The tech set's summer season: how to find the Uber or Net-a-porter

I’m a gypsy,’ says Carmen Busquets as she slides on to a banquette in her hotel restaurant and orders a pot of hot water with lemon. Well, a posh gypsy. The teapot, when it arrives, bears the distinctive green and white candy stripes of Claridge’s.

The Venezuela-born entrepreneur has just come back from Africa and is in London for two weeks to ink the final details on the merger of Net-a-porter with Italian e-tailer Yoox. She has invested £15m in Net-a-porter and £30m in other London tech startups, including retailers Lyst and Farfetch, and industry bible The Business of Fashion.

After that, she is off to a series of conferences and global gatherings, among them TED talks in Vancouver, Digital-Life-Design (DLD) in Munich, Intelligence Squared events back in London, Thinking Digital in Gateshead, and Masterpiece and Miami Art Basel art fairs. ‘I don’t go for the parties,’ she says. ‘I go to learn and to invest. It’s so inspirational, it’s a brain orgasm!’

The rich have always followed annual migration patterns, notably the summer ‘Season’ in England, followed by the Greek Islands or New England in August, Mustique or southern Africa in December, Los Angeles in February for the Oscars, and Easter in a country pile somewhere, before the cycle starts afresh. For old money, it’s a ritual unchanged and undiminished over centuries.

But there’s a new breed of super-rich global nomad. They are pirates charting their own social course — well, flying it in flocks of Bombardier 5000 private jets. Theirs is a calendar of economic conferences, exclusive parties and art auctions that they call The Circuit. ‘It’s a new global merry-go-round for people who are interested in the new economy — and want to profit from it,’ says Busquets.

These new adventure capitalists don’t talk of countries, but of cities and events. They never say goodbye, rather à bientôt, because they know they will air-kiss soon enough at the next plutocratic pit stop. ‘See you at the summit!’ they say. Their preferred meeting places are anything hosted by TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), South by Southwest in Texas, Burning Man in Nevada, and Scandinavian events with silly names that make them sound like conventions for Tellytubbies.

Have you spotted the theme that links them all? Yes, technology — the most creative, powerful new force on the planet — is disrupting the oldest institution in the old world, the Establishment.

Tech wires together all the events on The Circuit. Why? ‘Because technology is not only the hottest thing right now — the sector you need to be in — it also affects absolutely everything,’ says Harry Briggs, a tech venture capitalist who goes to more events on The Circuit than any man should have to endure. ‘Whether you are at a formal tech summit or Milan Fashion Week, an art gallery opening or even Wimbledon, you can meet people and find an investment opportunity.’ Briggs should know. His most recent firm, Balderton Capital, invests around £190m a year in startups.

If you are interested, and rich, here are a few of the hi-tech hot tickets. There’s Summit Series, which in 2011 held Summit at Sea — a schmooze cruise for the rich and entrepreneurial, on a liner departing from Miami to a tropical island. Its motto: ‘You can’t discover new lands until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.’ Summit Series has since purchased the Powder Mountain ski resort in Utah, where it held its annual event in January. Then there’s TechCrunch Disrupt, Hackathon and various Wired get-togethers. The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is increasingly a technology love-in, attended last month by a host of Kardashians and Monica Lewinsky. Collision in Las Vegas and The WorldPost, held in London this year, are must-goes. Founders Forum in London is invitation-only and free to attend, but only if you have founded a spiffy tech firm. You might also like WPP Stream, held in China, India, Cannes and Greece — it’s run by WPP boss Martin Sorrell, who says it is the ‘(un)conference for (un)conventional thinkers’.

‘You can go to a tech conference somewhere on the planet every week of the year if you really want to,’ says Briggs. And that is making some people very rich. TED charges up to £5,700 for tickets. Last year, Web Summit in Dublin attracted 22,500 people, many of whom paid up to £700. Revenue north of £10m is not too shabby for a three-day event and it has enabled its founder, Paddy Cosgrave, to employ 100 people in Dublin and expand into conferences in Asia and the US.