Nightlife impresario Noah Tepperberg—"charmingly schlubby," as he was once described—has achieved a special kind of fame as the co-owner of Marquee and other posh nightclubs in New York and beyond: He is a celebrity to celebrities. Jamie Foxx, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Britney Spears are among the stars who count him as a friend.  
   
The 32-year-old Tepperberg, a former New York City teenage chess champion, joined forces in high school with Jason Strauss to start a party-promotion business. Fifteen years later, they are presiding over a growing marketing, entertainment, and branding company, Strategic Group, while casting themselves as social arbiters in the Darwinian world of glitz and glamour.
   
In an exclusive interview with Portfolio.com, the usually reticent Tepperberg tells how he gets customers to pay $400 for a $30 bottle of vodka, how to convert boldface names into fun and profit, why the velvet rope is a force for good, and other business secrets.   

Lloyd Grove: Tell me a little bit about your background. You come from a family that was heavily into medicine—your father was a doctor.
 
Noah Tepperberg: My father was a pediatric neurologist, and my mother was an editor of a travel magazine for physicians. And my eldest sister is a doctor up in Boston.
 
L.G.: And you had a brief flirtation with medicine as a teenager. Tell me about that.
 
N.T.: When I was 13, I spent a summer volunteering at Maimonides hospital [Maimonides Medical Center, in Brooklyn], where my dad worked, on the pediatric floor. And after that, I decided that I didn't want to go into medicine.
 
L.G.: Because you just found it too depressing?
 
N.T.: Just for a lot of reasons. You know, I saw how emotionally attached my dad was to some of his patients and didn't know if I wanted to go through life with the same attachments. For some reason, spending my whole life in that world didn't seem as exciting as it had my previous 13 years.
 
L.G.: And you were a good student, weren't you?
 
N.T.: Yeah. I mean, I went to Stuyvesant which, you know, is a top high school in the city. And then I went to the University of Miami, where I got almost straight A's. I had a double major in entrepreneurship and business management. When I was in school, my job was a full-time student. My job was to get good grades—and so I did.

L.G.: By the time you had worked at Maimonides, you were also a chess champion.
 
N.T.: Yeah, I played chess competitively. I studied with Jack Collins, who was Bobby Fischer's teacher. I took lessons with him. I started playing chess at eight, and I played until I was about 16, very seriously. I grew up with Josh Waitzkin, who they made the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer about. I probably met him when I was about eight. His father and one of my parents' closest family friends were best friends. I'm pretty sure I went with Josh to his first chess tournament—it was probably my fifth chess tournament up at Hunter [College] High School. And obviously he's one of the most famous chess players now that they made the movie about him. Did you see that movie, Searching for Bobby Fischer?

L.G.: I did not, but it's one that's on my list. I kind of went off Bobby Fischer when I found out that he was such a kook.
 
N.T.: Right. Well, I played chess competitively. I was the New York City under-age-13 champion. I was a member of the Marshall Chess Club and the Manhattan Chess Club. I played for Stuyvesant. We were national champions. I wasn't on the team the year we won national champions, but all the players I played with were. And then I didn't stop playing, I just stopped playing competitively at about 16. And since then, I've only played a couple of times. I did get to meet [Garry] Kasparov, which is great. I played him when I was about 14—no, even younger, maybe 13, and that was pretty amazing. He played a "simul" for like 40 New York City school kids. And then I actually got to meet him again, so randomly—at a party in the Hamptons, maybe five years ago, that Ted Field threw—and it was pretty amazing. The guy remembered playing me, 14 years earlier, as one of 40 kids who played in the simul. He remembered the game!

L.G.: It takes a certain kind of intelligence to be good at chess, and I assume a pretty good memory for things like that, does it not?
 
N.T.: Yeah, I mean chess takes a certain type of, I guess, thinker. I don't know if intelligence is necessarily the perfect word, but you learn to think a certain way when you play chess. You really need to be able to look at a board and see things in a big picture, kind of play things out in your head very quickly. And it's the thought process of, if I do this, what does your opponent do next? And if they do that, and you do that, what's then next? And if that happens, then you really need to be able to think through many scenarios. You have to be able to think through scenarios that move off moving parts all the time.
 
L.G.: So the obvious question is, how do you think, if at all, that translates into what you're doing now?

N.T.: I think that having that experience and that sort of training as a child really has 100 percent influenced every day of my life. I think I benefit from having that training, you know?
 

L.G.: Well, see if you can tell me, while you briefly recount for me your career so far in the party-promotion, nightclub, and branding-promotion businesses, how your chess training has influenced you? Maybe you'll think of ways in which your feel for strategy and moving parts and seeing around corners has helped you in business.

N.T.: Well, I mean that's a very long conversation-I'm happy to have it with you—it's a long conversation. It's probably a whole book.
 
L.G.: Let's not have that conversation. Instead, Noah, tell me how you got into the business.
 
N.T.: At Stuyvesant, I started throwing parties for the cast of the school play that took place every year. It was a cast party for SING! [a New York City high school musical theater competition]—they actually made a movie about SING! too—and I have a lot of friends in the club business and a brother that played in a very popular band, through his relationships.

L.G.: You must tell me the name of the band.
 
N.T.: The band was called the Skadanks. They were a popular band in the late '80s, early '90s, in New York City. My brother's name is Ricky Tepperberg—his real name is David—he goes by Ricky.
 
L.G.: I hasten to ask, your real name is Noah, right?
 
N.T.: Of course. Hold on one second—we put in these new servers today, I can't even explain what it means, but I've had just this major piece of equipment in my office. I don't know how to use it, but now I have the email capacity to have, like, hundreds of people working off the server as opposed to the previous one I've had. You don't really think about these things when you start your business. You don't expect it to grow. Literally just put a server in, they could have a thousand users on it. So hopefully there'll be that many people working with me one day.
 
L.G.: It seems like you're on the right trajectory for that.
 
N.T.: Well, knock on wood.
 
L.G.: So you started off throwing a cast party for SING!

N.T.: Right. And from there, I started working for different clubs. I was promoting and at that time was literally handing out invitations. There were no emails. There was no text messaging. It was collecting phone numbers, and making personal phone calls, and promoting different clubs that worked. That's where I met Jason [Strauss]. He was doing the same thing. I remember going to a club that he promoted, going to one of his parties, and talking to him about working together there. That was a club called Bacchus-now Eugene, on 24th Street. I know the first party Jason and I did together was when we were seniors in high school. We threw a party at the Country Club, on 85th Street between Second and Third. It was actually the night of the Columbia Prep Prom, and Jason was at that prom. He came and he showed up with 200 people from the prom. [Laughs]

L.G.: And what qualities did you possess, do you think, that gave you a talent for party promotion and hosting parties?
 
N.T.: Well, first, there was the business side of it. My friends would come to the parties I promoted because they knew they'd get in. They knew they would have a good time. They knew there would be a certain crowd there, a certain theme. They knew they would see their other friends. So how did that happen? Well, I always did good deals with the venues to make sure that wherever we were doing our parties, our people would get in and they would have a place. There was a room for them, whether it was their own room in a bigger club. Or we had our own person at the door. We had our own entrance. We were always making sure that our crowd was taken care of. At that age, that was really important. Doing deals with club owners at that age was not always the easiest thing, but I carried myself well. This was when I was 16, 17, 18.

L.G.: And you were first in a club at age 14, right, when your dad brought you to your brother's band performance. So to get this out of the way quick-unlike many people in your business, you never succumbed to the temptations of drugs.
 
N.T.: Never.
 
L.G.: And you're a moderate drinker.
 
N.T.: Yep.
 
L.G.: Excellent. So you and Jason sort of joined up in the party-promotion business.
 
N.T.: Officially, we became partners when we were 17. I went to Stuyvesant, and he went to Riverdale [Country School, in the Bronx], which is a private school.
 
L.G.: So you were a very academically successful kid who could very well have followed your dad into medicine. Tell me how your parents reacted to the idea of "My son, the party boy"?
 
N.T.: I think originally, at the beginning, they weren't thrilled. I don't think they sent me to college and invested all the time that they did into bringing me up the way that they did to run parties. But that's when they thought that I was running parties to have fun. Once they realized that there's a real business there, their tunes quickly changed.

L.G.: What persuaded them that was the case?
 
N.T.: Well, first of all, I think when I bought my first apartment—at age 21. It was in the Village. It was a co-op, and my dad had to co-sign it so they would approve me. Same building I live in now, on West Twelfth Street. And I think they realized—Wow!—and that was with the money I saved working in clubs throughout college. And they realized that I was a good businessman. And they thought that was very smart of me. All my friends were still living at home or renting rooms with other people.
 
L.G.: Do you mind my asking, since real estate is kind of the new pornography, how much did you pay for it?
 
N.T.: I paid $65,000 for a studio. [Laughs]
 
L.G.: [Laughs] Which today would probably go for- 
 
N.T.: Probably go for, like, $400,000.
 
L.G.: That was obviously very prescient of you. And now you live in a much larger apartment in the same building.
 
N.T.: I'll tell you because it's public, but I don't want to sound like I'm boasting.
 
L.G.: No, you're not boasting—I'm asking you. I'm demanding to know.
 
N.T.: I actually just moved into a three-bedroom apartment. I bought it from Peter Eisenman, the architect. It's fantastic.
 
L.G.: Since this is also a matter of public record, what did you pay for it?
 
N.T.: Please don't put that in. I hate that. I know that's a hard thing to ask you to do, but I hate it. Considerably more than my first studio. How about I give you a multiple?
 
L.G.: Okay, what's the multiple?
 
N.T.: I have to take out my calculator—I think 300 times. No, 50 times. Sorry.
 
L.G.: [Laughs] Well, that'll do. Whatever, it'll be 300 times in due course. But tell me, why did you choose Miami for college?
 
N.T.: I had a lot of family that lived in Miami. And my dad was sick, actually, when I was in school, and he used to like to go down there a lot. My brothers live there, and I like the city. I wanted to go to a school in the big city because I grew up in New York, and I didn't know how well I would acclimate to a college town. But I wanted to go to a real college. And with my family living there, and my parents spending a lot of time down there, and just the year I was applying to school, I read the "Soho in the Sun" story—I never forgot it—the cover of New York magazine. The month I was making my decision, they had a whole feature on South Beach and how it was the new Soho. It was Soho in the sun! It was a picture of the Clevelander Hotel and some girls in bikinis. It was this great story about how Miami was the new place with hot clubs, all the artists, and fashion. I just thought it would be a good place for me to go to school. The school itself had a great reputation for the business school. And I liked the city. It was near New York, good weather. And that's why I went. It was one of the best decisions I've ever made.

L.G.: By the way, I suppose that as a high school kid, you were making in the thousands of dollars a week, perhaps, promoting parties?
 
N.T.: Not really. We weren't making a lot of money. It was really more toward the end of college. In high school, it was small-more like the other benefits, the social benefits, and the fact that we liked it. We liked going out and organizing the guest lists. It was fun.

L.G.: And did you run across this character in New York club lore named Baird Jones?
 
N.T.: I did meet Baird a few times in high school and college. [Jones, a former doorman at Studio 54, was a New York party promoter and the self-proclaimed inventor of "midget bowling," among other pursuits. He died in February at age 53.]
 
L.G.: He was also doing party promotion for nightclubs, but his business model was different from yours.
 
N.T.: Yeah, Baird used to hand out these small "get in free with his card" cards. 
 
L.G.: And then he established himself as the Webster Hall curator. And every time his name was in a gossip column with Webster Hall, he got paid a certain amount of money by Webster Hall.
 
N.T.: I guess that's how it worked. I didn't really know what the deal was.
 
L.G.: [Laughs] I just told you. At least, that's what Baird said, may he rest in peace. But, in any event, you and Jason decided actually to get into the nightclub business yourselves. Tell me about that.

N.T.: Well, we had been promoting a few different clubs every week. And we had always done very successful parties in the Hamptons. We had a big following out there, and we were approached to open our own club.
 
L.G.: By whom?
 
N.T.: A guy named Bill Masterson and Andrew Sasson. The two of them came to us and said, "We'd like to do this club." Andrew owned Jet East, which was right up the road. And they wanted to do a club. At the time, it was going to be positioned as more of the hot place for a younger crowd. I was 23. Jason was 24.

L.G.: And this was Conscience Point in Southampton.
 
N.T.: That's right. So we opened that in the summer of '99. I'd graduated college in the summer of '97, opened Conscience Point in the summer of '99. About two years after college, I opened my first place.
 
L.G.: And so things went pretty well there for a while.
 
N.T.: Yeah, we were successful for a seasonal Hamptons club. We had the club for '99, 2000, and '01. So we sold it, after the summer of '01.
 
L.G.: After the summer of '01. And let's not forget to mention that Conscience Point became very famous in the popular culture and will forever be associated with the immortal line, "Fuck you, white trash."
 
N.T.: You said it, not me.
 
L.G.: I didn't say it. Lizzie Grubman said it.
 
N.T.: Lizzie was our publicist. And she got the club a lot of publicity.
 
L.G.: She sure did. [On July 7, 2001, Grubman, the daughter of powerful entertainment lawyer Allen Grubman, apparently angry at being ordered by security officers to move her car, backed her dad's Mercedes S.U.V. into a crowd outside Conscience Point, injuring 16 people, then fled. She ended up serving 37 days in jail.] And that whole incident was really a tabloid melodrama. And I remember that somebody put out a crazy computer game on the internet, in which there was a Lizzie icon in a car that would be running over people and repeating that line every so often. Did you ever see that?

N.T.: Yes, I did.
 
L.G.: Hours and hours of fun and amusement. But, in any event, did that whole thing hurt or help business? Or was it business neutral-or what?
 
N.T.: I really don't want to talk about the whole thing. Can we just leave it in peace? [Laughs]
 
L.G.: We're off the actual incident now, but I'm just wondering what the impact of it was.
 
N.T.: Well, I just don't want to be quoted about that. I never do think about that situation.
 
L.G.: Not even to the extent whether it had any impact on your business?
 
N.T.: Well, yeah, it's hard to say. It had a small impact.
 
L.G.: But let me just stipulate here that I know Lizzie, and I like her, and she's very good at what she does. Obviously, that was not a great moment in her life. But she seems to have recovered from that and seems to be doing well and is a mom.
 
N.T.: Business was different after that, that's for sure. There were only a couple of weeks left in the summer-and then we sold the club. We sold it after that summer.
 
L.G.: So then what?
 
N.T.: In between the opening and the closing of Conscience Point, we opened a restaurant called Luahn, a restaurant-lounge which we had for a year. And then after Luahn closed, in 2000, we started Strategic Group. We had basically stopped promoting, except for maybe one club, and stopped almost all of the club-land activity and started Strategic Group. At the time, we had two employees and we had an office above Luahn, a one-bedroom apartment. It was Jason and me and two others, and our first clients were Guinness beer and Smirnoff Ice and Stuff magazine. And we started doing events. We started doing the idea of "influencers" for marketing-getting noteworthy people, or influencers, to try products, and getting those sightings mentioned in the newspapers. You know, figuring out a way to take these brands and kind of make them cool, helping these clients navigate the world of nightlife and fashion and just popular culture. And we saw that as a really amazing sort of opportunity. At the time, there were not many people doing it.

L.G.: This was in 2000, so this was a relatively unpopulated business at that point.
 
N.T.: Yeah, there weren't any real agencies doing what we do. We moved into a much bigger office in early 2001. We hadn't really been doing much work in the club business for a few months. And then, kind of randomly, some friends of ours came to us and asked us to get involved with a new bar that they wanted to open. Jay and I went and we looked at it. It was tough not being in the nightlife business. The phones would ring every night, great people wanting a place to go, and we'd have no place to take them. So we kind of got back into the business after getting out of it for a few months. And we took over a place for which we actually came up with the name. It was called Suite 16. Jay and I did a management deal where we ran the place, we operated it. And we created Suite 16. It was on 16th Street and Eighth Avenue. It was right around the time that Bungalow 8 and Lotus opened in Chelsea. It was a small bar, a small renovation. It had been a Re-bar. And we opened this place—it was a huge runaway success. I mean, this place for three years was one of the best and hottest places to go-between 2001 and 2004.

L.G.: And what made it so hot?
 
N.T.: We had a great crowd, tons of celebrities, tons of girls. It was a beautiful crowd there. The energy was great. We had all these wonderful nights. Monday nights, Samantha Ronson moved her karaoke night from Moomba to our club. Tuesday night, we had these really great promotions, a really edgy downtown thing. And Thursday was, like, a line around the corner. The weekends were great. I mean, that's the club where Britney [Spears] and Justin [Timberlake] first ran into each other after they broke up! And we used to have—literally every star in town would come there. It was a very cool bar-lounge.
 

L.G: How did you manage to attract these young celebrities to your venue?
 
N.T.: We have, through our agency, and through just being in the business for so long, from the people we knew growing up. Our network and our relationships are pretty vast. Friends of friends [in the entertainment business]. We end up bringing them to our place. We just created a following and a reputation for having very, you know, cool, edgy, sort of entertainment, celebrity-friendly venues. The hospitality was always great, and people would come.
 
L.G.: Was it worth it for you, if celebrities came, just to comp them? Just because of the added buzz?
 
N.T.: Some celebrities we would comp. Some will pay. It's a case-by-case situation.
 
L.G.: How do you make that decision?
 
N.T.: It's so case by case. Sometimes it depends who brings them. Sometimes you'll comp them, or sometimes you're comping the person who brought them. Really, it's different because with every celebrity, there's a different relationship there. Some pay every time. Some never pay. There's no formula for it.
 
L.G.: Are there any celebrities that you now bar from your clubs? Because of bad behavior or whatever?
 
N.T.: No, nobody comes to mind.
 
L.G.: Okay. What's the utility of a famous person coming to your club? What's the business benefit of that?
 
N.T.: Every type of celebrity has a different utility, has a different value. Some people just are great. Having them there creates a lot of excitement inside the venue.
 
L.G.: Give me an example.
 
N.T.: When Jamie Foxx is in the club, he loves to get on the mic. He's always standing on top of the banquette, you know. He puts on a show, and he's a great actor. He's a talented singer. He just brings really good energy. He loves to, like, amp up the crowd. And people love seeing him. He's really just a good example of someone who brings an extra-special energy to the place when he's there.
 
L.G.: Well, I hope to God that you comp Jamie Foxx.
 
N.T.: Yeah, I mean, I'm sure we do. I wouldn't remember, but I'm pretty sure that we do.
 
L.G.: Now, let's talk about Marquee, with which you and Jason are very much associated in terms of your public image. Just how do the economics of these nightclubs work? I mean, is the profit center selling the liquor? I mean, $400 bottles of vodka?

N.T.: Yeah, the liquor, the cover charge. Corporate events are a major profit center inside the nightlife business.
 
L.G. And why would any person who's not deranged want to pay $400 for a $30 bottle of vodka?

N.T.: I'll turn that around on you. Why do people pay $2,000 for front-row seats at great concert? In other words, inside nightclubs, there's a show that goes on. There's a voyeuristic aspect. It's this social show. People want, you know, to have a good seat in the middle of that. And they pay a premium for the liquor, which is really just another way of charging for the real estate.
 
L.G.: Surely you, Noah, would never pay such an extravagant price for something like that!
 
N.T.: I pay from time to time.
 
L.G.: So you, too, have let yourself be gouged for vodka?
 
N.T.: I've paid for overpriced bottles, yes. I go out to places where I don't know people, just to see what other people are doing. Sometimes, you know, when I'm overseas in other places. Sometimes I pay out of respect to other people in the business.
 
L.G.: Now Marquee is obviously very successful. Today, it's throwing off about $13 million a year. Correct?
 
N.T.: Last year that's what our gross revenue was. Correct.
 
L.G.: I remember going there for the first time for the 50th birthday party of Richard Johnson, the editor of Page Six in the New York Post. I think it was January 2004, not long after you opened. How important was that event? I remember it was just huge, with lots of celebrities there. I remember Uma Thurman and her then-boyfriend André Balazs making out at the bar, just a huge scene. And a lot of media people there obviously.
 
N.T.: The event was great. It was definitely one of the most prolific nights ever at that nightclub—or at any other nightclub that I've been to or heard of. It was a fantastic event. It was a great way for us to introduce the brand-new space to a lot of people, very quickly.

L.G.: It obviously got a fair amount of publicity in the Post and in other places as well.
 
N.T.: I remember you wrote a lot about it.
 

L.G.: I wrote a bit about it. When I had my gossip column in the Daily News, I would periodically write about the goings-on at Marquee. And once, as I recall, I even wrote about one of your publicists sending out a memo asking that the gossip columns please respect the privacy of a whole list of celebrities who frequented Marquee, including Giselle Bundchen, Leonardo DiCaprio, Lindsay Lohan, Mark Wahlberg, P. Diddy, Michael Strahan, Jeremy Shockey, and Tom Brady. Now, as I recall, my reaction was to laugh heartily and then make fun of it. But did anyone accommodate this wish for celebrity privacy in nightclubs?
 
N.T: I would say yeah. I think so.

L.G.: So I was alone.

N.T.: You were the only one who mocked us for that request.
 
L.G.: [Laughs] Really? So once again, I missed the point. I mean, I thought at the time that it might've been a clever publicity ploy.
 
N.T.: Not at all.
 
L.G.: You were seriously trying to protect the privacy of these people in your club?
 
N.T.: Yes. We felt like we, as a club, provided a lot of fodder for the columns. And we just asked that they respect a certain select group of our guests' privacy and not write about them in their columns.
 
L.G.: So you've got a number of things on your plate. Tell me about the other places that you're opening or have opened.

N.T. We opened Marquee at the end of '03. We're in our fifth year, and it's going really, really well.
 
L.G.: Which, in nightclub terms, is like the Galápagos tortoise.
 
N.T.: Exactly. We've maintained our status as a really hot, trendy, popular place, and one of the best clubs in the city-if not the best. And we joined forces with Mark Packer and Rich Wolf, who owns Tao New York and opened Tao Nightclub in Las Vegas two-and-a-half years ago. And now Jason and I brought in a partner to Strategic Group almost four years ago named Seth Rodsky. It's always important for me to mention my partners. He was an agent at CAA [Creative Artists Agency] and joined our company as our partner on all our ventures. And then on Tao in Vegas, we partnered with Mark and Rich. And now Jason, myself, Seth, Mark, and Rich have again partnered to open a new place in Las Vegas, which will be opening in about three months in the Palazzo hotel. It's a restaurant and a nightclub, rather large, and it's going to be called Lavo. We have about three other projects right now that are in the queue-one in New York, another one in Vegas, which make three in Vegas and two in New York-and one in Miami. That's on one side, the restaurants and clubs. So within 18 months, we'll open four new places, six to seven places total between us and our partners. We also have a place in Southampton called Dune, in which we're small partners. And we took over Bridgehampton Polo four years ago.

L.G.: It's a great singles scene?
 
N.T.: It's a great event. It's a great property. Our corporate clients love to actively sponsor the events. And on the other side, Seth, Jason, and I built up Strategic Group from what was 30 people in 2000 to almost 50 full-time now. We have 30 and change working in our New York office and another 16 full-time employees in 15 other cities.
 
L.G.: And they're doing what, Noah?
 
N.T.: We do five things. We do special events. We conceptualize them, build them, invite the people, do the decor, handle the P.R.
 
L.G.: And this is for corporate clients like Donna Karan, Maxim magazine, Absolut Vodka, and Yahoo? And you also have celebrities as clients too.
 
N.T.: Sort of. Not necessarily them directly, but their businesses. So we've worked with Pharrell [Williams] on his clothing line, his store openings. We've worked with Puffy [Sean "P. Diddy" Combs] on his vodka launches. We've done business with a variety of celebrities, usually via their other business entities. We've worked with Usher on his charities. I think part of what Strategic does is talent procurement. And we handle putting together host committees for charity events. We put together appearance deals, concerts. We book artists. We book D.J.'s. We book guest appearances all day long.
 
L.G.: And celebrities—people that you know of personally—can make as much as, say, a million dollars for getting involved in these sorts of things?
 
N.T.: Yep, that is true.
 
L.G.: And that business—which is separate from your nightclub and restaurant business—is throwing off about $23 million a year in revenue at the moment?

N.T.: That's gross revenue. So we do five things: We have a talent resources division. We have the special-events division. We do consumer promotions. We have thousands of people who work as independent contractors for us in 17 cities. And they give out our products or do events for consumer brands-whether the goal is to market products to people, you know, or in some cases to specific age groups and specific types of people in other cases.
 

L.G.: And the trick is to do the sorts of events that attract media attention?
 
N.T.: Well that's on the events side. Because the promotions side is a different type of event. This is the consumer side. Say, Yahoo wants a million people to go to their website for a specific purpose. So you figure out a way to drive that traffic. Or Brand X wants to give out 600,000 samples of its new product to college students. And we figure out how to do that and put people on the street to actually do that. It's all marketing, but that specific type of business is a consumer-driven model as opposed to marketing that's media driven or celebrity driven. So we do consumer marketing-consumer promotions we call it. And the third division is public relations—Sam Ong and his team. They do P.R., and I don't need to tell you what that is. And the fourth part is creative. We are a creative agency. We come up with campaigns, taglines, slogans, graphics, and art. And we do branding. Brands come to us and they say, "Hey, I have this new product. This is my target demographic. Can you give me some ideas of how I can get the word out about it?" And we come up with plans-you know, here's an idea, here's a stunt. This will get you a lot of press. This will make people go to your website. This will make people go to your stores. And we come up with ideas. And sometimes we'll just get hired for our ideas, and we don't actually execute the work. But we are full-service, sort of top-to-bottom marketing services. It's a great business.

L.G.: So let me just get you on this whole fascinating notion of the velvet rope and the exclusionary aspect. Because when you started out, you were very inclusive. Because it was all your friends, and bringing people along, and come one, come all. But now, they're lined up in front of Marquee, for instance. And there are people that aren't permitted in by your door people. What's that all about? I'm talking about people who have money to burn. Sometimes they're not allowed in. Tell me what that's about. Explain that process to me.
 
N.T.: Let me put it into this context: Marquee is a product. It's a brand. Just like artists will make things in limited quantities or any apparel designer will make limited-edition items. It creates demand. Not everybody can get it or buy it. And that creates a demand for the product. There is a premium paid for those products once the demand is there. So with regard to the nightclubs, sometimes having a tough door policy helps create the demand for the club. It's a premium product that has demand for it. And part of what you're able to do, if you have a premium product, is charge more money. So by having a tough door policy, making it not so easy to get into the club, it allows us to charge more money for people who do get in. And then it has created demand for people who will now wait on line or pay a premium to get in.
 
L.G: People who are influential, powerful, famous, generally have no trouble getting in. And people who are good-looking, like a good-looking young lady, will probably have no trouble getting in. But regular people from some suburb might have a great deal of trouble. What is that calculus all about? Is it the same thing?
 
N.T.: I mean, it is, again, the same theory of why do people pay more money for front-row seats?
 
L.G.: That's fascinating to me, how you arrive at kind of the proper balance. It's different from other premium products. I mean, if I have sufficient funds, I can go buy a Van Gogh. And no one's going to deny me the right to spend tens of millions of dollars on a famous painting, if it's for sale. But with nightclubs-and not just yours but just in general—I can flash a wad of bills, and I can be told by the guy at the door to go rent movies at Blockbuster.
 
N.T.: Well, it's not all about the money. It's also about having the right mix of people and the right balance of people. That's how we operate our business. The doorman's job is to ensure that there's the right balance of people inside the nightclub. The doorman has been trained. [Marquee doorman] Wass has been doing the door for about 15 years. He's been in the business for a long time. And he knows how to judge the room. He's updated on the cliques, how many people are inside, how many men, how many women. It's important to have a good ratio: 60-40, women to men, is a good ratio.

L.G.: Otherwise, it starts getting a little too competitive on the women's side? Or puts out a weird vibe?
 
N.T.: I just think that people have the most fun when it's at that proportion.
 
L.G.: Okay. And Paris Hilton is always getting in. She always adds a little something?
 
N.T.: Paris always gets in.
 
L.G.: But not necessarily Brandon Davis?
 
N.T.: Nope, Brandon gets in too.