The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [36]
Five weeks before the trip, Elliott was in the hole forty grand on his personal credit cards to cover the trip. Ever the enterprising mind, he used his self-taught sales skills once again to call up new corporate sponsors to see if they’d pay for the trip; he got the entire trip covered by sponsors.
The trip was a massive success. “They had never met a ton of other young entrepreneurs. For three days, they were stopping their lives and meeting amazing other people, doing business together, learning from each other. We made these great friendships,” Elliott said. The trip went so well, in fact, that Elliott decided to do another trip six months later, for sixty young business leaders. Naturally, he found sponsors to pay for that as well. Dustin Moskovitz attended the second gathering, as did Tony Hsieh from Zappos.
The trips took on a life of their own, grew and grew. Elliott brought on some friends to help him, Jeremy Schwartz (a Berklee College of Music dropout), Brett Leve, and Jeff Rosenthal, and the gatherings morphed into what is now Summit Series (http://www.summitseries.com), an annual invitation-only gathering of young entrepreneurs, innovators, and thought leaders, which has been called by Forbes “the Davos for Generation Y.” The New York Times says, “There is no blueprint for what Mr. Bisnow and his associates are doing. Perhaps the closest analogy is Davos, if the yearly forum held in Switzerland for billionaires and heads of state were somehow crossed with MTV’s ‘The Real World.’”1
The tipping point for Summit Series occurred in 2009, when the White House Office of Public Engagement wanted to put on a roundtable with young entrepreneurs. Someone from the office had heard that Summit was the hottest business networking conference for the Facebook generation. So they contacted Elliott and asked him and the Summit Team to put together the event for the White House, which they did. Bisnow and his team of merry twentysomethings had arrived at the central halls of global power.
Now, Elliott rolls with Bill Clinton, Mark Cuban, and fellow non-college-graduates Ted Turner, Sean Parker, Russell Simmons, and Twitter cofounder Evan Williams, all of whom have participated at Summit Series gatherings. Aside from Facebook cofounder (and college dropout) Mark Zuckerberg, Elliott is now quite possibly one of the most well-connected twentysomethings on the planet. As a Forbes profile of Summit asks, “Do you know of a more influential networking event for a new generation of geniuses? If so, let me know.”2
Elliott has left the family newsletter business in good hands and is focusing entirely on Summit. It’s his second multimillion-dollar business, and he has also raised over $2 million for charity from participants at the events. (By the way, Elliott never returned to Madison after his “leave of absence.”)
I met with Elliott and the other cofounders and executives—all in their twenties—in Miami, where they were renting a group home together. The eight of them collectively choose new cities to live in every few months, all over the world, where they meet people to invite to their conferences and work remotely via laptop and cell phone.
I asked Elliott how he accounts for his success in life at such a young age. He told me point-blank, “I attribute my success so far, 100 percent, to the people I’ve met and learned from. It’s not even a question. [Motivational author, and college dropout] Jim Rohn says, ‘You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.’ And on a bigger picture, you are a reflection of the twenty or thirty people who give you the best advice. Everything is about people. It all starts with you surrounding yourself with great people who you can learn from.
“The problem is, most people view college as their learning experience,