Characterizing themselves as a ragtag band of the important and unconventional, a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, executives and entrepreneurs is opening a new $2,500-a-year social club for the tech elite.
The Cuckoo s Nest will open next year at 48 Willow Rd., in Menlo Park, a former robotics lab and more recently home to the HelloStartup co-working space.
The clubhouse, according to its website, will be reserved to 1,200 global players, all of them disruptive founders and CEOs, risk-taking venture investors, and other distinguished champions of the entrepreneur. Around the corner from Facebook headquarters, Stanford University and many VC firms, the drinking and eating club will be a suburban and slightly cheaper alternative to The Battery, where tech titans mingle with aspiring entrepreneurs in San Francisco.
The Valley does not have a place where entrepreneurs can find each other and hang out, said an online pitch from venture capitalist Tim Draper, one of the club s founding members. The Cuckoo s Nest is the perfect vision and perfect spot to make this happen.
News of the soon-to-open venue was first reported Wednesday by s JP Mangalindan, who interviewed backers and some skeptics, including an anonymous start-up founder who declined a membership offer, arguing that entrepreneurs should be heads-down and building.
Leading the project is Silicon Valley deal-maker and AlwaysOn CEO Tony Perkins, who touted the new space in an email Wednesday to the Mercury News but could not be reached for further comment. The club promises to be both exclusive and diverse, with 51 percent of membership reserved for women and 20 percent for people under 30 years old. Young members also pay a lower annual due of $1,000.
Inspiring the club s name was Ken Kesey s book One Flew Over the Cuckoo s Nest. Kesey wrote the book in the 1960s when he was working a night shift at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital, just down the street from the new clubhouse on Willow Road.
The club website quotes Kesey as describing the hospital as a place where the patients were not insane, they just did not fit the conventional idea of how people are supposed to act. The new club, says the website, will be in the same spirit.
Above: Students from Burlingame High School starred in their school s 2008 production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo s Nest.
(Photo by John Green of the San Mateo County Times and the Bay Area News Group)
