Camp allows adults to connect, without cell coverage
Something magical happens when entrepreneurs and investors unplug
Iwas one of those city kids whose mom packed her off to camp every summer for a few weeks. We moved a lot, and the camps varied from year to year.
At the best ones, I enjoyed a life entirely unlike my normal one. I could reinvent myself, if only briefly, and do things that were wholly unlike my day-to-day urban youth.
Some families make a nextlevel investment in the summer camp experience. Starting as young as 6 or 7, these kids make an annual pilgrimage to the same spot in the woods and spend a month or more, year after year (sometimes generation after generation).
Fellow campers and staff members become a second family, and the campgrounds grow as familiar as their own city streets or suburban back yards. I never under- stood this alien world, the profound allegiance to one particular sleepaway camp, the initial aching goodbyes with mom and dad that quickly evolved into annual anticipation and excitement.
I never understood until Fireside.
Two boys, Steven Pulver and Daniel Levine, grew up in this world, both having attended Camp Walden. Pulver even became a full-fledged counselor.
Then the two went off to college, eventually becoming lawyers and, like many former Camp Walden alums, they stayed friends. Sharing an interest in technology, the two traded stories of the many tech conferences they attended, where (unless they were pitching) everyone spent much of the time staring down at their phones.
The two wondered: Could there be a better way?
The pair, who stayed in touch with many members of the Camp Walden community as well as camp owner Sol Birenbaum, decided to try to transport the immersive, friendly experience they had growing up to the tech conference circuit.
This meant gathering hundreds of people in the woods, hours outside of Toronto.
Oh, and they had to convince entrepreneurs and investors that they needed to make this epic trek only to end up somewhere without cell coverage or WiFi. Three years ago, they launched their first Fireside with a crowd of about 100 bold souls. In year two, the audience more than doubled.
This year, in his keynote addressing the nearly 500 attendees of the Fireside Conference, Birenbaum explained that a subtle but significant thing that takes place for the kids who attend Camp Walden is the transformative power of discomfort.
Likening it to the micro-tears that allow us to build muscle, Birenbaum pointed out that being away from the safe and familiar surroundings of home helps campers build new strengths that empower them in whatever they do.
At Fireside, attendees not only have to live without the reassuring buzz of their phones, they also have to forgo hotels to share cabins with strangers, sleep on bunks made for kids, without heat in weather that dips into the teens at night. Despite good food, it is, without a doubt, physically and technologically uncomfortable.
Yet what occurs is nothing short of magic, warmed by campfire light and reflected in the kind of star-filled sky you only see far from the light of civilization.
People make eye contact. They introduce themselves. They watch speakers without the distraction of tweets or email. They walk and talk in twos and groups, reflecting on what they’ve seen and heard.
In this lovely, odd, uncomfortable, disconnected place, people take risks: professional (pitching for formidable accelerators, venture capitalists and angel investors); personal (heart-rending group discussions about the mental health of founders); and even physical (ax throwing and blindfolded nature walks).
Fireside demands that attendees disconnect, with the promise of connecting. Without a doubt, there’s something to that. All of us, in search of our next big thing, big break or big investment, need to take big risks.
While a few days in the woods without a phone hardly qualifies, getting far away from the glare of the screen might be just what’s needed to really see the stars.