An Interview With Noah Tepperberg

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.