In San Francisco's Pacific Heights, Trevor Traina has blended the city's blue bloods with new blood by encouraging Silicon Valley friends like Larry Ellison and Mark Pincus to move in. And nowhere is the Gold Coast alchemy more evident than in his Georgian-style home with a museum-worthy photography collection
I ’ve spent my entire life as a connector of people,” Trevor Traina says in his cozy San Francisco den. It’s the end of a long day that some would find exhilarating, others exhausting and Traina simply typical.
The 45-year-old tech entrepreneur had woken up in Los Angeles that morning, having spent the previous evening at the Oscars.
That afternoon, he canceled his Virgin America flight home in favour of hitching a ride on a friend’s private jet. Then he was out until the wee hours having dinner with a Disney executive and some tech-mogul friends at Spruce, a cozy, Michelin-starred Presidio Heights restaurant in which he is a co-investor. Is this socialising, is it business? For Traina, it’s the sweet spot of a career spent nurturing relationships with talented people.
“It was interesting to see how many people at dinner were also at the Academy Awards,” he says as he settles into a vibrant-blue Etro-upholstered chair. “It really hit home that San Francisco has become the centre of the idea economy.” And for the past few years, Traina has been holding that centre—linking the Bay Area’s tech titans with the city’s Old Guard. His 1905 Georgian town house defines that nexus. Situated in Pacific Heights, one of the city’s most rarefied neighbourhoods, the home, which Traina shares with wife Alexis and their two children, was decorated by his neighbour Ann Getty. Just down the block are Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, Zynga’s Mark Pincus and Apple’s design genius, Jony Ive.
The mix is no coincidence. “Over the years I’ve reached out to the people I care about and recruited them to colonise the coolest and best part of the city,” says Traina, who matches friends and nearby real estate with the enthusiasm of a high-commission broker. “Who wouldn’t want to be surrounded by the brightest and best minds that they know?”
Expansive views of the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz compete with Traina’s remarkable 300-piece photography collection—including works by Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Cindy Sherman and Andreas Gursky. “Because of my two kids, my wife has exiled the more risqué images to far walls,” he says, staring out from behind one of his Frederick Remington statues.
Instead of counting his inheritance or riding the express lane to Wall Street like so many of his peers, Traina transformed his silver spoon into a full platinum table setting through a series of internet startups. After graduating from Princeton and Oxford, he became a brand manager for Seagram’s wine coolers in New York. “It used to be embarrassing to go to bars and demand Sunset Passions,” he remembers, as he sips a glass of cabernet from his in-laws’ Swanson Vineyards in the Napa Valley—his wife, a wry Southern beauty, is from the frozen-foods family. Traina has his own Napa vineyard, “but if you want to be friends with your wife,” he explains, “you drink her wine.”
Two years ago, his collection was exhibited at the de Young Museum, where he is a board member. He sits on the board of six other non-profits. “Philan-thropy has always been very important to my family, and I firmly believe in giving back.”
(This story appears in the May-June 2014 issue of ForbesLife India. To visit our Archives, click here.)