With an experience of hosting events down to nought and only two college degrees collectively, in 2008, Elliott Bisnow, Brett Leve, Jeff Rosenthal, Ryan Begelman and Jeremy Schwartz became the co-founders of one of the top 5 CEO events and conferences beguiling the power business personages of the world – The Summit Series.
Analogous to the other conferences that have gained eminence in the past, like the Apple AI Summit, the Summit Series has held uncountable conferences, thriving into a phenomenon within just its first four years – an invite-only, multi-day-curated conference that feels interminable, professing on business practices, philanthropy, and technological innovations.
Prolific speakers at the past conferences, including the ever-awaited Summit at Sea convention (happening in May 2023) include the industry-wide legends likes of Elon Musk, Bill Clinton, Erin Brockovich, Shonda Rhimes, Quentin Tarantino, Jane Fonda, Marie Konda, Eckhart Tolle, Malcolm Gladwell, Jeff Bezos and many more CEOs and founders galore.
Not more than a decade ago, the eco-conscious group purchased one of the largest ski resorts in Utah, North America, the Powder Mountain affectionately called “Pow Mow” for an incredible $40 million. Across the 5,200 acres of heavy-snowcapped-reliant in-bounds terrain, the plans for the Utah mountain were to be built into the Summit Village.
The ski-trip-for-young-entrepreneurs trope had intensified in Silicon Valley as a “TEDTalks meets Burning Man” palaver. So how did the trustworthy Utah’s Powder Mountain’s utopian dream become a 9000-foot tall monument of just Silicon Valley’s over-exuberant ideas? Has this moonshot fallen just like the ubiquity of the era of Silicon Valley coming to a close – with bank meltdowns, layoffs, and cryptocurrency failures?
Summit Series On Powder Mountain: An Illusion
The Summit organization, which was also the start-up impact investors with early-reckon investments in Uber and Warby Parker, had committed to providing for the environment, civic engagement, criminal justice reform, and homelessness among other causes. Amongst other aspirant entrepreneurs, the Summit founders also tried to make a ski resort on the “upside-down” Powder Mountain work (drive up but ski down).
“We need people pushing past their reservations like never before. We need to be radical creators, protecting our planet and exponentially doing more good.”
When news of maneuverings of the Summit Village broke out, the Summit founders were flooded with implacable national media coverage, mostly tiding on derision. A hyperbole if it may, perhaps, but with Elliot Bisnow’s and his co-founders’ prowess in what they had achieved with the Summit Series at Sea, it didn’t seem too far-fetched.
The young men behind the massive nonpareil would usually be hobnobbing the guests or playing the perfect hosts. But in 2012’s Lake Tahoe’s Summit, they were lurking in the shadows, secluded away from the rest, surreptitiously working on chartering a path to Utah alacritously. They wrote of these experiences in their book titled “Make No Small Plans” which was released in 2022.
They ushered 60 of their 800 attendees of the Tahoe conference onto an all-expenses-paid-for mystery trip to Eden, Utah to announce their intentions of always having viewed the Summit Series bigger than an echelon of gallant gatherings, and rather as a community of people who wished to fix the world’s fallacies by creating businesses.
“We’re going to be building a place where people around the world can form friendships, families can spend time together, and kids can grow up to start families of their own. We want you to be a part of that story with us.”
Bisnow, Leve, Rosenthal and Schwartz partnered with two venture capitalists to build a chimerical place for wunderkinds and urbanists. The $40 million estate deal of Powder Mountain would give the Summit group possession of over 10,000 acres of land, akin to two-thirds of Manhattan. The pitches of an eco-friendly village consisting of 500 single-family homes, modernist condos, co-working spaces, farm-to-table restaurants, upscale hotels, and Montessori schools, landed well, inviting zeal from extensive investors like Richard Branson, Tim Ferriss, Reed Hastings, Martin Sorell, and Beth Comstock.
VC Greg Mauro’s 50 percent stake in purchasing the Powder Mountain gave rise to the entity of Summit Mountain Holding Group (SMHG) which introduced the project to Summit-goers and other founders, including Kevin Systrom, Sergey Brin and Ashton Kutcher with weekend events. SMHG capered to Weber County for its impeccable credit money with projections of a $1 billion buildout of public roads, sewer lines, water tanks, restaurants and more, over the next 20 years.
Now, a decade later, grumbling locals of Eden and investors alike feel besotted, twiddling thumbs for the promised dreamland to manifest into reality. And the reality of the plans of this creatively-designed landscape bustling with socially conscious people is just rendering paradoxical. The resort is home to a sparse populace, with 90 percent of unfinished homes of the warranted 500, no hotels or full-service restaurants, and no greenhouses or next-gen wastewater recycling.
The pace of development has been preposterously slow. The prophecies of economic boosts have not materialized, ruffling the feathers of the locals who share anecdotes of their beloved Pow Mow now being home to a corrupt lifestyle of hallucinogens, wild parties, and alcohol. People have resorted to eliminating ‘Summit’s name from it, renaming it Powder Mountain again.
Summit Village Or Merely An Albatross?
Of avowing of ‘No Small Plans’, the existing machinations at Powder Mountain are much smaller plans. Investors were promised of construction of half of the Summit Village afoot in 2015. But the present-day dynamics are nowhere close to the bustling hub of socially conscious go-getters envisaged.
Developers have been embroiled in lawsuits and countersuits with investors, while the logistics of even the Summit Series conferences in Utah have been fizzling out into prohibitions. The founders have since reduced their ownership stake in the organization, leaving the fate of the Summit resort in limbo.
Their book does not even mention an ounce of the lawsuits or the leadership missteps that landed them in the predicament; rather just glorifies the pride in their costly and complicated accomplishments.
But, in the epilogue, Elliott Bisnow and his co-founders acknowledged the litany of red flags they had underestimated when they bought Powder Mountain.
“The main Summit Series conferences are still being held in other locations, like the Palm Desert in California and Summit at Sea conventions.”
Will the Summit Series conferences never touch the snowclad terrains?
The Conundrums Of Summit Village
Amidst lawsuits, friction from locals, and the pandemic, the prepend of the Summit Village was far from being impeccable.
Building upon the normal complexities of real estate development, it’s quite a formidable feat to establish a town at 9,000 ft. (other ski villages are elevated at 5,000 – 6,000 ft.). Harsh winds and unpredictable weather make the dilemmas even more challenging. The road leading up to the mountain is one of the steepest paved roads in the country.
SMHG has also had to face the ubiquitous pandemic-related delays of soaring costs, which everyone appertained to. Bisnow listed other challenges they had to deal with including building amenities which was not affordable indulgence.
“A place for everybody to stay with bathrooms, facilities of kitchens, eating, showers etc. Building it all was expensive, making the tickets also expensive.”
Weber County has noticed no year-round influx of blossoming businesses yet has been paid their bonds on time from the Summit group. But they consider the biggest impediment to the project as the constant dysfunction of the team, reflecting on their inexperience.
With the bureaucratic travails of the Powder Mountain’s paperwork, discussions were heated between Mauro and Bisnow, owing to their excitement over voluminous ideas, which led to misalignments. The decisions taken were never followed, either being changed or eradicated. This power struggle and internal discord were straining the aspirations of the Mountain, yet Bisnow and Mauro upheld their respect for each other.
The Summit group had also vowed to engage, interact, and collaborate with the local community of Eden, Utah but in vain – they live in separate worlds except when the need for drivers or house cleaners arises. The locals don’t even mince words when describing the flailing flamboyance of the town’s development.
“They should go bankrupt, be bought out, and restore it to a conservation area.”
The skiable acreage journey embarked upon by this overzealous project has not manifested from its original version and the founders have moved away, continuing to run the conferences elsewhere.
Bisnow now believes the homeowners and the board have to decide on whether they wish to move forward or not with the articulated vision of the past.
“Do they want the après-ski town? Or just a quiet mountain community?”
The Pragmatic Realm Of The Powder Mountain
The partially-built ski resort on Powder Mountain serves as a caveat of the projected ambitions hitting a wall. The dawn of wealthy people affiliated with the Summit Series is not as utopian as planned a decade ago. The overexuberance is still oblique, although the moonshot naivety has ceased to exist. Maybe, the 9,000 ft. tall Mountain will always remind Silicon Valley’s euphoric ideas to incarnate as a solid business plan and get off its ambitious high horse.
