How to network like the One Percent

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How to network like the One Percent
Golf is so last century: if you’re a member of the Silicon Valley elite, your downtime will be
thrill-seeking and dangerous. Richard Godwin talks to the venture capitalist who knows
where tech entrepreneurs go to play (kiteboard compulsory)
Richard Godwin
June 18 2016, 12:01am, The Times
MaiTai at Necker Island
JOHN DILL
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Let’s imagine you’re a high net-worth individual with a string of successful tech start-ups
to your name. What do you do when you’re not disrupting, inventing, innovating? How do
you spend the “wealth” you may have inadvertently “created” for yourself along the way?
There was a time when you might have headed to the marina at Monaco to compare
superyachts or splashed your cash on JeC Koons super-art. But that’s a little too flagrantly
One-Percenty, a little too Sir Philip Green for the real 21st-century thought leaders. If you
want to be part of the new elite, you need to have a transformational experience. And the
place to get it is at MaiTai Global – a kiteboarding festival started in the mid Noughties by
Silicon Valley venture capitalist Bill Tai and professional kiteboarder Susi Mai. With only
100 attendees and a roving list of locations – including Maui, Hawaii; Cabarete, Dominican
Republic; Richard Branson’s Necker Island; the Hamptons, New York; Perth, Australia – it
is almost certainly the most exclusive festival in the world.
You might think of it as Ted Talks meets Burning Man meets the World Economic Forum
in Davos, only on a beach, with the ever-present danger that you will be slammed into a
cliC or dragged underwater in your kite lines. As the website says: “The MaiTai Global
community has an incredibly accomplished professional network who’s [sic] collective
passion brings them together in an extreme environment.” Spellchecks are so 20th
century.
“
We don’t want to waste time with someone who doesn’t feel
right. We know who will fit in pretty quick’
When I ask Bill Tai how you get a ticket, his demeanour doesn’t scream, “Welcome!”
“We’re not trying to push people away,” he says, shifting slightly in his chair, “but we don’t
want to waste our time with someone who isn’t right. I mean, we don’t want to waste your
time. And we get a feel for who’s going to fit in real quick.”
You need to have an interesting biography, an engaging personality and a cool enough
tech company to impress the MaiTai community, which has a combined net worth
estimated at $7 billion (£5 billion) by Forbes. This is the place where Twitter was beta-
tested and “several unicorns” (billion-dollar companies) have been launched. You don’t
have to be super-rich – tickets are a mere $800 – but you do need to be somewhere on that
trajectory. The younger entrepreneurs stay in hostels and spend the week eating ramen,
but they’re often better at kiteboarding than the older dudes with money, so they bring
valuable skills to the community.
Susi Mai in action at MaiTai Necker Island earlier this year
Yes, and sorry, you also need to be cool with kiteboarding, a high-octane watersport that
requires you to handle a 15m sail at high velocity while strapped to a surfboard. It’s all
about participation, says Tai. “We get you out of your comfort zone with a group of people
who … I wouldn’t be so immodest as to say they’re all Ted-level speakers, but they
probably are. Imagine taking a load of Ted-level speakers and then making them do action
sports.”
I connect with Tai over Zoom, an international networking app he’s just venture-funded
(Canva, Voxer and Tango are other MaiTai babies). He sends me a link and promises all I
need to do is click it. There he is in his T-shirt and baseball cap beneath a piece of
Buddhist art in his enviable Bay Area home. But while I can hear him, he can’t hear me.
For 15 minutes, he is reduced to a sort of remote IT assistant, instructing me how to get my
microphone to work. In the end, I handwrite a message and hold it up to the computer
screen: “CAN WE JUST USE SKYPE?” This seems to pain him – he seems to regard Skype
as you or I might a fax machine – but testing new things is part of the MaiTai process, he
tells me when we do connect (on Skype). “Tech is failing, failing, failing, iterating, winning
for a short amount of time, and then failing, failing, failing …” Which is just like
kitesurfing, as it happens.
Tai is a happily married father of three enjoying a lean and sporty middle age. He trained
as a computer-chip designer in the Eighties. He helped to launch the Taiwan
Semiconductor Manufacturing Company in 1987, before moving into venture capital in
1991, a year before the World Wide Web came into existence. He has seen 19 companies
that he’s invested in go public. “I kind of rode the internet wave and all the wealth
creation that happened in that period,” he says – a common Silicon Valley euphemism for,
“I got rich!”
He was always into watersports and formed part of a group of tech investors who
gathered at the home of Ken Goldman (now the CFO for Yahoo) on Maui for tech
powwows and windsurfing. However, after seeing a couple of people kiteboarding in 2000
or so, he upgraded. “Kiteboarding allows you to harness so much more power than
windsurfing or any other sport. It also gives you a three-dimensional ride. You can be
cruising along the water at 20mph or so – and then with a flick of the wrist you’re 40ft into
the air.”
The sport has become a Silicon Valley cult. When Sergey Brin and Larry Page – the cofounders of Google – were pictured kiteboarding in San Francisco Bay in 2003, the beaches
of California soon filled with budding entrepreneurs hoping to ride the wind and the
waves, and possibly come to the rescue when a passing billionaire got snagged in his lines.
Kiteboarding is to Silicon Valley what golf is to Wall Street – a place away from the
boardroom where the real networking gets done. With a crucial diCerence: “When you’re
on the golf course, you’re not counting on the other people to save your life at a critical
moment,” Tai points out. “When you’re out on the water and you’re coming in hot and
screaming into the beach, it’s worrisome. So everyone who kites changes their mindset.”
It’s pretty dangerous; he has been rescued by the coastguard after kiting into the Golden
Gate Bridge.
Susi Mai and Bill Tai
JOHN DILL
MaiTai itself only came into being once Tai, who refuses to disclose his age, had teamed
up with Susi Mai – whose sun-kissed lightness and ready laugh makes an amusing
contrast to his algorithmic intensity. Mai’s father was a German pro windsurfer and
“borderline hippie” who moved the family to the Dominican Republic (epic swell) when
she was five. “He decided he didn’t like Europe and would rather live on a tropical island.
I’m pretty happy about it,” she shimmers.
Mai, 32, grew up on the beach. She took up kiteboarding in 2001, at a point where there
were only a few hundred of them in the world and the equipment was mostly home-made.
“I’ve always been a free spirit, growing up on an island,” she says. “The first time I rode
out past the reef, maybe five kilometres from the beach, out into the deep ocean, I was
like, wow. I sat down on my board and looked back and felt like I’d removed myself from
planet Earth. I was so free.”
Living on one of the most windy beaches in the world, she soon became rather good at it.
After finishing second in her first competition, things began to fall into place. “Someone
came up to me and said, ‘Hey! We should sponsor you!’ and I said, ‘Cool!’, and I got
involved with Red Bull and it sort of went from there.”
She delayed going to university year after year and became a poster girl for the sport just
as Tai was getting started. The pair were introduced over email by a mutual friend.
Mai says she was “kind of freaked out” by his approach. “I didn’t know much about email
at the time – I thought it was like a formal letter that you had to write out. But he just sent
me this one-line email saying: ‘Our names together spell Mai Tai! That’s really cool! We
should do something!’ I didn’t know what the heck he was talking about!” But things soon
fell into place.
At MaiTai in the Hamptons, New York
JOHN DILL
The festivals take place over a week. There are a couple of hours of tech talks and lectures
in the mornings but, as Mai says, “As soon as the wind picks up, there is no way of keeping
anyone’s attention. They’re all looking out the window at the trees moving. Then, people
are relaxing; they’re bonding; there are endorphins floating around and beer in the
coolers. Everybody’s having a good time!”
They are also, it should be stressed, transforming themselves. How many times have you
been transformed in the past 12 months, would you say? I mean, like, truly
metamorphosed from one thing into another, eg, single-minded tech billionaire into freespirited beach bum, investment banker into sustainability zealot? Because the frequency
of these “transformational experiences” (and your ability to transform back again) is fast
becoming the social capital of the 21st century. Truly avant-garde capitalists like to pitch
themselves against adversity and see what emerges in extremis.
You can trace a lot of this back to 1990, when the founders of Burning Man drew a line in
the Nevada sand and declared that, on the other side, everything will be diCerent. Since
then, Burning Man has become a countercultural phenomenon, oCering 70,000 souls a
turbo-charged fusion of futurism and paganism each summer, with the caveat that they
leave no trace – no carapace of their metamorphosis.
“
For someone doing 80 hours a week at their start-up, we’re
offering a reprieve’
As Rolling Stone magazine has it, “Tibetan monks teach meditation workshops. Cirque du
Soleil performers oCer acrobatics classes. Internet billionaires run around naked.
Thousands of women ride their bikes topless ...” It’s a crucial part of the top tech
entrepreneurs’ Silicon Valley lifestyles.
In recent years, “transformational festivals” that aim to replicate that spirit have sprung
up from California to Costa Rica. Earlier this year, Further Future – which grew out of the
legendary Robot Heart encampment at Burning Man – pitched itself between arts festival
and a wellness retreat, with on-site spa, Michelin-starred restaurants and lectures by
billionaires such as Google boss Eric Schmidt. It was recently dubbed “Burning Man for
the One Percent”.
At MaiTai in the Hamptons, New York
JOHN DILL
Russell Ward, owner-founder of the Confluence, an LA-based firm that promotes MaiTai
and Further Future, spits with rage when I suggest that these events are elitist – but he
does see them drawing in a specific mindset. “Further Future – and I say this with the trust
that you won’t twist it – is for a very select few. I wouldn’t say necessarily the One Percent,
but it’s certainly for an outlier group. The people who won’t settle for the status quo … It’s
for a group of individuals who are open to mindful optimism and are looking to build a
brighter future.”
“There’s a big crossover between MaiTai and Burning Man, particularly the Robot Heart
encampment,” confirms Tai. “One of the terms they use at Burning Man is ‘Moop’: matter
out of place. When you go to Burning Man, you are not supposed to leave anything in the
desert that wasn’t already there. As our community began to grow, Susi and I decided to
go one better – and rather than just leave things as they were, we try to improve things.”
While it’s not oscially about networking, it also is. Ward sees the experiences oCered at
festivals such as Burning Man and MaiTai as equivalent to dining in Asian cultures.
“The humanity that’s laid forth when you’re watching the sunrise in the desert or out
there on the water is infinitely more powerful than what can be delivered in an hour in a
boardroom. There’s a level of trust there – and trust is a primary input for building a
business.”
He feels it’s no surprise that high net-worth individuals are drawn to this. “Initially,
festivals drew a bohemian base. But entrepreneurial fervour has taken hold and, as people
are succeeding in business, they’re looking for an equal oC-set. The tenacity of the
business world needs the recuperation and community values of the festival world all the
more. For someone doing 80 hours a week at their start-up and trying to get as much done
as they can before their burn rate extinguishes, it’s a reprieve.”
At MaiTai in the Hamptons, New York
JOHN DILL
And, as Tai says, the demands on a Silicon Valley venture capitalist are such that they
can’t simply go and lie on a beach in their downtime. In fact, he seems oCended when I
suggest he might want to do that. “I’m just not wired that way,” he says. “When a start-up
executive takes a little time oC, it’s very uncomfortable – their mind is so conditioned to
being insanely busy.”
In fact, the more he talks about kiting, the clearer its appeal among the Silicon Valley elite
becomes. “Kiteboarding appeals to the kind of person who can handle a highly
multivariant situation,” he says. “The number of inputs that you’re dealing with is
exponentially higher than when you’re on a surfboard. Wind, speed, range, direction,
water, waves, currents … The aspect ratio of your board, the size of your kite, the length of
your line – all of these things matter. So you have to be able to absorb all of these variables
and express them in one output, which is your ride.”
Which is a lot like running a tech company, I’m guessing? Tai nods enthusiastically. “That
is the exact reason MaiTai exploded among the tech community.” And much like in tech,
when you do fail, you get to fall back down to the ground with a parachute and be greeted
with beers by all the guys on the beach? “By definition, the start-up process is Darwinian
and the vast majority of companies don’t make it. Even the ones that do make it are a
string of failures that need to be corrected constantly.”
Bill Tai and Susi Mai
OW E N B U G G Y
Mai – who takes a rather more Zen approach to these things – admits to finding Tai’s
approach a little stressy at times. “Bill’s kiting?” she says. “He is a very proficient
kiteboarder. But he gets super-nervous. He has this computer brain that can’t turn oC.
When we were first working on MaiTai he would jump out of bed in the middle of the
night and shout, ‘Oh my God, the stock market is down!’ And I would be like, ‘What are
you doing?’ ”
There are no plans to “scale” MaiTai events – to expand beyond their 100 attendees would
risk losing their magic – but Tai recently held the Block Chain Summit on Necker Island
and they have started snowkiting in Norway. Mai talks of establishing a global community
with the brand, “like a sort of Soho House for kiteboarding. You would have diCerent
clubs around the world full of everything you need.”
I ask Mai if she gets hit on by a lot of techies at MaiTai and she stresses it’s not really
about that. “I’ve dated a couple of techies – not my cup of tea, really. I’m more interested
in people who can come out and play with me.” She’s now dating a German percussionist.
But she has noticed a diCerent mentality emerging among the billionaires.
“Now, you can’t tell who runs a billion-dollar company. The younger ones put so much
more emphasis on trying to get the life/work balance right. Often, I find out people’s net
worth after years of knowing them and I’m astonished: there’s no way I would have
thought they were running multimillion-dollar companies.”
In a transformational world, the shapeshifter is king.
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