From Belkin to Building a New Kind of Hospitality Business - Chet Pipkin, Desolation Hotel

Josiah: What happens when the founder of one of the best-known technology companies decides to enter the world of hospitality and build a boutique hotel? Today we're going to hear the answer to that question with Chet Pipkin, who founded and grew Belkin into a global leader in connectivity and innovation, and who has spent his career creating products that improve people's lives. Now he's applying that same clarity, purpose, and design thinking to hospitality, building Desolation Hotel in South Lake Tahoe, and also in Hope Valley in Alpine County, California. And he's building it as a new kind of business where people, community, and the environment come first. In this conversation, you'll hear how Chet developed his one-page business plan, why simplicity drives everything he builds, and what it looks like to create meaningful experiences for both guests and the people working in his hospitality business. Let's get into it. 

[intro]

Josiah: You built a very large business before, and then you decide to enter the hospitality business. My understanding is that you had a very straightforward business plan. I think it even fit on one page. Is that right? Tell me about that. 

Chet: So I think clarity and simplicity matter a lot. And I think that there's a tendency from me, perhaps, and maybe from people generally speaking, to overcomplicate things. And if I really understand what it is that I'm setting out to do and how I'm setting out to accomplish it, I should be able to get it on a single page. It's a suggestion that I use with almost everything that I do, whether I'm just advising and helping someone on an informal basis, whether I'm invested, whether I'm on the board, that clarity is priceless.

Josiah: Yeah. So one page is not a lot when you're building a brand new hospitality concept. What goes on that one page?

Chet: What was your one page business plan? Yeah. So it's got the five key principles and tenets, and then it's got a little bit of operational depth as to how that gets executed. So on that page, the most important piece are the five things we stand for. And the first thing we stand for here is our staff. The development of our staff. the appreciation of our staff, and our view on it is as long as we're the ideal place for them, and they're an ideal candidate and member of the team for us, we're in great shape. And if they're here just as a bridge to get themselves through school and they eventually want to be a machinist or a doctor or a lawyer or a trade crafts person, we celebrate that and we want that just out in the open. So we do everything we can to avoid one angle trying to get something out of the other angle, but we're in this together. What is it you want to achieve? And this is what it is we want to do. So this should be a great place to kind of develop and learn for the future. The second thing that we stand for is our guests and five-star guest experiences. So what that looks like is understanding what that looks like for the guest and accommodating as much as we can what she or he is looking to do. And we've got a deep buffet of things for people to choose from, depending upon how they want to immerse themselves or just relax. It's really understanding what those five-star experience looks like through the guest lens. And we certainly have what it is we stand for here, but then accommodating that guest as completely as we can. Then the next thing that we stand for is the environment. and that's true here in the Lake Tahoe Basin and the adjacent areas, but it also just stands for the environment in a broader sense. So a lot of the time is spent on education, and it's my belief that The more each of us are educated on the impact we have and how we are impacting things, the more we'll just make better choices. There's exceptions to this, of course, there's exceptions to everything, but all of us almost all the time are really trying to do the right thing. Very few of us are waking up in the morning and saying, how is it that I can hurt the earth? I mean, it just doesn't want to work like that. So we don't want to pay a lot more. We don't want to be inconvenienced a lot more. But we want to help in ways that we can that are not negatively impacting us too much. So a lot of it is education. The next thing we stand for is the community here in the Lake Tahoe Basin, as exists in any community. There's different points of view and different ways of thinking about what the future should look like. Should it, should it grow? Should it create more jobs? Should it attract more people? Should real estate that's undercapitalized and has a lot of deferred maintenance, should it be enhanced? How are we able to be effective with pricing people in and not pricing people Some of that's policy and some of that's shaping how the free enterprise system works. So we try to be very open-minded, aware, ask a lot of questions, get a lot of points of view. Sometimes you have to be careful because there can be a small minority. that puts a large amplifier on their voice that doesn't necessarily speak, you know, for the broader whole. But one thing we say a lot is if our intent is genuine and authentic and good, and we're really trying to do the right thing, then there's a pretty good chance we're going to get the outcomes that we feel are right for us and for the values that we have. So just keep checking in on what your real intent is and what your motives are. Then the fifth thing is, we were curious to know, now we know, that if you focused heavily on the first four things, could you still have a viable, successful business? And none of this works if number five isn't true. Because you're not, you don't exist. You can't make the first four things happen. And we're delighted and not shocked that you can focus on those four things with attention being paid to the fifth and still have a vibrant business at the same time.

Josiah: Well, it's great to hear that. I think a couple of years ago, you recorded a conversation where you were talking about the business plan and the fifth part was an open question. And you said, you know, we think this can work. We'll check back in. So we're recording a couple of years after that conversation. It seems like so far, so good. Exciting to hear that. I want to bring many of the elements of what you shared to life by walking through the story of the creation of this property. Uh, we are sitting in South Lake Tahoe. I am struck by the ease of access. It feels like to so much. I wonder if you wouldn't mind sharing a little bit about how did you select this site and how did you go about building this property? And then I would love to get into a little bit about the guest experience and how you thought about creating that. But of all the places you could build a hotel, why this site in South Lake Tahoe?

Chet: So some of it's just, um, my own personal values and what it is that I love. I discovered at an early age that I'm a mountain person more than I am anything, spent some amount of time working my way up the Sierra Nevada, hung out and still do quite a bit of my time in the Yosemite area, and then eventually made my way to Lake Tahoe. And wow, as soon as I came over, that ridge at Echo Summit and saw the vast beauty and the appeal of this basin, I was just in absolute awe. So I spent many years, turned into decades, immersing and exploring, getting to know the area, the people, some of the opportunities that exist here, some of the things that still need to be overcome. And so this is where I want to be. And I love getting out and about a lot, but this is home. And we love the notion of being able to provide just amazing experiences for folks. And that happens in all kinds of ways. I had my own hospitality experiences. So I go, I think that there's an opportunity to do that in a different way here. maybe not better or worse, because it all depends upon the experience that the folks are looking for, but this one felt like it was missing. And so then we tried to find a location where the existing real estate was beyond its useful life. So maybe we can be a little bit helpful here, too, and help to evolve something that probably needs to get evolved. So on this site, there was a 1950s era motel that was past its useful life. There was a vacant lot that people didn't really even understand, like who owned it. And it just had a bunch of stuff accumulated on it that was just adjacent to it. People told us we'll never figure out the owners. We will never get that to them happen. We got both deals able to happen. We love this particular location because we're steps away from being able to immerse ourselves on hikes. We're steps away from our beautiful beach on the shore of Lake Tahoe. For people that want to experience a variety of other kind of fine dining and some kind of nightlife, that exists also. So when you get here, you can only walk if you wish. You can explore like crazy on your bike. Even by bike, you can get to the Desolation Wilderness, for which we're named, or you can get there in a vehicle in about 30 minutes or so. So it is just an absolute ideal place. This is Tahoe. There's no shortage of ideal places, but this is one of those ideal spots.

Josiah: Well, if I think about from earlier in our conversation, I have this in my notes. I think this notion of a portal for immersion was the concept that you were shooting for. So location matters a lot and ease of access and proximity to things that you can do matter a lot. If you're a portal, you want to be a base for this jumping off point. Amazing to see this. And then what you've built here is extraordinary new builds. It feels incredible as a guest stepping into this environment. I want to hear how you thought about developing the guest experience, because, you know, if I think back to what the company built before with Belkin, it is known for connectivity and elegance in solving customer problems. You alluded to this earlier in our conversation. When you're thinking about a guest experience, how did you go about designing this? Was it from scratch? How did you approach that, developing the guest experience?

Chet: Yeah. So it was formed largely by my own experiences. My experiences from a kid, being on holiday with my parents and my family, going to the mountains. We show up and I'm just immersing myself there. And my business travel attempts to immerse myself in all of these places around the world. This area is so rich and observing people who come that don't necessarily know everything that they can immerse themselves into, missing out on things that I think that they would have loved to do. Let's be in a right spot and let's provide this education of the richness of the experiences that can be had here year round, by the way. And we're sitting, of course, in our location in South Lake Tahoe, which has got its magical combination of things for us to do here. And then, of course, we've got our other location in Hope Valley, which is only 30 minutes south of here, which is even more immersive on the nature side. Now, you don't get the chance to immerse yourself in some of the not-so-nature kinds of things, but man, you're really in it, you know, there and the ability to see the stars and just lean back in awe of the grandness of this universe and be able to think magical thoughts that include everything we're seeing are things that have happened a long, long time ago that are just now getting to where we are able to observe them and to experience them. Yeah, it's just absolutely rich here.