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9.30 A.M. shark tagging
‘YOU’RE YOUNG,
YOU’RE HORNY,
YOU’RE SAVING
THE WORLD’
An exclusive event within an already highly
exclusive event, wannabe participants in
the University of Miami’s R. J. Dunlap Marine
Conservation Program’s shark-tagging
expedition have to submit an application
detailing how tagging an 11-foot tiger shark
with a scientific tracking device will further
their own work to save the world’s oceans.
Morning meditation with a lama; afternoon workouts with an NFL
linebacker; and boozy late nights with the world’s most dynamic
entrepreneurs. Welcome to Summit at Sea—where future masters
of the universe gather to strategize. And rave it up.
By Joshua Glazer
The late-night scene onboard the Celebrity
Century cruise ship isn’t from your average
vacation brochure. The deck of the vessel is
awash with sound and lights. On a
custom-installed stage, DJ Axwell of mega-act
Swedish House Mafia is spinning a set of pop-friendly
dance hits. He is flanked by dozens of 20-something
fans who pass bottles of Belvedere vodka and cans
of Red Bull among themselves while hyping up the
dance floor, which is packed with several hundred
more revelers. Concert-grade spotlights and strobes
illuminate the party in pulsing colors as highpowered lasers pierce the moonless Caribbean sky.
Above the stage, green beams sketch a flickering
image of two upside-down Vs, while dancers raise
their arms to make a similar shape with their hands.
The logo is that of Summit Series, the three-year-old
company responsible for this floating bacchanal that
has been going nonstop for the past three nights.
But this isn’t a retreat for stressed-out sales hacks,
or a boozy cougar cruise. Gathered on this ship are
1,000 of the world’s brightest young entrepreneurs
from the worlds of tech, investment, nonprofit,
music, and the arts. Equal parts Davos and Daytona
Beach, Summit At Sea is what happens when a new
generation of global leaders drink, dine, dance, and
dive together in the only place left on earth with no
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fri 9.30 A.M. network
Upon embarking, Summit at Sea attendees are issued with a keychain-sized
plastic figure to use to register a “connection” with other attendees. The
connection then appears on The Collective website—an attendees only socialmedia network—thus eliminating the need for wasteful business cards.
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fri 9.30 A.M. pool party
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Workouts are conducted by NFL linebacker Dhani
Jones and MMA champion Tiki Ghosn, and those less
physically inclined can learn about lucid dreaming
from yoga guru Ken Von Roenn, or meet Scott
Parazynski, the only man to have flown in outer
space and summited Mt. Everest. Yet, despite all of
the scheduled activities, the real draw for most
Summiteers isn’t the itinerary, but the attendees.
“The energy on the boat is unbelievable,” says
Lana Volftsun, a pretty 24-year-old Virginia native
who runs a charitable organization of Jewish
professionals. Like many aboard, Summit At Sea is
Volftsun’s first experience with Summitthe series
Series. And like every person onboard, she is stunned
by the open-minded attitude of her new peer group.
“Not only is every single person doing amazing work,
but every single person is genuinely interested in
helping each other,” she says. “A network like this has
unfathomable potential.”
Beyond the potential for professional connections,
three days at sea also offers the chance for the young
attendees to connect on a more personal level.
“You’re young, you’re horny ... you’re saving the
world” is how inspirational speaker Sean Stephenson
put things to his full-capacity audience—although
with a male-female ratio of 2-to-1, the chance of
onboard hookups certainly favored the fairer sex.
“You’ll never hear me complain about a party
“every single person is doing amazing work
...A network like this has amazing potential.”
cell-phone service—the middle of the ocean.
“I knew this was going to be a one-of-a-kind
experience,” enthuses David Burnstein, a 22-year old
writer, filmmaker, and advocate whose first book,
“Fast Future: How the Millennial Generation is
Remaking Our World,” is due out next year. “And I
was not disappointed.”
Like many of those on board, Burnstein is what
you might call an overachiever. At age 16, he started
a film project aimed at mobilizing the youth vote,
entitled “18 In ’08.” By November of that year, he was
photographed with Barack Obama just days before
the election. The photo sits modestly buried on his
Facebook page. Since “18 in ’08,” Burnstein has
become a frequent contributor to outlets such as Fast
Company and The Huffington Post while living in the
United Arab Emirates, where he is working on his
next movie, this one about global education. Even
with all this experience packed into his young age,
Burnstein insists that Summit Series stands out.
“I’ve attended too many conferences to count,” he
reveals via e-mails. “And Summit will always be at
the top of my list. While it is obviously a networking
opportunity, at Summit I’ve never felt like I was
merely trading contact information with someone.”
The series is exclusive by design, bringing together
the best and brightest in Gen-Y and Millennial-aged
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sat 12 p.M. russell simmons
The hip hop pioneer was one of this year’s most applauded guests....
thinkers and doers. Each and every unfailingly
dynamic and youthful attendee comes by
recommendation from a former Summiteer, and is
personally interviewed by one of the heads of the
Summit staff. Yes, big-dollar business deals are done
there, and the guest list is chock-full of on-line
innovators and marquee-name entertainers from the
worlds of sports, movies, and music. But what makes
Summit stand out—beyond the mere age of the
average attendee—is the careful mixture of selfimprovement, business opportunity, and partying
that is fundamental to its mission statement.
“People didn’t sleep that much,” boasts Justin
Cohen, Summit Series’ chief operating officer, who
the Summit handbook notes is the youngest person
ever to charter a major ocean liner managing all of
the operations for the weekend-long voyage. “But at
an event like this, why would you want to sleep? You
want to be out there learning and having a great
time.” In place of sleep, Summit At Sea offers allnight partying with world-renowned talents such as
The Roots, Pretty Lights, and Imogen Heap
entertaining the crowd. But no matter how late the
party goes, meditation starts at 7 a.m. with Lama
Tenzin, and leads into morning seminars with the
likes of PayPal co-founder and CEO Peter Thiel and
X-Prize founder and chairman Peter Diamandis.
10.30 p.M. the roots
The Grammy-award winners and Jimmy Fallon’s house band ....
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s 8.30 a.M. workout
JOSH, IS 8.30 A.M. ABOUT RIGHT FOR THE WORKOUT TIME ON SUNDAY?
“They pusHed the limits
and they went all in...
that’s 65 percent dudes,” jokes Volftsun. “But I will
say that the women I met onboard were as
tremendous and inspiring as the men. I did notice
that none of the mainstage speakers were women,
but there are always areas for improvement.”
At the rate Summit Series has grown,
improvements are measured in weeks or months,
rather than years. The company was started in 2008,
when then-21-year-old founder Elliott Bisnow
assembled a relatively modest ski-trip gathering for
19 young entrepreneurs, meant to bolster his own
college-based start-up that provided newsletter and
conference services to business gatherings.
“We were good kids going in the right direction,
but it was still self-centered in our whole attitude,”
admits Bisnow, a D.C. native with a million-dollar
smile. “We said, let’s do this fun ski trip, and let’s go
to Mexico and meet [other] entrepreneurs.”
Such traditional networking is still part of the
package for Summit Series, where under-30 chief
financial officers from tech start-ups stalk venturecapital investor peers around the open bar. But such
opportunities take a back seat when discussing the
purpose of Summit Series with those who created it.
Words like “nonprofit,” “philanthropy,” and
“altruism,” compete with more predictable concerns
like “funding,” “start-up,” and “business plan.”
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Of particular pride is Summit At Sea’s sharktagging expedition, done in conjunction with the
University of Miami’s R.J. Dunlap Marine
Conservation Program. A limited-capacity activity—
yes, an exclusive event inside an exclusive event—
participants had to submit applications explaining
how hauling an 11-foot tiger shark onto the back of a
marine-research vessel and tagging the creature with
a scientific tracking device could be utilized in their
own endeavors to help protect the oceans.
Results of this mini-event are already evident,
with participant Blake Mycoskie, founder of charitydriven footwear company TOMS Shoes, announcing
a “Shark Shoe” to be sold next year, with $5 from
every pair going to support further shark research.
Summit Series are also working with The Nature
Conservancy to investigate how to turn the
Caribbean waters where the trip takes place into a
marine-protected area. When fellow shark-tagger and
actress Kristen Bell appeared on “The Tonight Show
With Jay Leno” to promote her movie “Scream 4” two
weeks after Summit at Sea, she spent a full segment
talking about her adventure with the aquatic
carnivores. She didn’t mention the conference by
name, but the message of shark conservation was
conveyed to millions of viewers.
On the penultimate day of Summit Series, the ship is
anchored just off the shore of a private island near
the Bahamas.
On the beach, Summiteers grunt and groan
through an endless series of sprints, crawls, and
wheelbarrows, their torsos caked in sand and baked
in the sun. This workout is run by Cincinnati Bengals
linebacker Dhani Jones and former
professional soccer star and Summit team
member Natalie Spilger. Once the 60-minute
regiment is over, Jones surveys the blue
waters and takes note of one female
attendee’s excellent, um, form. He laughs
when asked if the Summiteers lived up to his
expectations of physical fitness. “I was just happy
people showed up,” he replies. “I heard that some
people threw up afterwards. They pushed the limits
and they went all in, which is the essence of what
Summit Series is about.”
Jones is a media star whose “Dhani Tackles the
Globe” program on the Travel Channel finds him
competing in high-impact sports from around the
world. He is also a founding entrepreneur behind
brand-development firm VMG Creative and the
creator of Bow Tie Cause, an organization that
produces high-end bow ties to be sold in support of
causes such as the Juvenile Diabetes Research
Foundation. He is, in practice, the ideal Summit
Series attendee—combining personal excellence with
business acumen and philanthropic activities. Jones
plans to help cultivate the latter by bringing in more
athletes to participate in future Summit events: “I
think there’s a lot of athletes who want to engage in
philanthropy, but don’t necessarily know how, or
who to talk to,” he muses. “What I’m doing is helping
athletes open more doors to understanding.”
And that’s not the most ambitious goal hatched at
Summit At Sea, either. Panelist Robert McKnight, cofounder of legendary surf-clothing line Quicksilver,
was hesitant to come (“usually you don’t learn too
much”), but since coming, he has hatched a plan he
hopes will bring his love of surfing into the realm of
international arms negotiations. “[I met] this guy
from North Korea who wants to do a trip with some
action-sports stars. Not many people know this, but
Kim Jong Il has a wave machine in his palace, and
every morning he boogie boards. So we’re trying to
connect with a few people to go up there with [prosurfer] Kelly Slater and present him some board
shorts, and try to do détente through surfing.”
As an “elder tribesman,” McKnight was impressed
by what he saw from the Gen-Y and Millennial
entrepreneurs he met on Summit At Sea, who
reminded him of his salad days founding Quicksilver
back in the ’70s, but with a thoroughly modern grasp
of what it takes to succeed. “They’re engaged in all of
the aspects,” he says. “The financing, going public,
maintaining credibility in the market place. What
about retail? What about e-commerce? You can see
that wild-eyed fascination of youth that we had when
we were starting our business.”
“Wild-eyed” might be the best way to describe
Summiteer Tyler Kellogg, when he and a group of
...that’s what summit
series is all about.”
8.30 a.M. bon voyage
xxxx
fellow “overly hyper, highly caffeinated, thrillseeking go-getters” decided to one-up the Summit
schedule by planning—and then executing—a sevenstory jump off the stern of the cruise ship.
“There comes a moment in every person’s life
where they find themselves on an edge, whether
literal or physical. And in that moment, you must
make the decision to either jump or live in regret,”
explains Kellogg, a self-described “do-gooder” who
once drove from upstate New York to the Florida
Keys, bestowing random acts of kindness on 115
strangers along the way. “Jumping off the ship was
an idea that I became involved in because a guy who
designs, builds, and operates submarines proposed
the question ‘Why not? We chartered the boat?’.”
“Why not?” could be the unofficial motto of
Summit Series, and will continue to drive the
organization’s optimistic future. Plans are being
made for smaller “impact” adventures, where
attendees will travel to far-flung spots to perpetuate
Summit’s current altruistic ambitions. The organizers
insist that the new focus came from listening to the
goals and dreams of the Summit community. Bisnow
credits three particular early Summit attendees with
helping him find the company’s current path: TOM’s
Mycoskie; author Timothy Ferriss (“The 4 Hour Work
Week”); and Charity Water founder Scott Harrison.
“[Blake] was selling shoes, but every pair he sold,
he gave a pair away to poor children. That blew our
minds,” Bisnow says, his enthusiastic voice gaining
even more excitement. “Number two was reading a
book by Timothy Ferriss called the 4 Hour Work
Week,” he rapidly continues. “It talks about how you
need to make sure you’re not waiting to get older to
get healthy, to be nice to your family and friends, to
become a better person. The third person was Scott
Harrison from Charity Water. He quit the nightlife
industry and started Charity Water, which is now
giving clean water to 10 million people in the world.”
It’s telling that Mycoskie, Ferriss, and Harrison are
all attendees at Summit At Sea, demonstrating the
sort of long-lasting community-building goal that is a
pillar of the Summit foundation. On boarding the
ship, each attendee is given a keychain-sized plastic
figure—if you meet someone you want to trade
contacts with, simply press your figures together to
register a “connection,” which then appears on The
Collective, Summit Series’ social-media website—no
need for business cards or clunky iPhone “bumps.”
“We want to share the community rolodex in a
responsible way,” Bisnow explains. “We want to
make Summit a continued part of people’s lives. Push
them in a good positive direction.”
On Monday, a large contingent of Summiteers
disembarks and makes their way to South Beach’s
Mondrian Hotel to kill time before heading to the
airport. A few dive into the pool or mingle by the bar,
but most want nothing more than to find a shady
spot to take a nap. Tomorrow, there are deals to
draft, connections to secure, and e-mails to catch up
on. But for now, that will have to wait for the one
thing that makes even these elite and ambitious
youths just like the rest of us: the need for sleep.
Bon voyage at http://sea.summitseries.com
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