The Cuckoo’s Nest, a new private social club in California’s Silicon Valley, will open in the first quarter of 2015 and attempt to be “a techie version of the blue-blood business clubs of yesteryear.”
A new private social club, the Cuckoo’s Nest, will open early in California’s Silicon Valley in 2015 as a “techie version of the blue-blood business clubs of yesteryear,” Fortune magazine reported.
The new club, billed as the “ultimate indoor/outdoor dining, drinking and special-events venue” for “founders, CEOs, investors and artists,” is scheduled to open near the Menlo Park, Calif. headquarters of Facebook (Menlo Park, Calif.), Tesla (Palo Alto, Calif.) and Google (Mountain View, Calif.), Fortune reported. The goal is to “create a techie version of the business clubs of yesteryear, where corporate scions wearing suits and ties lounged in big leather chairs to talk deals, puff cigars and sip bourbon.”
Early members of the club include billionaire investor Mark Cuban, Google Senior Vice President David Drummond and Tim Draper, Managing Director of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, according to the club’s website (http://cuckoosnestclub.com). The club is taking its name from the 1962 bestseller, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” that then became the Academy Award-winning 1975 movie starring Jack Nicholson.
The club, to be located in Menlo Park, Calif., is being created by Tony Perkins, described by Fortune as “a Silicon Valley wheeler-dealer who runs the AlwaysOn tech conferences and is a venture capitalist with DFJ Frontier.” BootUp Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in and advises startups, is also a partner, Fortune reported.
The criteria for becoming a member is unclear, Fortune reported, but early Cuckoo’s Nest members are predominantly CEOs, founders and venture capitalists—“somewhat at odds with Silicon Valley’s supposed egalitarian ethos.” Membership has been priced at $2,500 annually and will be capped at 1,200 “with an eye towards diversity,” Fortune reported, adding that “may be difficult to achieve given the tech industry’s heavily skewed demographics of mainly white and Asian males.”
The Cuckoo’s Nest plans for 51% of its members to be women, according to a marketing pitch written by Perkins and obtained by Fortune. And to attract younger people, the club offers a discounted $1,000 annual membership to those under 30.
Although the Cuckoo’s Nest is still under construction, Perkins is holding several “pre-launch” parties, Fortune reported. The club also has regular live entertainment and speakers like Cuban and well-known Benchmark Capital partner Bill Gurley have been scheduled.
“The Valley does not have a place where entrepreneurs can find each other and hang out at,” Draper said in a club e-mail soliciting new members that was titled “Confidential,” Fortune reported. He went on to describe the Cuckoo’s Nest as the “perfect vision and perfect spot to make this happen.”
Silicon Valley execs, founders and investors already have plenty of other social gathering options, Fortune noted. In Palo Alto, the five-star Rosewood Sand Hill hotel remains a go-to spot for meetings and private dinners, and the Epiphany Hotel’s Lure + Till restaurant has fast become a casual favorite for younger entrepreneurs since opening in the spring of 2014.
Then there’s The Battery, the five-story San Francisco social club. The space, filled with dark wood and exposed brick, cost $13.5 million for entrepreneur couple Michael and Xochi Birch to buy and an undisclosed amount of money to renovate into a luxurious space to see and be seen. The Battery draws luminaries like Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and famed Apple designer Jonathan Ive, as well as execs from Twitter, Airbnb, Dropbox and other tech companies. Members pay $2,400 in annual fees, $100 less than what the Cuckoo’s Nest is asking of many members, Fortune reported.
But early Cuckoo’s Nest members like Brian Wong, CEO and founder of the mobile ad network Kiip, contend the Valley could use more hotspots like The Battery, which is why he signed up early, Fortune reported. Wong is also an admirer of Perkins, who founded the tech-focused magazine Red Herring in 1993. (The magazine ceased publication in 2003 after the dot-com crash.)
“I think he [Perkins] is one of the best candidates to do something like this,” said Wong. “He’s a gatherer of people, and I use his events as a litmus test of how this club might be.”
Perkins did not respond to Fortune’s requests for comment.
Andrea Zurek, co-founder of the venture capital firm XG Ventures and also a Battery member, splits her time evenly between San Francisco and the Peninsula south of the city, Fortune reported. So the idea of a Battery-like experience in Menlo Park, 40 minutes outside the city, proved compelling to her. “Because I am a female person in venture, I also liked that they wanted a nice, healthy mix between females, males, startup folks and VCs [venture capitalists],” Zurek added.
Not everyone is a Cuckoo’s Nest fan, however—a number of other execs and entrepreneurs that Fortune spoke to balked at the idea of paying thousands a year to hobnob with fellow techies.
“I mean, who has the time to go to a membership club?” argued one startup founder, who said he declined a membership offer from Perkins. “Entrepreneurs should be heads-down and building.”
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