In light of last week’s Fourth Annual Tom Tom Founders Festival and the events it brought to Grounds, Arts & Entertainment sat down to chat with founder and director Paul Beyer to talk about the festival’s past, present and future.
Arts & Entertainment: To begin, could you give a quick background on what Tom Tom is, for those who don’t know about it?
Paul Beyer: Well, it’s the fourth Tom Tom Festival, it’s been going on for four years, and the intention has always been to foster Charlottesville as a creative hub and a place where a lot of interesting ideas, projects, and businesses grow. The festival does that by assembling a lot of the community that wouldn’t otherwise assemble, across class lines, across genres and disciplines. It’s really just intended to get the town out and about for a weekend and learn about their community.
AE: Was there any kind of catalyst four years ago to get this project going?
PB: Well, no — it was probably due to a series of conversations over beers and coffees over the series of a month with friends, and then I ran it by some event planners in Charlottesville. It then occurred to everyone that Charlottesville didn’t have a music festival of any kind; it had one for film and photography and one for books and literature, but it didn’t have anything for music. In thinking about a music festival and allowing that idea to incubate, it became apparent that Charlottesville was a lot more complex and needed something that is about culture more broadly than just music. So my first impulse with Tom Tom was to have it be a music festival, but it quickly became apparent that that wouldn’t suffice, and it would be a lot more impactful if the themes were about creativity and innovation, with music as more of a celebratory device to draw people together. People love coming out, drinking beer, going to food trucks, but what gives it impact is that the celebration is centered around innovators in Charlottesville and telling their stories.
AE: What do you hope to achieve by congregating all of these successful Charlottesville entrepreneurs with the Festival and the Founder’s Summit?
PB: It’s assembling a lot more people than just entrepreneurs. There were roughly 23,000 that came to the events last year.
AE: What about the speakers at the Founders Summit, in particular?
PB: Well, with the Founders Summit, the intention is to highlight local stories that have occurred here, and put Charlottesville on the map as a place where innovative conversations occur. One way to do that is to get world-class speakers to come. So we celebrate local talent while also facilitating an event that will have a mid-Atlantic and hopefully one day national draw based on the strength of the speakers.
AE: Is there any speaker you are particularly excited about?
PB: The biggest speaker is Alexis Ohanian from reddit and is someone who spends a lot of time thinking about innovation and entrepreneurship in small cities and how small cities become startup hubs, which is relevant to Charlottesville and where it is in its own narrative, trying to figure out whether it’s a retirement community or whether it’s a place that’s dynamic and where people are creating new things.
AE: How do you see the different facets of Tom Tom reconciling with each other? There are entrepreneurs coming to share their stories, but there is also food and music and art, like this patchwork quilt of events — is it just meant to showcase as much talent from Charlottesville as possible?
PB: Well, primarily, it’s meant to be fun. I find talks fun, and art fun, and music fun and beer fun, and all those things I’m pretty comfortable with them being together in a week.
AE: How long does it take to organize Tom Tom? And does each year have a different aim or theme?
PB: The theme is the same each year: founding. This is the first year we’ve had this caliber of speakers, though, and that was just a result of making the decision to book the Paramount in December. It’s a very short time frame — as the festival grows, I think, we’ll get better at planning because generally a festival such as this would take a year to plan, and we planned it in about three months. There are still some loose ends to wrap up, and it makes you excited for the next year, when we can get better. The planning for this event has really been about a six month process.
AE: What do you think is the biggest takeaway from Tom Tom, for both students and locals?
PB: For a lot of U.Va. students it’s just a matter of getting out of the U.Va. bubble and finding out what’s actually going on in the city. A big takeaway for students might be finding out that Charlottesville might be a place they can stay in after college — that there are jobs here and that there is a lot going on. As for the community, there are a lot of communities that come to Tom Tom, and the takeaway might be that there is a lot of public creativity that can occur in unique places, public parks, city buses, old retaining walls, city intersections — you can do something there. For the entrepreneurs, they can see that there is a lot of investment here in innovation, a lot of start-ups and a vibrant job market here if you’re in those fields. For families, it reinforces the idea that Charlottesville is a fun, creative city.
AE: For those students reading that have only heard about Tom Tom or would like to know more, what is a message you would like to leave them with?
PB: I guess it’s probably just the basic marketing message that there is a week in Charlottesville that has world class speakers, dozens of bands and parties, art in 50-plus venues downtown, and that it’s a new way to see the city.
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