Elliott Bisnow – Make No Small Plans: Book Review & Audio Summary

Book Info

• Book name: Make No Small Plans: Lessons on Thinking Big, Chasing Dreams, and Building Community
• Author: Elliott Bisnow, Brett Leve, Jeff Rosenthal, Jeremy Schwartz
• Genre: Business, Entrepreneurship, Self-help
• Published Year: 2022
• Publisher: Currency (an imprint of Random House)
• Language: English

Audio Summary

Synopsis

Four young entrepreneurs with barely two college degrees between them decided to throw a ski trip for 19 guests in 2008. Beer ran out in 30 minutes. Budget was laughable. But something clicked. Fast forward to today and Summit hosts events worldwide with speakers like Bezos and Branson. Make No Small Plans is their origin story – part memoir, part manifesto about the power of bringing smart people together. It’s aspirational as hell. Whether that inspiration translates into anything you can actually use is… well, that’s the question, isn’t it?

Key Takeaways

• The Big Idea: Your network isn’t just your net worth – it’s your launchpad. The more great people you meet, the more great people you’ll meet.
• The Controversial Point: The ‘just start before you’re ready’ philosophy works great when you’ve got safety nets most people don’t have.
• The Actionable Part: Stop waiting for permission. Host your own small gatherings. Curate the room you wish existed.
• The Hidden Gem: The beer running out at their first event didn’t kill it – the conversations that happened anyway proved the concept.

My Summary

Let’s Talk About What This Book Actually Is

So here’s the thing about Make No Small Plans – it’s not really a business book. I mean, it’s shelved there, and Random House is marketing it that way, but let’s be honest. It’s a victory lap dressed up as a how-to guide.

And look, I’m not even saying that’s bad. (Okay, maybe I’m saying it’s a little bad.) The Summit founders – Elliott Bisnow, Brett Leve, Jeff Rosenthal, and Jeremy Schwartz – have built something genuinely impressive. They started with a janky ski trip and ended up owning Powder Mountain, the largest ski resort in the US. They were early investors in Uber and Warby Parker. They’ve hosted everyone from Al Gore to Jeff Bezos.

That’s not nothing. That’s actually pretty remarkable.

The Writing – Raw Energy, Questionable Depth

The prose here is… fine? It reads fast, which I appreciate. The authors write with the kind of breathless enthusiasm you’d expect from four guys who genuinely believe they’ve cracked some code about community building. And maybe they have.

But here’s where my former-novelist brain starts twitching. The book leans heavy on inspiration and light on the gritty how-to stuff. It’s all “believe in the impossible” and “just start before you’re ready” without acknowledging that – hey – these four had the kind of risk tolerance that comes from having options most people don’t.

(Not everyone can cold-call CEOs and shrug off rejection because daddy’s business connections provide a safety net. Just saying.)

What Actually Works Here

Okay, cynicism aside – and I’ve got plenty – there are genuine gems buried in the Summit mythology. The core insight is solid: curating rooms matters. Bringing together people who should know each other but don’t – that creates real value. The authors aren’t wrong about that.

The early chapters about their scrappy beginnings are genuinely fun. Nineteen people in a cramped rental house, beer gone in half an hour, everyone sharing beds like it’s freshman year again. There’s something honest about those moments. Before Summit became this glossy Davos-for-millennials thing, it was just four dudes with an idea and not enough alcohol.

I also appreciate their manifesto’s simplicity: “The more great people you meet, the more great people you will meet.” It’s almost stupidly obvious. But obvious things are often the truest things.

The Problem With Billionaire Origin Stories

Here’s where I get grumpy. (More grumpy? Is that possible?)

This book suffers from a disease I see in a lot of entrepreneur memoirs – it conflates correlation with causation. They did X, they succeeded, therefore X caused the success. But there’s a whole lot of survivorship bias baked into that logic.

For every Summit, there are probably a thousand failed attempts at “bringing people together” that nobody wrote books about. The authors acknowledge their luck occasionally, but it feels performative. Like they know they’re supposed to be humble but can’t quite pull it off.

And the lack of concrete strategies is frustrating. Readers have complained about this – a lot – and they’re right to. If you’re picking this up hoping for a playbook, you’re gonna be disappointed. It’s more like a hype video that runs 300 pages long.

Real Talk: Who Should Read This

If you’re already in the entrepreneur/tech/startup world and you want some feel-good motivation, sure. Knock yourself out. The Summit story is genuinely interesting, and the energy is infectious.

But if you’re looking for practical guidance on building communities or launching events or any of that stuff? You might walk away feeling inspired but also… empty? Like you ate a big meal of cotton candy. Sweet, but no actual nutrition.

The Verdict

Make No Small Plans is what happens when four successful guys look back at their journey and decide it was all destiny rather than luck plus privilege plus timing plus yeah okay also hard work. It’s not a bad book. It’s just not the book it pretends to be.

Read it for the story. Skip it for the strategy. And maybe pour yourself a beer first – unlike their first event, you can probably afford enough to last the whole session.