and conspicuously luxurious and star-studded, all the while raising millions of dollars for modest start-ups and nonprofit organizations. The idea was born of the desire to corral a group of successful business men and women into a conference room so they could talk about their successes and failures to young entrepreneurs who have great ideas but no framework for practical application. Notable speakers have been Mark Cuban, Russel Simmons, Bill Clinton and Ted Turner.
We cannot wait to see what the new ‘hood‘ will look like, and we look forward to possibly being a part of a community bursting with exciting and fresh technical, cultural and social ideas. We work hard. We play hard. We conference hard. And now we’ll welcome Summit Powder Mountain.
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