14: Alex Zhang - Curating Cultural Playgrounds

Episode summary: 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 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 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.

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. It 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.