THE THEME WAS NARNIA meets Walden meets 1920s speakeasy at the 2012 Summit Series Basecamp conference. The rapper Q-Tip and DJ Jazzy Jeff played a set; the president of Georgia made a speech; rescued mountain lions surprised guests at a nature talk; and the illusionist David Blaine roamed the halls of the Lake Tahoe resort, randomly delighting attendees with his tricks.
Just four years after a group of idealistic entrepreneurs in their early twenties started Summit Series, it had grown into a phenomenon: an invite-only multiday conference with an eye-popping guest list of CEOs, founders, wellness gurus, philanthropists, and celebrities who came for the intense workshops, heady talks, and legendary parties at stunning vacation destinations. At an annual Summit Series conference or a “Summit at Sea” cruise, one might find oneself in a meditation session with Jeff Bezos, learning about indigenous peoples’ rights from Harrison Ford, or petting puppies with A$AP Rocky.
The four young men who created Summit Series—Elliott Bisnow, Brett Leve, Jeff Rosenthal, and Jeremy Schwartz—would usually be in the mix, hobnobbing with guests in the craft cocktail bar hidden behind a broom closet or practicing lucid dreaming in the geodesic dome. But at Lake Tahoe in 2012 they had to sit out the fun, they recall in Make No Small Plans, a book about the conference series that they published last year. Instead they were holed up in a windowless room at the resort, working behind the scenes to charter a 737 jet to Utah.
The morning after the conference ended, they ushered 60 of the 800 Basecamp attendees onto the plane for a last-minute all-expenses-paid mystery trip. A fleet of 30 rental cars was waiting in Salt Lake City to deliver the still-baffled guests to a hastily constructed yurt at the top of a mountain in the town of Eden, Utah—Powder Mountain.
The group arrived just in time to watch a spectacular sunset streaked over the Wasatch mountain range. Only then, around a barrel fire, did the Summit team explain what was going on.
“You might be wondering what you’re doing here,” Rosenthal began, according to the book. “We’re going to build a place where people from around the world can form friendship, where their families can spend time together, and where their kids can grow up and start families of their own. And we want you to be part of that story with us.”
The founders had always seen the Summit Series mission as bigger than a string of epic gatherings, they explained. They were building a community of people who wanted to fix the world’s ills by creating businesses that gave back. They were collecting people who accepted the Summit mantra “Make no small plans” as a personal creed. They needed a year-round home, and this literal summit could be it.
They just needed $40 million to buy the mountain.
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