Summit Powder Mountain
Summit Series has crowdfunded and crowdsourced a new resort and town plan for Powder Mountain in Eden Utah. The Question is to what end?
Summit is an organization of that hosts an annual Summit Series designed to bring together entrepreneurs, leaders, artists, businesspeople, and scientists to drive positive change in the world. Summit was founded in 2008 by Elliott Bisnow, Brett Leve, Jeff Rosenthal, Jeremy Schwartz, and Ryan Begelman in the hopes of hosting annual gatherings to drive attendees to achieve their goals and raise money and awareness for philanthropic endeavors.
Summit Series gatherings have ranged from 19-person groups in Park City UT to 750-person conventions in Washington D.C. to 1500-person “Summit at Sea” chartered cruises of the Bahamas and have featured the likes of Bill Clinton, Richard Branson, Peter Theil, Tony Hsieh, John Legend and The Roots. The series has funded Uber, Warby Parker, Qwiki, as well as raised money in support of the United Nations, the Clinton Foundation, and the Nature Conservatory.
In many ways, the Summit Series embody the principles of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. Primarily, its conferences serve as a crowdsourcing/thought-incubator for its many thought-leader and entrepreneur attendees. Multiple tech start-ups and organizations at the intersections of politics, sports, arts and science have hatched as a result of the Summit Series. Founder Rosenthal explains: “We learned about the art of just gathering great, innovative people from disparate industries into a shared space and seeing what happens. If you want to think about it in terms of provenance, we were a bit of a younger, hipper TED or Davos.” In terms of crowdfunding, the Series raise money through its ~$12K attendance price tag, the money is used to host the events and fund endeavors put forth by its members.
One of Summit Series most recent crowdsourcing and crowdfunded endeavors has been to purchase the Powder Mountain ski resort for $40 Million in 2013. Disparate from other nearby ski areas such as Park City and Canyons, Powder Mountain sees only ~120K annual visitors (contrasted to Canyons ~450K), has only 6 chairlifts and no large town associated with it. However, the mountain boasts over 7000 acres of skiable terrain (that’s 2000 more than Vail) and a stalwart local population that fought previous owner American Western Holding in 2008 from exploiting zoning loopholes and expanding the mounting to include 5 villages, golf courses, 18 ski lifts, major hotels and a water park.
The Summit Series purchase of Powder Mountain demonstrated real estate crowdfunding not dissimilar to that in the Prodigy Network Case – in this case Summit recruited around 50 partners willing to invest ~$2 million each to purchase and reinvigorate the struggling mountain in an environmentally-conscious and mission-driven way. It has demonstrated crowdsourcing in its approach to renovating the mountain – they have recruited land-planning companies from New York, architecture professors from Texas A&M, as well as Summit Series thought-leaders and local residents to determine the scope and operations of the town.
However, the question remains, to what end is Summit investing in Powder Mountain? The Summit answer would be to have a homebase for their operations and a great place to continue its mission of crowdsourcing ideas and innovation for its attendees. In this way it is crowdfunding and crowdsourcing Powder Mountain to beget more crowdfunding and crowdsourcing of other ideas. They also claim that they are preserving this unique mountain from the “timber-and-elkhorn-chandelier” gaucheness of typical ski resorts. However, like with Warby Parker and Uber, they are also likely looking to turn a profit on their investment. Thus it will remain to be seen how they balance their ideals of creating an environment to fulfill their mission of “uniting the leaders of today and tomorrow in surreal settings and immersive experiences designed to catalyze positive personal and collective growth” with their need to return a profit on this expensive investment.