When the Festival Couldn't Happen, We Built Founders Instead

When the environment changes, the organizations that thrive aren't the ones waiting for normal to come back - they're the ones willing to learn, adapt, and build.

In early 2020, the world - and our proud local Las Vegas community - faced new challenges. Life is Beautiful existed to inspire and transform communities, and the way we did that - a large-scale music and arts festival - was suddenly, painfully unlikely to happen. When your whole reason for being is gathering tens of thousands of people in one place, and gathering is the one thing you can't do, "wait and see" stops being a strategy.

So leadership put a challenge to the team: if live events stayed impossible, how else could we serve our community and create value? We'd already been exploring ways to grow beyond the annual festival; the disruption just turned that slow exploration into something urgent. This is the story of what we built in response - and the lesson it left me with.

The challenge nobody wanted, and the opening inside it

There's a specific kind of fear that comes with watching your core product become unviable overnight. The honest thing is to name it: people were worried about their jobs, their industry, and whether the thing they were good at still mattered. But underneath the fear was a real opening. A community full of people who knew how to produce extraordinary experiences suddenly had time, talent, and a powerful reason to point those skills somewhere new.

I didn't want us to spend that moment waiting. I wanted us to spend it learning.

So I built the system that could teach it

In response, I designed and launched Innovation Hive, a workforce reskilling and innovation program built on the principles of design thinking. And I made a deliberate choice early: this couldn't be a one-time workshop that evaporated the day it ended. It needed to be a living system people could actually move through. So I built one, end to end, in Notion - not a folder of links, but a structured resource library that worked like a real innovation pipeline.

Here's how it was designed to work.

An idea funnel, in tiers. Rather than dropping people straight into "go start a business," the Hive moved ideas through stages - a first tier focused on clarifying (understanding the customer, the problem, the assumptions) and a second tier focused on validating (modeling the business, testing against real success criteria). Each tier had its own curated toolkit, so people always knew what the next right step was instead of staring at a blank page.

Roles, so everyone had a way in. This was the part I'm proudest of, because it solved the real problem. Most participants came from hospitality, events, and production - not lean startups - so I built a set of roles people could step into based on strengths they already had: someone to own the objective, someone to chase down research, someone to translate strategy into a deliverable, someone to coach others' "innovation muscle," someone to keep communication flowing across teams. One person could move through several roles over time. It reframed the whole thing: you didn't have to become a different person to contribute; you had to recognize where your existing talent fit.

A development guide sequenced like a curriculum. The library walked people through the actual arc of building something - starting with mindset (adaptability, resilience, the honest question of whether an organization can even learn), then personal development, then how to give and take feedback and defend a new idea without getting defensive, then ideation (understanding a customer's real "job to be done," running "How Might We" exercises, making sure you're solving the right problem), and finally forming a hypothesis you could actually test.

The best outside thinking, plus tools I built myself. I curated the strongest external material I could find - design thinking from Harvard Business Review, Jobs-to-Be-Done, the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Design, the PRFAQ method - and then I built custom worksheets tailored to our people: idea-exploration guides, empathy-interview templates, a one-page business plan, brainstorming and audience-interview frameworks. Curation meets translation; the point wasn't to show people the canon, it was to make the canon usable by someone whose last job was running a stage.

To put all that into practice, I partnered with our Festival Director and with organizations including Zappos, and we ran a Zappos-inspired event called 48 Hour Founders, inspired by Startup Weekend - teams formed, researched real opportunities, developed concepts, and pitched them, using the exact tools the library had been teaching.

What came out of it

Several teams pushed past the workshop stage into something real. One became a venture called Life is Beautiful Consulting - a group proposing to help hospitality organizations, event producers, and public-sector clients prepare to reopen under evolving health and safety requirements. Exactly the kind of expertise our people already had, aimed at exactly the problem the moment had created. They used the customer discovery, market research, and business development techniques the Hive had introduced to go after clients and investment.

I'm proud of this one because it turned a period of pure uncertainty into a period of experimentation. Instead of waiting for normal to return, we built a framework - and a real library behind it - that helped people explore opportunities, build new capabilities, and test their ideas while the ground was still shifting.

It reinforced something I've watched hold true across my whole career: when the environment changes, the organizations that thrive are the ones willing to learn, adapt, and build - and the fastest way to become one of those organizations is to give your people a real system and a place to start.