Rupert Hart, the King of Parties in Santa Cruz, Has a Serious Side

When Rupert Hart moved to Santa Cruz seven years ago, he wanted to meet people and he didn't want to waste time.

A master of networking, he started with a simple strategy. He invited the first 10 people he met to a dinner party. It went well, so he asked each of them to invite a friend to his next party.

Although his background is in high tech, he not only built an old-fashioned social network, but he got a girlfriend out of the deal, when she arrived as a guest. He also built all of the furniture in his house, including a giant party table shaped like a woman's back.

"Every job and girlfriend I've gotten has been through networking," he says. He also wrote a book on the subject, "Effective Networking for Professional Success."

Before long the guest list grew geometrically and the parties every six weeks that featured the costumed, over-the-top artistic spirit of Burning Man, outgrew his house.

"Rupert is the P.T. Barnum of parties," says Silicon Valley marketing executive Phil Sheridan. "The man and his parties are larger than life."

The parties have themes and require costumes, based on what Hart and his wife Marie, are reading or investigating. The next one, which also celebrates Hart's 50th birthday on March 30, is a look into the future. He expects more than 700 people, almost half of them from Silicon Valley.

It can be the future as people in the past imagined it, ala the Flintstones or Jetsons, or the dark future of George Orwell's "1984," or a steampunk future, or whatever one can imagine. For details check Get tickets at Rupert's party site here.

"I hate saying no," Hart says, as he prepares for his biggest party ever at Santa Cruz's Portuguese Hall. "I'd rather go bigger than turn people away."

The cost is $15, which barely covers the expense of props, scenery, great bands and DJs that Hart supplies. He's hired Nora Cruz and Reverend Love Jones and the Sinners for the next one.

"Our aim is that we like dancing and we like to support creative people. We have workdays where people come help paint backdrops. It's like a little Burning Man."

Few partiers know Hart's serious side.

He came to the Silicon Valley from Cobham, a suburb outside London, to start a branch of E-trade in England, which he later sold back to E-trade. He had a strong business background with advanced degrees in robotics and engineering at the University of London and an MBA from INSEAD, a famed French business school.

At 37, he fell in love with the Bay Area and moved here to work as a consultant and author.  In 1989, he wrote his first book, "Recession Storming," while he was still a student and he updated it in 2007.

His most recent book "CrowdFund Your Startup!" is about raising money online from grassroots investors.

"I find things to write about that I would want to read about," he says. "When I first wrote about the recession, there were only two books with recession in the title, and one of them was a comic book."

His shortest book may be the shortest book anywhere. It's one word and it deals with his self-made religion, called "Joyism."

He coined the term back in London when he was looking for a philosophy to describe the life he wanted, one filled with joy.

The book, which sells for one penny over its production cost, has one word buried in a bunch of blank pages – "Joy."

Despite the pet rock-like novelty, it's not quite a bestseller. He's only sold one copy.

But his religion is a big part of Burning Man, where he has a group called Joyism complete with floats, art cars, ziplines, a merkin fashion show, free honey tea drinks, a costume exchange and a bar.

Last year he became mayor of the larger Silicon Valley group called Silicon Village which includes his Santa Cruz-based Joyism.

Among their classic contributions was a 28-foot pregnant statue celebrating the theme of fertility. It opened up and inside was an alien smoking a joint and drinking tequila.

Hart has been going to Burning Man since he moved to the U.S. a dozen years ago. Because he knew how to weld from a job back home working on submarines, he was called on to help build art projects. He was hooked and it became a large part of his lifestyle.

But he's also got a solid streak of entrepreneurialism. He's working on building a coat that will cool or heat the wearer and he's writing a book about the history of people's attempts to create environmental suits.

He says it's like the books on attempts to build a flying machine that inspired the Wright Brothers.

"No one wants to be hot or cold in the 21st century," he says. "It seems silly that we don't have that yet."

He's thinking about writing a book about writing a book in a week. He cranks them out that fast, sometimes.

"No one should die with a book in them," he says.

So, has the joyist life left him joyful as he looks back on his 50 spins around the Sun?

He's done some things that changed the world in small ways. He was the first person to rent a rubber raft in a rural section of China on the River Li and it spawned a big tourist business. He's been a one-man Facebook for linking friends and lovers around Santa Cruz and the Silicon Valley.

"I've had a heck of a lot of fun," he says. "I have a lot of friends. I got married. I have lovely sunshine," he says.

"I'm disappointed that I haven't made a lot of money or started a big company. If they write a million page history of the world, I'd at least like to have a small footnote."

For Tickets, click here.