Felix Gillette

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“To Fund His Grand Venture, He’d Charge $16,500 Per Head”

February 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A private city of conspicuous consumption being built at Burning Man, that Libertarian wet dream, says so much about the weird welter of technology, wealth inequality and batshit politics that make up much of the mishegas modern American landscape. The opening of Felix Gillette’s Bloomberg story about the 1% decamping to the Nevada desert with AC, Wi-Fi and a wait staff:

For his 50th birthday, Jim Tananbaum, chief executive officer of Foresite Capital, threw himself an extravagant party at Burning Man, the annual sybaritic arts festival and all-hours rave that attracts 60,000-plus to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada over the week before Labor Day. Tananbaum’s bash went so well, he decided to host an even more elaborate one the following year. In 2014 he’d invite up to 120 people to join him at a camp that would make the Burning Man experience feel something like staying at a pop-up W Hotel. To fund his grand venture, he’d charge $16,500 per head.

Tananbaum, a contemporary art collector who resembles the actor Bob Saget, grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and graduated from Yale and Harvard, where he earned both an M.D. and an MBA. After years of starting, selling, and investing in health-care companies, he founded Foresite in 2011. A private venture capital firm with $650 million under management, San Francisco-based Foresite specializes in the health-care and pharmaceutical industries.

Busy building his portfolios, Tananbaum only made it to Burning Man in 2009, the festival’s 24th year, but instantly fell under its spell. While his peers in San Francisco’s high finance circles took up kitesurfing or winemaking, he devoted his spare time to preparations for the next burn. “Jim put a tremendous effort into trying to create something very special for the Burning Man community,” says his friend Matt Nordgren, a former quarterback at the University of Texas, who went on to star in the Bravo reality show Most Eligible Dallas. 

For 2014, Tananbaum wanted a camp that was aesthetically novel, ecologically conscious, and exceedingly comfortable.•

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“He Sees Himself Not Only As A Businessman But As Something Of An Applied Scientist”

April 1, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From Felix Gillette’s smart new Businessweek article about the Internet buzz saw that is Buzzfeed, a passage on company co-founder Jonah Peretti, who sees the site as a psycho-sociological experiment, and one of his influences, Stanley Milgram:

“Peretti, 38, has a knack for coining clever Web neologisms. Among the keys to achieving success on the Internet, he says, is deploying ‘Big Seed Marketing,’ optimizing ‘Viral Lift,’ using a ‘Mullet Strategy,’ and catering to the ‘Bored at Work Network.’ ” He sees himself not only as a businessman but as something of an applied scientist, testing the theories of 20th century academic sociologists vs. the contemporary data of the social Web.

To understand some of the principles underlying BuzzFeed’s strategy, he recommends reading The Individual in a Social World, a 1977 book by Stanley Milgram, who is known, among other things, for his experiments leading to the six degrees of separation theory. ‘When some cute kitten video goes viral,’ says Peretti, ‘you know a Stanley Milgram experiment is happening thousands of times a day.’

Peretti grew up in Oakland, Calif., graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1996 with a degree in environmental studies, and spent a couple of years teaching computers and Web publishing to high school students in New Orleans. After co-writing a number of papers for academic conferences (‘Historical Role-Playing in Virtual Worlds: VRML in the History Curriculum and Beyond’), he matriculated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a master’s degree from the Media Lab.

In 2001, inspired by reports of substandard working conditions at Nike (NKE) factories, Peretti ordered a pair of custom Nike sneakers decorated with the word ‘Sweatshop.’ The company refused to fill the order, and Peretti got into a theatrical back-and-forth with a customer rep on e-mail. Afterward, Peretti e-mailed the document to 10 acquaintances, who passed it along to their friends. The whole thing snowballed. Overnight, Peretti became an Internet sensation. NBC flew him to New York to appear on Today.

Peretti walked away from the Nike affair a presumed expert on the explosive Internet phenomena now known as viral media. Writing about his experience for the Nation in April 2001, he theorized, ‘In the long run this episode will have a larger impact on how people think about media than how they think about Nike and sweatshop labor.’ He speculated that by understanding the dynamics of ‘decentralized distribution systems and peer-to-peer networks,’ new forms of social protest would emerge and challenge the ‘constellations of power traditionally supported by the mass media.'”

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Stanley Milgram’s 1962 experiment, “Obedience”:

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