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TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-09-12
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjAlMo4G35w
good evening nine years ago I decided that I want to focus on impact and then I want to live in the mountains Lee seasonally I started learn capital with my partner rob Haidar today we have over seven five companies around the world focused on education technology we're the largest focused fund in the space and the same time I discovered a hidden gem literally between the towns
of Eaton in paradise after three years of bliss when my friends would visit I would tell them they had to say on Facebook if they were ninety miles from here I found out that this sadly that amount 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 see some of the community of artists watch for nurse researchers scientists it's anything from fortune five hundred CEOs to starving artist I went for business reasons and that was part I ended up finding three companies that we invested and I also met Sir Ronald come of social finance who when he retired was tapped by the cleaning the defense and
he came up with the social bomb X. estimate which has profound implications for our learn cap our folio so many see was a real eye opener to me the people there were incredible the mentality of removing barriers limitations we put on ourselves and thinking big making no small plans as they say really drew me and he 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 seventy two hours later we were standing at the top of paramount and the largest ski resort in the United States my secret spots and sad 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 overdevelopment when I say overdevelopment this is the typical formula that you see in ski resorts particularly of paramount size if they go into true development you see mega crowds you see mega homes and you see materialism instead what we wanted with something like this yes for
this this for this this or this all images taken about around so design intentional community it starts really with a vision and with values division we had was could we make a place that embodied the date the ethos of summit where people could live work live and play and learn with a focus on innovation creativity impact and where they have values including a focus on intentional
design comedian lifestyle things like sustainable design like farm to table dining like wellness people who want engage the world after impactor innovation creativity it in half to be an innovator inventing something or an artist but had appreciate those things are support those things and of course a humility and and a desire for lifelong learning we compared those values to the Maslow hierarchy of needs and realize
that they met them broadly in fact what we were inspired by was the opportunity 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 show them some of the towns that inspired me inventing in and learn in Switzerland we also met the founders of sandy and the
urban planner Dr Phil top of Texas a and M. who in addition to be as being a sacred geometry test I don't know know exactly how one becomes one %HESITATION is a is a is a professor of planning so Dr Phil worked with owners of sandy who saw that outside of Atlanta you'd seen this massive deforestation and just repetitive Nick mansions and they said why don't
we do new urbanism here why don't we do an urban village in this forest and modeled after English countryside which the horseshoe shape where the commercial areas of the top the horseshoe and then surrounded by organic farms and save it from being just yet another suburbia and they didn't know was inspiring 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 big ridge area would be incredible but it also have a masculine energy and on his third day he found the village that we now have any set I found this incredible saddle intersecting three bowls with an incredible feminine energy he said guys if you can get feminine Angie you go for it so
that's where we put the village and overall our town is about fourteen acres but forty acres broadly which is a small fraction of that ten thousand acres that we own the scale a town is walkable now was our that was our focus so similar to the Swiss villages that we encountered and also the stork mining towns of the eighteen hundreds so you look at the center
of telluride go out these days or fifteen hundred feet bands at the widest range and that's the same that we have in our village so now we decide what we want to do a kind of values what this place to have how do you actually buy a town meeting of the money but we we thought we could crowdsource from this committee summit community and so we
hosted over two thousand people over fifteen weekends for about a year and a half so they could experience this magical place and sure enough we closed the purchase of paramount in April of twenty thirteen two months later we hosted the summit flagship event at powder mountain we had six hundred glamour camping tents belt and spread across the mound three restaurants %HESITATION stages and set up a
three and a half day event that was truly truly inspirational you can see some of the inspiration here this long table dinner here at the end was a quarter mile long with no brakes and we did a three course meal there it was incredible so this is doctor Phil's village at paramount who in the summertime you can see that horseshoe again modeled after the English countryside
town there's the fall I mean there's the winter in order to close we had to have the support of weaver county and the state of Utah quite frankly we would 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 scheme which is just so turns out is the largest expansion in US history of a ski resort and we added two new lives as part of that it was a good moment I'm not personally know this a photo I took scheme 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 a pad around and we want to preserve that magical scheme experience and so we did something unprecedented the ski industry we put a cap of two thousand skiers per day and also limited season passes just about 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've
twenty four miles as of today another twenty to go in this year and ultimately eighty miles we think we can be Emma rated the second is are the country to be so and have the most spectacular %HESITATION trails in the country our trails are infused with art that's a fifty foot up steel paper airplane there the bank to turn on an incredible vistas given the inverted
topography of powder mountain which has upper elevation integrated plateaus and saddles we wondered design guidelines to be in balance with nature we want the homes being that domineering forcing see these massive home to use on my earlier slide of twenty thirty thousand square foot homes in that basically domineering hillsides and so we limit homes to forty five hundred square feet above ground people thought we were
crazy that's only a thousand square feet above the gas house at the colony which is at the mega home development Indian deer valley park city area we also wanted organic modernism as our architectural vernacular we also brace small tiny home moving including cabins we want to sustainability in regenerative technologies to be utilized we partnered region villages a Stanford University spinoff that also won the singularity grand
challenge ward data completely off grid communities that are that produce organic food water reuse their own waste at a neighborhood scale so the output of about your sewage effluent ends up producing organic food this is images that silly they're gonna be building outside of Amsterdam I'm happy to say that region isn't just gonna be working as a powder mountain they're moving to paramount it will be
working with Stanford as well his partner with region we're also creating a commercial innovation zone so we're in the process on this we got university tells RTX you name are you were working on weaver state and Utah state we think we'll have them onboard shortly but the ideas to get the Utah legislature to give us a legislative exceptions we need with university oversight a pioneer in
deploying next generation technologies on on a scale unprecedented given it's a large ski resort in the country and so if we can create this commercial innovation zone we think we can track the cluster of technology companies that want to service it and effectively create a global tech cluster around sixteen wonder genetec Nagy's we have regenerate a sim sees a European company wants you to escort headquarters
here and block will wants to open a location here so we're very excited about that we're also reimagining main street as I showed earlier Prada store BR definition of failure instead we want intentional brands meaningful brands that mean something that Dr impact we want inclusion diversity in the town core and not push those things out like affordable housing down to that 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 include my Korean it's so we can accommodate artists and researchers documentarians people focus on social impact I mean three programs and things like that includes things like next Gen Montessori a recording studio education labs peak performance high tech medical diagnostics Olympic training we only have the
Australian Olympic team training with us lawmakers lab coat working in accelerators educationally will have everything from labs all the way to courses and immerses our boot camps all the way graduate programs when discussions of singularity university about doing a full scale singularly campus at some of paramount the summer institute is our nonprofit arm focused on taking experts in a given field and combine them with the
summit community and others to to drive creative solutions some the world's pressing problems we also support an artist residency program that we're in our third year we should be launching our scholars in residence program soon this is some of the art again including Simon back from from London news come out multiple years now to do this amazing landscape work this is our amazing facilities that we
do are convening and some instant sky lodge the sky lodge is actually where I stood with the summit founders we decided that we were going to try to buy powder mountain and finally the some issue 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 meetings to Ronald Cohen the inventor the category
two with the swords and center here in Utah and the White House and one with my firmware capital Enbridge international and next their photo is that the education minister of Liberia where we explored transforming that country which has a sixty percent teacher absenteeism and it's been devastated by the war twenty four thousand people applied for for college none of them pass the test so we're looking
to run a a charter school program across the country and I did it on that look to raise a fifty million dollar social bond paramount it's amazing to think it's been for half years and this place that used to be my refuge in largely isolation now has has hosted prime ministers and others and and we've worked to some some pressing problems I think we can have
