14: Alex Zhang - Curating Cultural Playgrounds
Alex Zhang (Website, X, Instagram) is a cultural curator, community builder, and creative director. Currently, he's Chief Creative Officer of Powder Mountain, a where he's working with Reed Hastings to create a globally unique ski experience that combines art, architecture, and lots of fresh tracks.Alex loves people and curating spaces and experiences for them: whether that means parties, music festivals, or mountain towns. He joined Summit Series out of school, throwing large scale events around the world and working on Powder Mountain, a Utah mountain resort the ownership group had acquired. He then joined one of the first social DAOs, Friends with Benefits (FWB) as Mayor/CEO, after being tapped by its founder Trevor McFedries to scale the tokenized social club beyond a Discord Server. He launched FWB Fest, an annual in-person music festival and crypto conference with past performers including James Blake, Charli XCX, and Caroline Polachek. Most recently, he joined Reed Hastings to return to Powder Mountain after the Netflix co-founder acquired a controlling stake in the resort. Alex leads brand, art, architecture, and marketing.Blending culture, commerce, and "cool" is anything but a science, but Alex has made a career of it. I've known him for a decade and it's been a thrill to watch him continue to find strange intersections, blending worlds like music and tech, crypto and culture, and skiing and art.
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Speaker A: Welcome to Dialectic, episode 14 with Alex Zhang. Before we get into the conversation with Alex, I'm thrilled to share that this episode is brought to you by Hampton. Hampton is a highly vetted private membership for founders and entrepreneurs. Company building is ultimately about people. Obviously the center of that is your core team, your collaborators, your co-founders, but there's another element of entrepreneurship that actually can be quite lonely, which is the unique experience that you go through as a founder or CEO of a company. Finding peers who can actually understand what you're going through can be really hard.
One of the things I've benefited most from in my career is having a variety of mentors, advisors, trusted friends, people who have less context in the day-to-day, but give you a different granularity of perspective because they're not staring at the problem super close up all the time. So what is Hampton? It was co-founded by Sam Parr of My First Million and The Hustle. They have over 1,000 members. As I mentioned, it's highly vetted and they look for founders with either $3 million in revenue or $3 million raised, or who have sold their company for at least $10 million.
And the goal is to create a place both digitally and physically where you can find like-minded people who actually understand the day-to-day of what you're going through. And who you can zoom in and zoom out with. There's a few core parts of this. First, you'll be put in a group of 8 with 7 other founders like you who you'll meet with monthly. If you're in New York or Austin, that will be in person. And they also have waitlists for Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Denver, and Miami. And the way to think of that is really the center of things.
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