Ace Hotel’s Early Days: Punk Spirit and Hospitality Innovation - Ryan Bukstein

Josiah: For me, Ace Hotel was the hospitality brand that made the biggest impact on me and how I think about hospitality because it was always much more than just about a hotel. From their very first properties, Ace Hotels were not only pillars of their communities and a platform to engage their neighborhoods, but they were catalysts for growth and creativity. That's why I'm thrilled to have the person who started out as an intern and then became the director of PR and marketing, and then their vice president of brand, Ryan Bukstein, joining us today in this episode to share the story behind this incredible company and his own remarkable career. We talk about how Ryan met Ace founder Alex Calderwood, how they got started working together, what their early days were like, the environment that led to the creativity and unique feel of Ace Hotel. We talk about hiring people. We talk about key collaborations. There's a lot here. So let's get into it.

[intro]

Josiah: Thanks for chatting today, Ryan. I'm excited to dig into this. And I wonder, just as a starting point, if you could take me, if you could take our listeners back, and I want to hear your retelling of the story of Ace Hotel, how you got involved in it, where did it all start for you?

Ryan: Yeah, well, for me, I grew up in Wisconsin and I moved to Seattle for college to go to UW in Seattle. And I was chasing, getting out of the Midwest, getting to the West Coast and really chasing music. I was a huge fan of the music coming out of Seattle, Nirvana, Pearl Jam and everything else as well. And I also just wanted to get somewhere very different. So I moved out there looking for that and I definitely connected with a lot that was going on in Seattle, but it was hard when you were young to get to shows because a lot of venues were 21 and over. So I would go down to Portland a lot because they had more all ages venues. So I got to know Portland, got to know Seattle. And then when I was a junior in college, I went to study abroad in Japan. This was the year 2000. And Ace Hotel had already opened in 1999, so it had just been open for a year. When I was studying abroad in Japan, I got an email from a company called Neverstop that was looking for an intern. And the backstory is that Ace Hotel started out of this cultural community in Seattle, where it was still a small tight-knit community and a lot of entrepreneurs doing a ton of different things. So Alex Calderwood, who founded Ace, he was also running a concert promotion company called Tasty Shows that was doing some amazing shows. And we should touch on that later, because I'm actually reconnected with the team there, working on a poster show, which is going to be really cool. But anyway, so he was doing concerts. He had a barbershop called Rudy's, chain of barbershops that just had a few stores in Seattle and then he had opened Ace Hotel Seattle. All that stuff was going on and they were looking for an intern for another company connected to it called Never Stop. They were one of the first experiential marketing companies. So the first to do pop-up shops, pop-up parties and guerrilla projections on the walls, all this kind of fun stuff.

Josiah: Ryan, can I just jump in there? I want to just spend another moment here because I wonder if you could take us back to what this is like, late 90s, early 2000s, the environment that you're describing, the shows. I'm hearing lifestyle, which every hospitality brand is talking about now, but what was it like when you were there and you were in it? What did that feel like? What were days and nights out on the town? What did that feel like?

Ryan: Yeah, yeah. It was really interesting. So I connected with them when I was in Japan and I was like, hey, they were just looking for an intern. And I saw all this crazy stuff they were doing. It was the first time I'd seen anyone just do whatever they wanted in business, you know? And I was like, oh yeah, that really appeals to me. You can work in music, you can work in whatever, you know? And so I connected with them, let them know I was in Japan and it turned out really great because Alex was a huge fan of Japan and turned out to be a big thing we had in common. And I did a little bit of research actually before I came back to Seattle on putting a hotel in Japan. And so this was the first time Ace Hotel was even exploring it by having a 20 year old do research while he was in Japan.

Josiah: Wait, why did you do that? Why were you researching putting a hotel, why a hotel of all the things to put in?

Ryan: Well, because he had started Ace, right? So I connected with them and Ace was in Seattle and he was like, since you're in Japan, weird little jobs you would give me. I would go shopping for headphones that they wanted to sell at Rudy's and send them back. And then one of the things he's like, well, why don't you for your school stuff, do a research project for me on how we move Ace Hotel Seattle to Japan. How do we open a Japan hotel? And so I did that on a floppy disk somewhere lost and haven't seen it ever.

Josiah: Wait, how do you do that? How do you research? How do you open a hotel? What was that process?

Ryan: I don't remember to be honest, but I'm sure it was a good way for him to figure out if I could figure stuff out. And then so I moved back to get back to your question about Seattle. And then I started working with them in Seattle and it was legit just show up at the office kind of internship. These were a bunch of punks in Seattle making a business. And so because I was in the office and in the mix, I would just get myself into wild other jobs because I was there, young kid and down to work. So one of my jobs, I met another mentor I had. Alex became a big mentor for me, Alex Calderwood, who founded Ace with Wade and Doug as partners. And so he became a big mentor for me and the other people that were in the office, that crew of people working with Never Stop and Tasty Shows and Rudy's and Ace would come through and give me opportunities. So one of my mentors, Whitney, at the time, he gave me an opportunity to stage manage raves because he was also working with Never Stop doing event production, but also part of this big crew that would do all the raves in Seattle. So I got to work on raves and then learn about event production that way and then had one gig putting posters up around town, never got paid. So I was like, I'm not going to do that. It gave me a good way to check stuff off the box that I won't do and that I do want to do. But it was really cool. It was all learning experiences and definitely very much that kind of magic I was looking for, being able to drop the names of the people I was working with and get into shows that are sold out around town, and it was a vibe for sure. And Seattle was small and tight knit and everybody supported everybody. The scenes were very intertwined, which was really cool. And very forward thinking, the stuff they were doing then is progressive now, which is really cool. And I was really lucky to be a part of that world. And so, yeah, that's kind of where everything started. And then I worked with them for a while, also worked in the music industry a little bit on a college rep internship because I was still going to school. And then when I graduated, it was right when Napster was taking over and I was working as a college rep for a major record label. And it was really disappointing, the state of the music industry then, everybody was being very nostalgic for the old times and grumpy about Napster and they weren't really engaging the young people, which was really surprising to me too, because I was like, shouldn't this be the time where you ask us what we think? But it was more the time where they would wax nostalgic to us about the old times. That moment was when I decided to go, instead of trying to go into the major label and music industry, to go back and work with this crew of wild people that I met with Never Stop. And so I got a job with Never Stop doing marketing production stuff. And that was my first start into marketing production. And we were this figure it out team that the major ad agencies and different clients would hire to do stuff that they didn't have the resources or know how to do and we would just figure it out. So it was fun.

Josiah: It's amazing. I'm thinking about that environment and I'm always interested in how to attract more people into the world of hospitality. And your story is a great example of this because it sounds like you didn't grow up wanting to enter hospitality per se. You got pulled into it. You had a lot of things in the mix. It sounds, if I'm hearing you correctly, there's something about the environment that Alex and the team had that was magnetic and pulled you into it. And I wonder if you could describe a little bit more about what that was for you.

Ryan: Yeah, definitely. I mean, that connects back to this idea of mentorship too. And the connection to Alex, what really made everything he did special, in my opinion, was he had this thing about him that he just wanted to bring people together and make things happen. And he was really genuinely curious and interested in everything that was happening. If anybody was obsessed about something, he wanted to dig in deeper and know why and understand it and follow their curiosity with his curiosity. And he had this effect around people and he would also attract other curious people. And so when I met him, I wasn't a Seattle cool kid. I was a kid from Wisconsin who was into jam bands, but I wasn't into fashion, wasn't into style. I was just obsessed with music and really curious. And he connected on that level and became my mentor and really supported me learning about stuff because of that curiosity. And I think that was what was really special about my situation, but many, many other people have the same experience. And then it allowed me to learn how to do that too, to use my curiosity as a gift to share with others and bring them in.

Josiah: Ryan, could we unpack that a bit? Because I'm very interested in mentorship and I'm curious, it sounds like you and Alex had worked on a lot of projects. So it sounds like working together on things was an interaction that allowed Alex to mentor you. You learned a lot. Were there other interactions or things that Alex did that you felt in retrospect really helped you learn? Because I'm curious on specifically, what does it look like to mentor well?

Ryan: Yeah, definitely. I think that's a really interesting question. And I was thinking about that too. In hindsight, now that I've grown to be in a position to mentor others, you really learn how hard it is to help somebody else do something and learn rather than just do it yourself. And it gives me a lot of respect for the care that he showed and the work that he put in to do that. And I think it really came down to that. He trusted his instincts a lot. That let him allow other people to trust their instincts and to encourage other people to trust their instincts. So a lot of times I think, especially in business, there's this idea that your job for the people you manage is to get all the information from them and then make the decision yourself, right? And I think that a lot of times that's really a challenging approach to help people learn because the whole point is you learn by doing, thinking things through yourself and making mistakes yourself. So Alex was very, very good at letting you fail but still helping you through it. And that whole team at NeverStop, it blew my mind. And that's where I really learned about this idea of if something goes sideways and something goes wrong, just fix it and figure out what to do next and how you can learn from it and move on right away. Keep moving. Because at first when I would, they would always throw you into the deep end. Everyone that worked with them, you would just end up working on something that you had no idea how to do and nobody knew how to do it and you just had to figure it out. And there was this atmosphere of, of course, stuff's going to go sideways and wrong and we're just going to move forward and figure it out together. And I think that atmosphere is a really great place for mentorship because you can look up to your mentors to help you through the challenges, and everyone's in it together in a way.

Josiah: I love it. I'm going to put a bookmark in this because I want to come back to the mentorship that you're doing now, but I do want to stay with the story of, I'm very curious about the early days of Ace Hotel, but also your own career. And it seems like they were being built in parallel. As you think back, so you start as an intern, you're working on all these projects. I'm curious if there was a project or a moment that was influential both in your career and in Ace Hotels that was sort of an inflection point and things really stepped up from there.

Ryan: Well, in some ways I would say at the very early stages, there was two major things. One of them was when I left NeverStop because after two years of working in marketing production and event production at such a young age, I didn't really know how to modulate or control my emotional intelligence at work. And even though it was a very supportive environment, it was still difficult and stressful and crazy to do that kind of work. And I think that combined with just that youth energy of, I want to give music a shot. I left the company and just moved to the mountains near Mount Baker, between Bellingham, Washington, and Vancouver. I set up a studio with a friend and we just made music for a couple of years and snowboarded. And I was in my early twenties, before I get into the real world kind of thing. But another thing Alex always did such a good job of is keeping in touch and keeping people in mind. And I learned that from him as well. Just you never know what the timing is going to be. And it's always good to just keep thinking about people that would be fun to work with. And so when he opened Ace Hotel Portland, which was the second hotel, their first, okay, we're going to make a run at doing more Aces. He just started hitting up people that were in his world. A lot of us that had worked with Never Stop because he wanted people that could just figure stuff out and give their all to it. And so he called me up and he was like, hey, we're opening a hotel in Portland. Would you want to come out here and move here and help us out? And I had gone to Portland a lot because I was saying, you had to go there to see all ages shows. So I loved Portland and I was like, oh, that would be really interesting to spend more time there. And so I got a chance to move there and work on Ace and it was crazy because in hindsight, this is so unique. We didn't even talk about what I was going to do till my first day meeting with the team. And he's like, well, here's what I'm thinking you would be good at. Here are some options. What are you most interested in? And that itself, I think is what one of the things that made Ace in the early days and Alex really unique is he had this process of it being all about the people and the uniqueness of their personalities and their interests. And then figuring out what they do on the team, almost like putting a band together or something. Okay, you can play bass and guitar, but he plays bass. So why don't you play guitar, and we'll all play together. It's an interesting way to build a business for sure.

Josiah: So Ryan, this is interesting. And I want to take a small detour here because I'm very interested in talent and how do you bring groups of people together to do really interesting things. And there's a school of thought around it being very scientific and there's all these diagnostic tests and you run everyone through the same rigorous process. And the person that comes out at the end of this rigorous process is the best fit. Maybe Alex is doing this. If I'm hearing you, it sounds like it was a different approach, though, where there's a little bit of he's built this relationship. He's seen you work. He's making a bit of a bet on you. Not that you weren't talented, but it doesn't sound like the same rigor. It seems like a different approach. It seems a bit contrarian. And it created the alchemy that became Ace. Is that right? Am I hearing you right?

Ryan: No, for sure. And for me, I'm not really good at the way you build a team in a corporate business setup, interviewing hundreds of people and then getting down to a few and then deciding between the few. I'm much better at just building a team from my network, continuing to grow my network so that at the right time, I can say, okay, it's this person, this person, and this person, let's go. Because that's how I learned how to do it from Alex, especially in those early days. We interviewed positions, but it wasn't the same. And especially the core team were more assembled from a series of interactions and connections and you worked with me on this project and I got to know you, so why don't you come into this project. Is that a little bit more how the music world operates? I think so. I mean, you rehearse people, but yeah, when you hear about artists that connect and play, it's random connections that are all trusted. It's like, why did John Mayer end up playing with Dead & Co? It's because he fell in love with the Dead from hearing them on the radio, on satellite radio, and had a connection with Don Waz, a producer that was connected to Bob Weir. And that intro and then a conversation spanned this reinvention of the band that has obviously become huge. So I think there is this element of the alchemy. When you want to make something really compelling and special, it kind of has to come out of that in some ways a little bit. I still believe in that, whether it's Kismet or the universe or fate, just the flow that's out there is still a real thing, I think.

Josiah: Amazing. So it certainly worked out for Alex in hiring you. You became one of the most influential leaders in the company and creating Ace to what it is. I'm curious because you quickly move into a leadership role. You're hiring people. Did you take the same approach to hiring? And if so, how did it work out for you?

Ryan: Yeah, I think for a large part of it, and my job started with Ace doing the PR and the marketing and then evolved into the event programming. All of it under Alex's care, because I was so young and trying to figure it out. So he let me lead it, but helped me lead it in a way. And then through that, we all worked together on bringing people in. So a lot of times Alex would be out at a club or a bar in Portland or at a live music show and meet somebody. And then he would say, hey, Ryan, this person's doing really cool events in Portland. Let's get them in the mix and introduce me. And then I would figure out how we could work together. And so I think this is what made it special for us for these first few ones we did. We would go to the city, usually we would move there. With Portland, we all moved there. And then after that, it was mostly Alex and Kelly Sodden. Me and Kelly were really tight at the early days of Ace, working together under Alex. And she was doing more of the development side of things and bringing the teams together to make the whole hotel. And then I was focused on the marketing and programming stuff, and PR, and so Kelly and Alex usually would move to the city. I would go there a lot. What we would do is, because Alex was so well-traveled before he even opened Ace, he knew people in all these cities, so he would bring in the people that had been doing stuff in the city for a long time, and then start exploring and meeting the young people that needed a platform and were ready to have someone help them with a bigger platform. So it was this really cool mix of what had developed the city and what was going to develop the city in the future. And I learned that about our process too from him, which was really cool. And I think that answers your question. And then we would, when we would bring people in, a lot of my job was the cultural programming, what kind of events and stuff we would do. So with that, we would always be trying to find the most connected people in the city and doing really interesting stuff. So it was a lot of referral stuff, social media wasn't as big, you had to do it the old school way.

Josiah: So I actually want to talk a little bit more about how you thought about programming then, because I think for me, and I'm not just saying this because I'm talking to you, but I think Ace Hotel for me defined what hospitality and hotels could be beyond just walls and a room and a place to sleep. As really a platform for so much life in a neighborhood, in a city, it really redefined everything for me. And so I want to dig into this because I think Ace Portland specifically, and there was a lot of media around this at the time too, where this was a hub of activity. And it sounds like from what you just shared, the programming, the creative collaborations were a part of that. But I guess, how did you create that electricity, that energy? Was it all of these creative collaborations that were making this more than just a place to sleep?

Ryan: Yeah, I think it actually started with the reason for Ace being a thing. When they opened Ace Hotel Seattle, it was truly because they were doing all of these concerts and parties, bringing all of these people to Seattle and they were the ones that knew the city. They were part of that core where internationally, even when people came to Seattle, it was ask Alex and his crew what to do, where to stay. And they didn't really have a hotel to recommend. And they were like, well, why don't we just, they got this opportunity with this quirky little space in Belltown. And they were like, why don't we just make a hotel? What we want to exist in the world doesn't exist, which, and to me, this is what I'm always chasing with companies I want to work for and help to, is that people trying to make something that they want in the world because they really want it there, rather than, I think I can make a lot of money off of this, this is really trendy, let's do it. It's more like, I want this to be here and it's special. So I think that Ace was really a part of that and that defined everything we did from there because it was all in service of let's make the hotels we want. Even the art Ace Seattle had art in the room from Cause, famous graffiti artist, Shepard Fairey. And honestly, these were just Alex's friends and he wanted to hook them up with a gig doing some art, and he liked the art. Even Cause said that Alex, I think gave him his first show, which is crazy. And I think that you look at that and what's that evolved, our next hotel in Portland, we went crazy on how many artists we worked with. We just tried to do every room with a different artist, different local artists, and that developed into some really amazing opportunities. We realized we couldn't actually do that because there's too many. So we ended up linking with certain local artists that would do extra stuff in the rooms. And this amazing artist, Johnny Eshelman, who's a scenic painter now, does movies and TV. He became our artist in residence and did almost every Ace Hotel that I worked on. He would do the extra little art touches. So I think it was very much the platform. That was the whole point. That was why we created it or why Alex created it and why we evolved it and grew it was to have a platform to do interesting things with.

Josiah: So I feel like I could talk with you for hours about this, but before we wrap up talking about the Ace story here, there's one thing I am really interested in, and that is how you thought about taking the Ace concept and moving to other places because it felt so integrated into Seattle and then Portland, such a part of the community there. It feels very difficult to take a very innovative, creative concept and bring it to other places. But for me, I was living in New York when you opened in New York, visited your Palm Springs location. And I felt those properties and then obviously there are many others. I feel like they're really well executed and they maintained a spirit of what you've described in our conversation about this so far, but it was very embedded in New York or Palm Springs, for example. How did you pull that off?

Ryan: I mean, it's a funny thing because it's one of those classic scenarios where the honest truth is that it is really difficult. There's not really a shortcut. There's not a secret hack to do it quick. You legit just have to be there, spend time, spend energy, true open energy to learn the city. And Alex, he would move pretty much. Kelly would move. They would spend almost all their time there. And then the rest of the team, we would go there as much as possible, and a lot of times as we started to grow and try to figure it out, it would just be a lot of trips very early, very early. Still when I have the chance to talk with or work with other hotels, it's much, much earlier than you would ever send a marketing person there. Right. But I would go there and some other people on our team, we would go there couple years in advance, as soon as we knew we were going to do the deal, which usually was a year or two, we would travel to the city and just spend time getting to know the places. I remember that one time a colleague of mine, Greg Bresnitz, who we would work together on all of the programming for many years, events and the partnerships, and then especially our music venues, because he's another big music fan. So we would go out together and one trip we went to New Orleans before opening that hotel. And it was two days of trying to go to every single bar in the city. That was a relevant place for us to see and understand. It's a tough job. It was actually a funny challenge because you couldn't really stay very long. So we were like, do we even have a drink at these bars? We got to have drinks, but you can't have a drink at 12 bars. We weren't huge drinkers, we wouldn't even remember what we were supposed to. But it was really fun and it honestly, to me, it really cracked what we were able to do with that music space in New Orleans because it came from a bunch of different spaces we saw. We took little elements of all those spaces and tried to make our perfect space and we communicated what we had found to our interior designers, Roman & Williams, and to the whole crew and Kelly and everyone. And then everyone just figured out what we could do based on our insight from doing the pre-trip and everything else. So it was very much that most of the time. Be in the market, meet people, travel around. He taught me how to do that, which I still love to do to this day. Go to a city and try to figure it out. There is tactics, pick up the local print media and read it. Look at the flyers on the wall. What's in common with those? Is there someone producing all the shows? That kind of connection. And then talk to people. Really? Ironically, our hotels became a great place to do that work, too, because we hired all these people because we wanted to hire people to work at the hotels that knew the city, could talk to the guests. Ace Hotels became a place you would go to figure out a city because we loved to go everywhere we could to figure out cities.