#SummitSeries #TheWashingtonSummit Is #Networking
Bill Clinton had spoken earlier in the day on global warming; Ted Turner and Russell Simmons hovered agreeably over their keynote events earlier in the week. So with most of the marquee sessions for the Washington Summit Series in the books, it’s time for the Friday afterparty, at a cavernous basement club a few blocks up from the White House called Josephine’s. The place is done up like the rec room in a Russian oligarch’s basement. The walls are adorned with black-velvet inlaid wallpaper and white chintz chandeliers hang from the ceilings. Victorian sofas abut coffee tables laden with ice buckets full of vodka at the edge of the dancefloor.
I’m here courtesy of some light-fingered credentials-swapping-actual registration for the four-day gaggle of 20-something entrepreneurs runs $3300 per attendee. Several of those fortunate souls have already noted my badge and pressed business cards on me; the semi-annual event, which informally launched in 2007 under the energetic guidance of the then 22-year-old e-newsletter impresario Elliott Bisnow is, after all, an invitation-only networking extravaganza.
Sure the former president’s appeals for international climate cooperation are diverting, and who doesn’t want to see the co-founders of Guitar Hero, or watch Kristen Bell host a panel on child soldiers in Third World armies? There’s also Tiki Barber, Olivia Munn from “Iron Man 2,” some deputy-level State Department diplomats, a couple of NASA astronauts and Mark Cuban.
But the real business of the Summit Series is this friction-seeking informal meeting of startup CEOs, brand managers, media messagers and political professionals. The club walls are blaring, in other words, with the siren song of synergy, throbbing just as persistently through the room as the 80s dance hits from Madonna and Grandmaster Flash. Indeed, as I feel the bass line of “White Lines” shake through my bones (“If you get hooked, baby, it’s nobody else’s fault”), I’ve been talking with a young Midwestern candidate for Congress about the perverse political legacy of heartland populism. The next gaggle over, a White House aide is working the room in the company of a clothing manufacturer.
Who knows what any of this signifies, in the larger scheme of things? But then again, not knowing what will come of it all is largely the point of this semi-annual scrum of the young, digitally minded and market-savvy. The last Summit convocation, back in January in Miami, featured Bisnow delivering his own slideshow on his past year’s travels and indefatigable networking schedule, called “Curating Life.” This year, a panel on the science of “reverse aging”-called “Youthanization” and led by Aubrey de Grey, head of something called the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence Foundation-precedes a breakout panel on “saving the world at work.”
Bisnow, a college dropout who’d attended the University of Wisconsin on a tennis scholarship, cites as a key professional inspiration the Timothy Ferriss business-advice bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-to5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich (he has also, of course, since recruited Ferriss as a Miami Summit presenter; this year, the carpe-diem spot on the agenda seems to be claimed by the cast of MTV’s bucket-list reality franchise “The Buried Life,” who have convened an after-midnight chat session-the after-after party, as it were.) The series launched when he maxed out his credit cards by convening a bunch of his young CEO acquaintances for a Utah weekend getaway to solicit advice on the business-end of his e-newsletter service, which he was then co-managing with his not especially business savvy dad. (That service, which blasts out 10 different industry-themed letters to about 130,000 free subscribers, may have required management guidance at the startup end, but the finished product is all about customized, just-in-time synergy, as the website’s promotional copy explains: Bisnow will send a reporter to your office to cover a story in our newsy way highlighting something of interest to our readers that you do. We disclose that you are a sponsor in the piece, but make it interesting so that our readers consume it as they do the rest of our editorial.)
The next quantum leap for the group’s development came last February, when Bisnow’s mother called him from an Oscars party she was attending to report that Yosi Sargent, the short-lived NEA communications director who had been demoted to White House director of public engagement, was on the scene. “I wasn’t even going to go,” Bisnow told New York Times reporter Mark Cohen, “I’d been playing tennis and I was tired, but my mother called and said, ‘Elliott, you really need to be here.’” By the following week, the White House had agreed to sponsor a Summit Series event.
In other words, if I were writing an e-newsletter dispatch with the Summit Series as the designated client-subject, I’d lead with something like: Talk all you want about the 4-hour workweek: A well-connected mother can net you $3300 a head in the terminally self-enamored conferencing circuit. And that’s why, when the present cohort of twentysomething digital CEOs come fully into power, I’m reasonably certain I’ll never have lunch in this town again.
It should be noted that Chris Lehmann’s wife’s employer, GQ, was a cosponsor of this boondoggle.