Brett Leve, co-founder of Summit, on Summit LA17 including luminaries such as Jeff Bezos

I recently connected with Brett Leve, Co-founder of Summit.  I first learned of Summit at a dinner hosted by Christiana Falcone and was very impressed with their bold vision. Since then, Summit has acquired a mountain where they bring people together for relationship building, group experiences and creative workshops. This year, Summit is hosting their annual event in Los Angeles, with luminary speakers including Jeff Bezos, that will take place in November. I spoke to Brett about what inspired him to start Summit, the upcoming LA event, the millennial desire for experiences, and how Forbes readers can potentially interact with Summit.

Forbes: What inspired you to start Summit?

Leve: Summit was founded in 2008 out of a desire to create an authentic peer group for entrepreneurs, innovators, and artists who were bringing meaningful projects into the world. We saw the need to connect, support and uplift one another, because bringing an organization or body of work into existence is incredibly difficult.

At the time, there were plenty of organizations that catered to entrepreneurs, but they were all narrowly focused. We believed there was the potential to create something more interesting, dynamic, and fruitful that could help everyone achieve their goals by building a community that was inclusive, not exclusive, and by broadening the scope of who could participate.

We’ve been bringing people from different industries, nationalities, socioeconomic backgrounds, and expertise together for almost ten years now and have seen countless partnerships, joint ventures and collaborations occur as a result.

Forbes: After holding your annual flagship event on a cruise ship, you’re taking it to L.A. for the first time this year. How does this elevate what you're able to do with the event?

Leve: We’re at an interesting point in the life cycle of Summit. We’ve grown exponentially over the years, and we needed a place that could accommodate that continued growth.

While a cruise ship in the middle of the ocean is an inspiring setting, having the event on land and in a global hub gives us access to infrastructure and an array of venues that will allow us to showcase our creativity and build out a world-class experience without spatial limitations.

Summit is always working to expand our community. Moving to L.A. has allowed us to confirm many luminary level speakers we have been chasing for the better part of a decade.  Some of who wanted to participate in the past but couldn’t be disconnected on a cruise ship for three days.

Luminary engagement is important to us. We believe that their participation and recognition of the important work being done by the next generation of leaders is critical to our ability to persevere through the challenges associated with creating world-class organizations.

Summit community members Tini Courtney and Travis Brewer at Summit Powder Mountain in Eden, Utah

Forbes: Tell us about some highlights from some of the cruises and mountain events that you have hosted?

Leve: We’ve seen just about every type of positive externality come from the robust collaboration that's natural to the Summit community.  Summit is one of the only events in the world where you can’t accurately predict what the experience or the outcome will be.

Our programming is so wide and interdisciplinary and is set up in a choose-your-own-adventure style. This leads to an experience with all of the potential of a large event but with the intimacy of a small one.  We have seen over $1bn in investments, partnerships, joint ventures and collaborations take place inside the community. We’ve also seen countless examples of non-commercial, but still life changing collaborations, from artists finding new patrons, to people finding their co-founders, advisors or future life partners.

Forbes: Many people are calling millennials the experience generation, because they are spending increasingly more of their disposable income on experiences and are less interested in owning inanimate objects. How has Summit ridden this trend, and what do you expect to be the future of this trend?

Leve: All of my co-founders in Summit are millennials, and this trend was apparent to us long ago. It is part and parcel to what drove us to create an indispensable experience that simply was not offered anywhere else.

While our events certainly satiate that millennial desire for peak experiences, they can be appreciated by any age.

Summit was designed to offer the greatest impact on an interpersonal level, and an exponential amount of value to the individual who commits to being a part of it. You can get as much business done in 72 hours at a Summit event as you can in half a year in a traditional business setting.

While participation obviously requires an investment of time and money, community members who show up for an event are bonded together in perpetuity. This is by virtue of having the same shared experience and context as the rest of the attendees, as our events always have a unique time stamp and series of themes. While the actual event may last only a few days, its impact and the connections you make will stay with you for a lifetime.

We were among the first companies to build truly interdisciplinary and immersive events and we’ve seen several others pop up in the same vein since then. We hope this trend continues and that there will be more community-driven, immersive events. I firmly believe that the building of authentic community anywhere benefits community everywhere.

Forbes: What opportunities do Forbes readers have with Summit?

Leve: Summit is about being inclusive and about building a community that has strong shared values. We recruit people according to a specific psychographic--which is a person who views their work as a mechanism for transformation in their industry or the world at large, and is a person of good character and integrity. To the extent that any reader is bringing an organization or body of work into the world and they subscribe to the same ethos, we encourage them to apply on our website and reference this article. We would be more than happy to consider their participation.

Summit is all about growing a global community of innovators, entrepreneurs, and artists to catalyze creative achievement and global change. Our desire is to make Summit’s annual flagship event the preeminent gathering for thought leaders today and we won’t rest until that’s done!