“I had more great conversations per hour than I’d had in years,” Hoffman later told me.
The mentors, who flew in on a different plane along with Founders Fund partners Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, Luke Nosek, Brian Singerman, Bruce Gibney and Sean Parker included Yelp’s Russell Simmons, Palantir’s Stephen Cohen, World Economic Forum CTO Brian Behlendorf, and Airtime co-founder Joey Liaw. From what I heard the mentors really didn’t feel like there was that much difference between them and the attendees — as in, both groups were just as in awe of each other and eager to partake in dialogue.
In lieu of the artifice of talks or anything even remotely structured the next morning, the attendees were given the option of going snorkeling or off-roading in Jeeps, and those that chose snorkeling got to explore the ocean floor with industry visionaries like Parker and Thiel. Because this was Hawaii, some of the group even informally went golfing, on a whim.
To give you a sense of how casual everything was, when I arrived in Lanai, Island Air informed me that it had lost my baggage and I was stuck wearing my default airplane outfit to the conference: a Coachella hoodie, a pair of cut-off shorts, ballet slippers and a tank top. When I asked the hotel guest reception whether or not my attire was appropriate for dinner, they responded, “Yeah, everyone else is also dressed like you.” I ended up buying a Hawaiian themed dress from the gift shop anyways.
I arrived at the dinner 15 minutes late, and immediately one of the F50 kindly helped me get situated. My table was a cornucopia of super-impressive people, to my right Eben Bayer, a entrepreneur who is trying to make mushrooms “the new plastic” with his company Ecovative Design, to my left Founders Fund partner Gibney, and across from me was child prodigy Taylor Wilson — a kid who created nuclear fusion in his garage at 14 and currently owns one of the largest private collections of radioactive materials in the US.
At 18, Taylor wasn’t yet old enough to drink the wine and margaritas being offered to the table. He really wasn’t missing out on much, we insisted.
Sometimes I like to think of the technology industry as what high school would have been like if the nerds were actually cool, and this exactly was the vibe at F50. The next morning when I donned my swag shirt to breakfast (I still didn’t have normal clothes) I came across a girl who was also wandering aimlessly about the Four Seasons, also looking for the F50 breakfast, I assumed.
Ariel Garten was slight and about as un-intimidating as possible until she opened her mouth to respond to my cliche, “And what do you do?”question. “Thought-controlled computing,” was her answer and it made me do a double take. As CEO of InteraXon industries, Garten is making hardware products that can be controlled by the human mind (Seriously). She is also part owner of a Fashion Boutique in her native Canada.
“I can pick any one person here and they’ll be amazing,” she quipped as we headed to breakfast.
“Neither haphazard tossings of business cards nor random people’s elevator pitches blessed the event, where, profoundly brilliant people exchanged world-changing ideas,” explained attendee Meredith Perry (who, as the founder of Ubeam, is working on a ground-breaking wireless phone charger), who I got to know over a breakfast buffet replete with scrambled eggs, bacon and mangoes and more.
Perry set F50 in a league apart from other tech conferences, “[It] was small enough so that people felt intimate and uninhibited, and unstructured enough so that violent ideation could unfold … The relationships formed between the eager minds in attendance will lead to future-changing partnerships.”
And indeed I already know of one (off-the-record, for the moment) partnership to stem from the event — just weeks or so after. “The real ‘results’ of the F50 weekend won’t materialize for several years,” Perry said.
So who exactly were the chosen fifty?
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