[Music]
good evening nine years ago I decided
that I wanted to focus on impact and
then I wanted to live in the mountains
at least seasonally I started learn
capital with my partner Rob cutter today
we have over 75 companies around the
world focused on education technology
we’re the largest focused fund in the
space and at the same time I discovered
a hidden gem literally between the towns
of Eden and paradise after three years
of bliss when my friends would visit I
would tell them they had to say on
Facebook that they were 90 miles from
here I found out that this sadly that
the mountain was for sale and gonna go
into foreclosure and was gonna sadly be
over developed which is a common
American story a few months after that I
was invited to summit summit and their
flagship event summit at see some of
those a community of artists
entrepreneurs researchers scientists
it’s anything from fortune 500 CEOs to
starving artists to anything in between
I went for business reasons and it was
productive I ended up finding three
companies that we invested in and I also
met Sir Ronald Cohen of social finance
who when he retired was tapped by the
Queen of England to focus on social ills
and he came up with this social bond or
the pay for success movement which has
profound implications for our learn
capital portfolio someone at C was a
real eye-opener to me the people there
were incredible the mentality of
removing barriers and limitations we put
on ourselves and thinking big making no
small plans as they say really drew me
in it was intoxicating by the end of it
I come up with my own big hairy crazy
idea I went to Malibu shortly after the
boat to meet the founders of Summit and
my half an hour coffee extending to an
eight-hour meeting 72 hours later we
were standing at the top of Powder
Mountain the largest ski resort in the
United States my secret spots and
said let’s buy it the idea was that we
could take the summer community and give
it a permanent home at eighty six
hundred feet and in doing so save it
from over development when I say over
development this is the typical formula
that you see in ski resorts particularly
a Powder Mountain sighs if they go into
true development you’ve seen mega crowds
you see mega homes and you see
materialism instead what we wanted was
something like this or this or this this
or this or this or this all images taken
at Powder Mountain so design intentional
community it starts really with a vision
and with values the vision we had was
could we make a place that embodied the
the ethos of summit where people could
live work live and play and learn with a
focus on innovation creativity and
impact and where they had values
including a focus on intentional design
community and lifestyle things like
sustainable design like farm-to-table
dining like wellness people who wanted
to engage the world through impact or
innovation or creativity they didn’t
have to be an innovator inventing
something or an artist but they had to
appreciate those things or support those
things and of course a humility and a
desire for lifelong learning we compared
those values to the Maslow’s hierarchy
of needs and realized that they met them
broadly in fact what we were inspired by
was the opportunity to elevate people to
the highest part of the pyramid into
self-actualization I went with the
summit founders to Switzerland where I’d
lived when I went to high school and
showed them some of the towns that
inspired me in bangin and myrn in
Switzerland we also met the founders of
ceremi and their urban planner dr. Phil
Taub Texas A&M who in addition to be as
being a sacred geometry I don’t know
exactly how one becomes one is a
professor of urban planning
so dr. Phil worked with the owners of
ceremi who
that outside of Atlanta you had seen
this massive deforestation and just
repetitive McMansions and they said why
don’t we do New Urbanism here why don’t
we do an urban village in this forest
and model and after English countryside
which is the horseshoe shape where the
commercial areas at the top of the
horseshoe and then surrounded by organic
farms and save it from being just yet
another suburbia and they did it and it
was inspiring and we hired dr. Phil to
work with us and he walked the land for
three days and he said you could do an
Italian hilltop city up at this Ridge
area it would be incredible but it would
also have a masculine energy and on his
third day he found the village that we
now have and he said I found this
incredible saddle intersecting three
bulls with an incredible feminine energy
he said guys if you can get feminine
energy you go for it so that’s where we
put the village and overall our town is
about 14 acres about 40 acres broadly
which is a small fraction of the 10,000
acres that we own the scale of town is
walkable and that was our that was our
focus so similar to the Swiss villages
that we encountered and also the
historic mining towns in the 1800s so if
you look at the center of Telluride and
go out because those are 1,500 feet bans
at the widest range and that’s the same
that we have in our village so now we
decided what we want to do what kind of
values we want this place to have how do
you actually buy it down we didn’t have
the money but we we thought we could
crowdsource
from this commute summit community and
so we hosted over 2,000 people over 15
weekends for about a year and a half so
they could experience this magical place
and sure enough we closed the purchase
of Powder Mountain in April of 2013 two
months later we hosted the summit
flagship event at Powder Mountain we had
600 glamour camping tents built and
spread across the mountain three
restaurants stages and set up a three
and a half day event that was truly
truly inspirational he can see some of
the inspiration here this long table
dinner here at the end was a quarter
mile long with no breaks and we did a
three-course meal there
it was incredible so this is dr. Phil’s
village at Powder Mountain in the
summertime you can see that Horseshoe
again modeled after an English
countryside town
there’s the fall and there’s the winter
in order to close we had to have the
support of Weber County and the state of
Utah quite frankly we wouldn’t have been
able to pull this off in any other state
we were able to put in roads water sewer
all the traditional infrastructure
required to get six miles out to that
village site we also added over a
thousand acres of skiing which it just
so turns out is the largest expansion in
US history of a ski resort and we added
two new lifts as part of that it was a
good moment on a personal note this is a
photo I took skiing those three lines
are my lines and it took until one
o’clock in Saturday for someone to find
my lines that’s the kind of experience
that you have at Powder Mountain and we
wanted to preserve that magical skiing
experience and so we did something
unprecedent in the ski industry we put a
cap of 2,000 skiers per day and also
limited season passes just above natural
demand so that we could preserve that
magical experience long term with help
from the Walton Foundation we put in the
cycling trail we have twenty-four miles
as of today another 20 that go in this
year and ultimately 80 miles we think we
can be umber ated the second resort in
the country to be so and have the most
spectacular trails in the country our
trails are infused with art that’s a
50-foot steel paper airplane there that
you bank the turn on and incredible
vistas given the inverted topography of
Powder Mountain which has upper
elevation integrated plateaus and
saddles
we wanted our design guidelines to be in
balance with nature we didn’t want the
homes being the domineering force you
see these massive homes as you saw in my
earlier slide of 2030 thousand square
foot homes basically domineering
hillsides and so we limited homes to
4,500 square feet above ground people
thought we were crazy that’s only a
thousand square feet above the guest
house at the colony which is a mega home
development in
dear Valley Park City area we also
wanted organic modernism as our
architectural vernacular we also embrace
small tiny home movement including
cabins we want a sustainability and
regenerative technologies to be utilized
and we partner with region villages a
Stanford University spin-off that also
won the singularity Grand Challenge
award they do completely off-grid
communities that are that produce
organic food water reuse their own waste
at a neighborhood scale so the output of
your sewage effluent ends up producing
organic food
this is images of their facility they’re
going to be building outside of
Amsterdam I’m happy to say that regen
isn’t just going to be working with us
at Powder Mountain they’re moving to
Powder Mountain
and we’ll be working with Stanford as
well whose partner with regen we’re also
creating a commercial innovation zone so
we’re in the process on this we’ve got
University of Utah’s already executed
MOU and we’re working on Weber State and
Utah State we think we’ll have them on
board shortly but the idea is to get the
Utah Legislature to give us the
legislative exceptions we need with
University oversight to pioneer and
deploy next-generation technologies on
on a scale unprecedented given it’s the
largest ski resort in the country and so
if we can create this commercial
innovation zone we think we can attract
the cluster of technology companies that
want to service it and effectively
create a global tech cluster around
sustainable nura generative technologies
we have region already sim sees a
European company wants to do its US
headquarters here and blockable wants to
open a location here so we’re very
excited about that
we’re also reimagining Main Street as I
showed earlier a Prada store would be
our definition of failure
instead we want intentional brands
meaningful brands that means something
in that drive impact we want inclusion
and diversity in the town core and not
push those things out like a LeFort
about housing out into the extremity or
towns farther away one of the ways we do
that is through micro units on our Main
Street these buildings go up this summer
and include micro units so we can
accommodate artists and researchers and
documentarians
people focus on social impact our Main
Street programs and things like includes
things like next-gen Montessori a
recording studio education labs peak
performance high-tech medical
diagnostics Olympic training we already
have the Australian Olympic team
training with us makers lab co-working
and accelerators educationally we’ll
have everything from labs all the way to
courses and immersive Zoar boot camps
all the way to graduate programs we’re
in discussions with singularity
University about doing a full-scale
singularity campus at Summit Powder
Mountain the summit Institute is our
nonprofit arm focused on taking experts
in a given field and combining them with
the summit community and others to drive
creative solution to some of the world’s
pressing problems we also support an
artist residency program that were in
our third year we should be launching
our scholars and residents program soon
this is some of the art again including
Simon back from from London who’s come
out multiple years now to do this
amazing landscape work this is our
amazing facilities that we do our
convening in the summit Institute’s Sky
Lodge the Sky Lodge is actually where I
stood with the summit founders when we
decided that we were going to try to buy
Powder Mountain
and finally the summit Institute has
labs where we bring together these
experts and work on these topics we’ve
done now three labs on social bonds
going back to meeting Sir Ronald Cohen
the inventor of the category – with the
Sorenson centre here in Utah and the
White House and one with my firm learn
capital and bridge international and
next their photo is that the Education
Minister of Liberia where we explored
transforming that country which has a
60% teacher absenteeism and has been
devastated by the war 24,000 people
applied for for college none of them
passed the test so we’re looking to run
a charter school program across the
country and ideated on that and look to
raise a 50 million dollar social bond at
Powder Mountain it’s amazing to think
it’s been four and a half years and this
place that used to be my refuge in
largely isolation now has hosted prime
ministers and others and and we’ve
worked through some some pressing
problems I think we can have a really
interesting impact on the world and so
my challenge to you is think of that
secret spot you have that amazing piece
of nature that playground find it and
save it save your mountain thank you
[Applause]
you
[Music]
good evening nine years ago I decided
that I wanted to focus on impact and
then I wanted to live in the mountains
at least seasonally I started learn
capital with my partner Rob cutter today
we have over 75 companies around the
world focused on education technology
we’re the largest focused fund in the
space and at the same time I discovered
a hidden gem literally between the towns
of Eden and paradise after three years
of bliss when my friends would visit I
would tell them they had to say on
Facebook that they were 90 miles from
here I found out that this sadly that
the mountain was for sale and gonna go
into foreclosure and was gonna sadly be
over developed which is a common
American story a few months after that I
was invited to summit summit and their
flagship event summit at see some of
those a community of artists
entrepreneurs researchers scientists
it’s anything from fortune 500 CEOs to
starving artists to anything in between
I went for business reasons and it was
productive I ended up finding three
companies that we invested in and I also
met Sir Ronald Cohen of social finance
who when he retired was tapped by the
Queen of England to focus on social ills
and he came up with this social bond or
the pay for success movement which has
profound implications for our learn
capital portfolio someone at C was a
real eye-opener to me the people there
were incredible the mentality of
removing barriers and limitations we put
on ourselves and thinking big making no
small plans as they say really drew me
in it was intoxicating by the end of it
I come up with my own big hairy crazy
idea I went to Malibu shortly after the
boat to meet the founders of Summit and
my half an hour coffee extending to an
eight-hour meeting 72 hours later we
were standing at the top of Powder
Mountain the largest ski resort in the
United States my secret spots and
said let’s buy it the idea was that we
could take the summer community and give
it a permanent home at eighty six
hundred feet and in doing so save it
from over development when I say over
development this is the typical formula
that you see in ski resorts particularly
a Powder Mountain sighs if they go into
true development you’ve seen mega crowds
you see mega homes and you see
materialism instead what we wanted was
something like this or this or this this
or this or this or this all images taken
at Powder Mountain so design intentional
community it starts really with a vision
and with values the vision we had was
could we make a place that embodied the
the ethos of summit where people could
live work live and play and learn with a
focus on innovation creativity and
impact and where they had values
including a focus on intentional design
community and lifestyle things like
sustainable design like farm-to-table
dining like wellness people who wanted
to engage the world through impact or
innovation or creativity they didn’t
have to be an innovator inventing
something or an artist but they had to
appreciate those things or support those
things and of course a humility and a
desire for lifelong learning we compared
those values to the Maslow’s hierarchy
of needs and realized that they met them
broadly in fact what we were inspired by
was the opportunity to elevate people to
the highest part of the pyramid into
self-actualization I went with the
summit founders to Switzerland where I’d
lived when I went to high school and
showed them some of the towns that
inspired me in bangin and myrn in
Switzerland we also met the founders of
ceremi and their urban planner dr. Phil
Taub Texas A&M who in addition to be as
being a sacred geometry I don’t know
exactly how one becomes one is a
professor of urban planning
so dr. Phil worked with the owners of
ceremi who
that outside of Atlanta you had seen
this massive deforestation and just
repetitive McMansions and they said why
don’t we do New Urbanism here why don’t
we do an urban village in this forest
and model and after English countryside
which is the horseshoe shape where the
commercial areas at the top of the
horseshoe and then surrounded by organic
farms and save it from being just yet
another suburbia and they did it and it
was inspiring and we hired dr. Phil to
work with us and he walked the land for
three days and he said you could do an
Italian hilltop city up at this Ridge
area it would be incredible but it would
also have a masculine energy and on his
third day he found the village that we
now have and he said I found this
incredible saddle intersecting three
bulls with an incredible feminine energy
he said guys if you can get feminine
energy you go for it so that’s where we
put the village and overall our town is
about 14 acres about 40 acres broadly
which is a small fraction of the 10,000
acres that we own the scale of town is
walkable and that was our that was our
focus so similar to the Swiss villages
that we encountered and also the
historic mining towns in the 1800s so if
you look at the center of Telluride and
go out because those are 1,500 feet bans
at the widest range and that’s the same
that we have in our village so now we
decided what we want to do what kind of
values we want this place to have how do
you actually buy it down we didn’t have
the money but we we thought we could
crowdsource
from this commute summit community and
so we hosted over 2,000 people over 15
weekends for about a year and a half so
they could experience this magical place
and sure enough we closed the purchase
of Powder Mountain in April of 2013 two
months later we hosted the summit
flagship event at Powder Mountain we had
600 glamour camping tents built and
spread across the mountain three
restaurants stages and set up a three
and a half day event that was truly
truly inspirational he can see some of
the inspiration here this long table
dinner here at the end was a quarter
mile long with no breaks and we did a
three-course meal there
it was incredible so this is dr. Phil’s
village at Powder Mountain in the
summertime you can see that Horseshoe
again modeled after an English
countryside town
there’s the fall and there’s the winter
in order to close we had to have the
support of Weber County and the state of
Utah quite frankly we wouldn’t have been
able to pull this off in any other state
we were able to put in roads water sewer
all the traditional infrastructure
required to get six miles out to that
village site we also added over a
thousand acres of skiing which it just
so turns out is the largest expansion in
US history of a ski resort and we added
two new lifts as part of that it was a
good moment on a personal note this is a
photo I took skiing those three lines
are my lines and it took until one
o’clock in Saturday for someone to find
my lines that’s the kind of experience
that you have at Powder Mountain and we
wanted to preserve that magical skiing
experience and so we did something
unprecedent in the ski industry we put a
cap of 2,000 skiers per day and also
limited season passes just above natural
demand so that we could preserve that
magical experience long term with help
from the Walton Foundation we put in the
cycling trail we have twenty-four miles
as of today another 20 that go in this
year and ultimately 80 miles we think we
can be umber ated the second resort in
the country to be so and have the most
spectacular trails in the country our
trails are infused with art that’s a
50-foot steel paper airplane there that
you bank the turn on and incredible
vistas given the inverted topography of
Powder Mountain which has upper
elevation integrated plateaus and
saddles
we wanted our design guidelines to be in
balance with nature we didn’t want the
homes being the domineering force you
see these massive homes as you saw in my
earlier slide of 2030 thousand square
foot homes basically domineering
hillsides and so we limited homes to
4,500 square feet above ground people
thought we were crazy that’s only a
thousand square feet above the guest
house at the colony which is a mega home
development in
dear Valley Park City area we also
wanted organic modernism as our
architectural vernacular we also embrace
small tiny home movement including
cabins we want a sustainability and
regenerative technologies to be utilized
and we partner with region villages a
Stanford University spin-off that also
won the singularity Grand Challenge
award they do completely off-grid
communities that are that produce
organic food water reuse their own waste
at a neighborhood scale so the output of
your sewage effluent ends up producing
organic food
this is images of their facility they’re
going to be building outside of
Amsterdam I’m happy to say that regen
isn’t just going to be working with us
at Powder Mountain they’re moving to
Powder Mountain
and we’ll be working with Stanford as
well whose partner with regen we’re also
creating a commercial innovation zone so
we’re in the process on this we’ve got
University of Utah’s already executed
MOU and we’re working on Weber State and
Utah State we think we’ll have them on
board shortly but the idea is to get the
Utah Legislature to give us the
legislative exceptions we need with
University oversight to pioneer and
deploy next-generation technologies on
on a scale unprecedented given it’s the
largest ski resort in the country and so
if we can create this commercial
innovation zone we think we can attract
the cluster of technology companies that
want to service it and effectively
create a global tech cluster around
sustainable nura generative technologies
we have region already sim sees a
European company wants to do its US
headquarters here and blockable wants to
open a location here so we’re very
excited about that
we’re also reimagining Main Street as I
showed earlier a Prada store would be
our definition of failure
instead we want intentional brands
meaningful brands that means something
in that drive impact we want inclusion
and diversity in the town core and not
push those things out like a LeFort
about housing out into the extremity or
towns farther away one of the ways we do
that is through micro units on our Main
Street these buildings go up this summer
and include micro units so we can
accommodate artists and researchers and
documentarians
people focus on social impact our Main
Street programs and things like includes
things like next-gen Montessori a
recording studio education labs peak
performance high-tech medical
diagnostics Olympic training we already
have the Australian Olympic team
training with us makers lab co-working
and accelerators educationally we’ll
have everything from labs all the way to
courses and immersive Zoar boot camps
all the way to graduate programs we’re
in discussions with singularity
University about doing a full-scale
singularity campus at Summit Powder
Mountain the summit Institute is our
nonprofit arm focused on taking experts
in a given field and combining them with
the summit community and others to drive
creative solution to some of the world’s
pressing problems we also support an
artist residency program that were in
our third year we should be launching
our scholars and residents program soon
this is some of the art again including
Simon back from from London who’s come
out multiple years now to do this
amazing landscape work this is our
amazing facilities that we do our
convening in the summit Institute’s Sky
Lodge the Sky Lodge is actually where I
stood with the summit founders when we
decided that we were going to try to buy
Powder Mountain
and finally the summit Institute has
labs where we bring together these
experts and work on these topics we’ve
done now three labs on social bonds
going back to meeting Sir Ronald Cohen
the inventor of the category – with the
Sorenson centre here in Utah and the
White House and one with my firm learn
capital and bridge international and
next their photo is that the Education
Minister of Liberia where we explored
transforming that country which has a
60% teacher absenteeism and has been
devastated by the war 24,000 people
applied for for college none of them
passed the test so we’re looking to run
a charter school program across the
country and ideated on that and look to
raise a 50 million dollar social bond at
Powder Mountain it’s amazing to think
it’s been four and a half years and this
place that used to be my refuge in
largely isolation now has hosted prime
ministers and others and and we’ve
worked through some some pressing
problems I think we can have a really
interesting impact on the world and so
my challenge to you is think of that
secret spot you have that amazing piece
of nature that playground find it and
save it save your mountain thank you
[Applause]
you
[Music]
Please follow and like us: