A Q&A with Life Is Beautiful founder Rehan Choudhry

Would you believe that before Rehan Choudhry launched Life Is Beautiful, before he was in enlisted to engage everybody with enticing live music options in Las Vegas as the entertainment director at The Cosmopolitan, and even before he was in charge of wowing crowds in Atlantic City, he was working for the government as an IT consultant? True story. We discovered this interesting tidbit of trivia and a whole lot more during a recent chat with Choudhry in advance of Life Is Beautiful, which kicks off its third installment Friday afternoon in the heart of downtown Las Vegas. Keep reading to see what else we learned.

Las Vegas Review-Journal: What inspired you to launch the festival in the first place?

Rehan Choudhry: There were kind of three things that I wanted to accomplish. When I left Cosmo, I knew I wanted to create something new, but I didn't want to do just another tried-and-true music event.

I wanted something that, one, had some sort of meaningful impact for the city that we operate in. Hence the downtown location. No better way to drive enthusiasm, momentum around a city than actually doing the festival in the city, as opposed to a park somewhere.

So that was number one. Number two was creating a blend of lifestyle programming. So the collaborations between music, food, art and learning were really important to me, because it kind of touches on conversations that we're having on a day-to-day basis, just organically, as people.

And then the third was, with everything that I do now, I want to create some sort of meaningful societal impact. So you'll see that with some of the new events that I'm going to be announcing soon. Each one has some sort of social crisis or issue that we're trying to solve.

In the context of Life Is Beautiful, we're trying to solve hopelessness, to put it as simply as possible. The idea that people feel trapped because they are feeling more and more isolated with their social issues — a 13-year-old is struggling with his or her sexuality.

Or if it's a 30-year-old or 50-year-old who went down the wrong career path, or people are getting divorced, or battling addiction, illness, et cetera, we're trying to encourage people to see the hope and opportunity in life, via kind of shared stories and shared kind of experiences.

So what made you decide to leave Cosmo? Did you leave specifically to launch Life Is Beautiful?

I left Cosmo because I wanted to start my own company. It took me about 30 days from when I left Cosmo to come up with Life Is Beautiful, but the general premise was there, right. I knew I wanted to have a company that focused on these kinds of inspirational impact festivals and events. I just didn't know what it looked like until I had some time at home putting pen to paper and designing it.

Was it a tough sell at first when you did it?

You know, it's funny: It was actually a pretty easy sell, all-in. Yeah, it really was. It was almost surprising. I mean, look, coming out of Cosmo, we did such incredible stuff over there, that I had a good amount of industry credibility in the city.

And we hit the right time. There wasn't a large rock festival like this in the city yet. So I just started pitching — really, I wasn't even pitching. I was just sharing the concept with friends. And I had two friends that happened to, coincidentally, be acquaintances with Tony (Hsieh). So they suggested I show it to him.

I showed it to him, and we confirmed our deal within two weeks. Then we brought on Wirtz Beverage as our major sponsor, and we worked with the mayor to get our city location secured, and it just happened. I mean, all said and done, we developed Life Is Beautiful in probably 13 months.

So did Tony help finance the first installment?

Yeah, Tony's my financial partner.

Gotcha. And you were able to leverage all of your contacts and everything else that you had at Cosmo to get this going?

Yeah, I mean, I've been doing events and entertainment in some capacity for the last 10 years.

You started in New Jersey, right?

I was originally with the Department of Homeland Security. I was an IT consultant.

What?

Yeah, yeah, I was. After college, I joined Homeland Security, and I was developing emergency response systems that we had to put in place post-9/11 to increase national security. Hated it. Didn't like working in tech. Quit. Went to grad school for two years, and I got recruited to go work for Caesars Entertainment in Atlantic City. And I did my first festival with the Food Network out there. It was a food and wine festival, and it just kind of spiraled from there.

So over 10 years, I kind of developed a general idea of how to put this stuff together, but you don't know how to put a festival together until you actually put a big festival together. So that first year, it was lot of stumbling and a lot of making mistakes, but we put together a good finished product.

What's it been like watching it grow?

It's incredible. I still get chills when I hear people refer to us on the radio. It's funny: All of a sudden, very quickly, it went from being an unknown concept — I was like boots on the ground just pitching to everybody — into something that people speak about as if it's been around for 20 years. So to see the role that it plays in people's day-to-day conversations is probably the most exciting part about it.

How did you come up with the name?

I had a close friend of mine that was coming out of the closet several years ago and struggling like crazy with it. She was battling depression for some time and none of us knew why or what was going on. And I remember having a conversation with a mutual friend of ours, saying that I didn't understand why she couldn't just see that life is beautiful, every opportunity that she had to walk outside and see the sun shining and the birds chirping.

Largely, it was just I didn't fully understand the kind of internal struggle she was dealing with. So then years later, she's come out and the story's gotten much better, but when I was naming the festival, I named it Life Is Beautiful because there are so many people who are struggling that need that perspective. I just thought that, like, if you can get people to say those words over and over and over again, people will believe it when they need to.

To that end, I guess, what impact do you think it's had on the community?

I think that it's given people in the city something to rally around. Festivals are great. I mean, people love them, but a lot of festivals have bad stigmas associated with them, because they're built around … a lot of them are built around partying for the sake of partying, right. There's a tremendous amount of risk associated with them. But in our case, we're such an integral community event, I think that's really come through to people locally, that we're actually a part of their city, as opposed to an outside promoter coming in to do an event.

It's being created from the inside out.

Yeah, and it's everything we do … it's all the little things that we do, like giving tickets to the entire incoming freshman class at UNLV, or last year, I took the entire staff and we marched in the gay pride parade that happened downtown, and we gave out tickets in envelopes that said, 'You are beautiful' on them — like all of these things that we do that are, for no other reason, than just to be an added member of the community are really important.

Where do you see it going from here? What's your vision?

I would like to see it grow, and I'd like to see it become just a thing that people go to every year, the way people in Chicago go to Lollapalooza, right. I mean, even though it seems like we've been around a lot longer, we've only been around three years. We're still trying to build a sense of permanence for the brand and for the festival.

I'd love to see more people in Summerlin and in Henderson coming out for it. And I think we're seeing more and more of that as people become more aware that it's more than just a festival for a bunch of kids to go crazy at, but we're a festival that kind of appeals to everybody. I'm already working on ways to take this model into other cities under different brands. So I'd love to see more scenes be able to experience it.

What are some of the biggest things you've learned?

Like basic entrepreneurialship learning that you get after doing this for the first time, right. It's what kind of team to hire at the beginning. It's what kind of focus on experience versus creativity. You have to blend those two kind of perfectly. I learned that this is a tough city to sell tickets in, man.

Other cities when there's obviously competitive events going on, but when you're in San Francisco for Outside Lands, that's the only thing anyone's really talking about. Here, it's difficult to get that because at any given moment, Aviici could be at XS, or the Weeknd could be performing at Drai's, Celine could be making her comeback — there's so much going on in the entertainment space, it's sometimes difficult to get people's attention.

To that end, I noticed that there are some artists that are playing iHeartMusic's fest that are also on Life Is Beautiful. Did you not have a radius clause with your artists?

No, we do. We actually released the radius clause for a couple artists for iHeart, in particular. Mostly because iHeart's an important media and promotional event for Vegas, and we want to help it in any way that we can. And they have a different model. Most of their attendees are radio winners. So it's not like we're losing ticket sales, as a result. If iHeart was a traditional festival, then we likely wouldn't have done that. But just the nature of that specific type of event allowed us to be able to have that relationship with them.

Since you've learned from doing this, what are some of the things you would have done differently if you had the chance? If you could go back right now, go back to the beginning, what are some things you'd do differently?

What are some things I would do differently? Um … you know what I probably would've done is I probably would've focused even more attention on getting the music industry more connected with the Las Vegas local music scene. And that's something that we still try to do. But there's a difference between adding it in kind of superficially later versus building it in to the core strategy.

And I think that's something the entire city should get more actively involved in, that when we have some of these bigger agents and managers in town that we're actively working to get them to go to local venues to see local shows and interact with local bands. Because that's how the next Killers and the next Imagine Dragons is going to come out of the city.

You have struck some pretty key alliances and you have been able to get some integration from folks in the music industry. Specifically, I'm talking about Isomniac. Can you talk to me a little about how that partnership came about and the significance of it?

Yeah, you know, we've all been — a group of us, between Pasquale, Justin, Ryan, myself, some of the other people on the Insomniac Team — have all been friends in some capacity over the years. We were having meetings with Pasquale every, like, probably twice a year in those first couple years, showing him what we were doing, talking him through it, and I invited him last year. And he's always … I mean, that guy's as dedicated as it gets to this city.

He lives around the corner from me, and it was kind of just a natural fit to bring him in. And he's got such a strong command of the EDM world. That's not something that we do normally. I'm better at the rock stuff; I'm better at the indie stuff. But he's got EDM and that experiential element nailed. So the hope is that that partnership, over time, can really enhance the overall experience for our attendees.

Talking about having rock and indie on lock: Talk to me a little about Craig Nyman and what made you choose him to help you out with the talent buying and why you think he's been successful.

Another Planet actually does our talent buying for us. Craig's a curator on our side. He's really, really good at picking kind of the next generation breakouts. He's more dialed in with new music than anyone else I know. At the time, he was writing reviews of the shows I was doing at Cosmo. So him and I just started conversations, and I just realized the guy always wanted to get into the music industry and really never saw a way to get in. And he's also a brilliant music curator, so it's just good timing and a good relationship.

So explain to me how the process works — he just kind of pinpoints the acts and then the other group you're using actually goes about booking them?

Yeah, so what happens is we've kind of got a committee of people that review all the different talent options and select the bands. And we do that for all four categories; we do that for food, art and learning, as well. For each category, we have a lead curator. So music, it's Craig. For art, it's a girl name Charlotte Dutoit, for learning, it's a company called CatalystCreativ, etc.

So for music, we get on calls every week and we'll all throw in ideas. Another Planet will offer stuff based on what they've seen to be successful at Outside Lands and at Treasure Island and some of the other festivals they visit. Craig's more involved in what he believes is going to work for Vegas fans and Vegas attendees better than anyone.

So we all review. We all contribute. And we all have our own kind of unique perspectives on what we think is going to work, and we build the lineup that way. Another Planet actually facilitates all the offers, because they've got the best agent relationship, and we go from there.

How long does it take to pull Life Is Beautiful together? How long do you spend on it? Is a yearlong venture, or is it six months? How long are you working on it?

It's year-round, man. I mean, after the prior year festival, we'll spend probably three months closing the books and getting the strategy stuff together for the next year. And then you're in the holidays, so usually around January, we'll start booking again, and we'll announce dates somewhere in a February time frame, and then we go from there. But yeah, I mean, we're working on it year-round.

So what have you taken away or pulled any ideas from other festivals? I know you talked about Outside Lands and a couple of other festivals. Do you actively attend festivals and kind of get ideas for things you can integrate here?

Yeah, I go to like 15 festivals a year and probably another hundred regular concerts and other kind of lifestyle events. So I'm on the road like crazy attending this stuff. One, because I love it, right. I mean, this isn't a job for me. It's a full-time, like, passion of mine. So I love just being a part of it. And the second is there's no better way to get a real understanding of how different types of talent influence your festival than actually being there and seeing the show live. So I go to all of them and it really just helps give me perspective on what fans are reacting to, how far interactive with the festival sites, how the culture has evolved, so on and so forth, so we can stay relevant.

Are there any acts that weren't on your radar that you saw at another festival and you were just blown away and were like, 'Oh, I've just got to have them?'

Yeah, I mean, Snoop wasn't originally on our talent list, and we added him because I saw him at BottleRock, and he was, like, in the middle of the day. He wasn't even closing out a stage. He had the biggest crowd of the weekend. I mean, the guy just absolutely crushed. Such a great vibe. It was like one big dance party almost. So I got back from that festival, and we submitted an offer two days later.

If you had to define Life Is Beautiful in one sentence to somebody who's never been, how would you do that?

It is a music, food, art and learning festival in the heart of downtown Las Vegas, dedicated to encouraging people to see the hope, opportunity and beauty in life.

— Read more from Dave Herrera at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at dherrera@reviewjournal.com.