An Interview With Noah Tepperberg

Noah Tepperberg

Image: Michael Nagle

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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?
 

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