Rehan Choudhry and the art of gathering people

Rehan Choudhry once had to persuade people to come to a festival without knowing which part they would like best. The bands were one attraction. So were the chefs, the murals and the people giving talks. In downtown Las Vegas, he wanted all of those audiences to occupy the same streets. Years later, running Chptr in New York, he is working on another invitation: getting a community to pay attention to the life of someone it knew.

The distance between a festival wristband and a televised memorial announcement looks considerable. His career makes it smaller. Again and again, Choudhry has chosen work that involves assembling people, finding something they care about and giving them a place to encounter one another. The venues have changed. His interest in who turns up, and why, has been remarkably consistent.

There is a pleasing occupational irony here. Someone who helped bring touring musicians to the Las Vegas Strip now wants local television to make room for ordinary neighbors. Celebrity is useful for selling a concert. For the work he does today, being known around the block is quite enough.

A business student walks into divinity school

Before the stages, there were systems. Choudhry studied computer information systems at the University of Tampa, graduating in 2003, and worked in emergency-management technology associated with the Department of Homeland Security. His next degree took him to Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management, where he completed his MBA in 2007.

One of his interests there was an unusually direct question for a business school: how could profitable ventures help people living in poverty? Choudhry co-created Project Pyramid, which brought business and divinity students into the same educational undertaking. The combination had an appealing lack of professional tidiness. Future managers and future religious leaders were being asked to work on a shared problem.

In spring 2007, more than 50 students enrolled in the course. It examined subjects including microfinance, supply chains and marketing, using Hyderabad, India, as a setting for studying poverty alleviation. Twenty-one students and three faculty members traveled to India for ten days that March. The project gave an early shape to an idea that would keep appearing in Choudhry’s work: commercial tools could serve a purpose beyond the transaction.

The casino with regulars

Hospitality and entertainment followed. Choudhry worked at Caesars Entertainment and then became the opening entertainment director at the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. The job involved familiar resort concerns, including booking artists and attracting an audience. His account of the work also dwelled on something less obvious: the possibility of making a casino feel like a neighborhood.

At Book & Stage and Bond, he noticed people returning often enough to become regulars. They recognized one another. They discussed the musicians and DJs. A property designed to welcome visitors was developing some of the habits of a local bar. For an entertainment director, that offered a different kind of feedback from a single crowded show.

The bookings could be substantial. Adele, the Black Keys, Lauryn Hill and the Flaming Lips were among the artists associated with the property’s first-year music program. But there was also room for a band to change scale. Foster the People played eight free shows over four nights at Book & Stage in March 2011, then returned to headline the Boulevard Pool in October.

Choudhry described a booking process involving his local team, C3 Presents and Cosmopolitan chief executive John Unwin. Music discovery was part taste, part legwork, part getting the right people to listen. For Unwin, that sometimes meant loading up iPods. Every era has its corporate presentation technology.

Four reasons to buy one ticket

Choudhry left the Cosmopolitan in April 2012. Life Is Beautiful made its debut in downtown Las Vegas in October 2013, bringing music, food, art and learning together. The organizing idea was more demanding than putting a few food stalls beside a stage. Each part was supposed to give its own enthusiasts a reason to attend.

That distinction mattered to him. A visitor coming for a culinary demonstration should feel that the food program had been taken seriously. Someone coming for talks should have a satisfying day without needing to pretend that the music was the main event. One ticket could admit several kinds of curiosity.

The undertaking also depended on other people’s expertise. Another Planet Entertainment brought festival experience. The Downtown Project, backed by Tony Hsieh, connected the event to a wider effort in the neighborhood. Choudhry’s own contribution included the brand and the experience he wanted those different audiences to share.

After the inaugural weekend, he put attendance at about 60,000 across two days. He was interested in more than that total. People who had spent their time in different parts of the program seemed to describe a consistent experience. For someone trying to fit several festivals into one, that was a useful result. There were mundane lessons too, including trash problems on the first day. Even an event called Life Is Beautiful needs bins.

Learning, with the volume turned up

After leaving Life Is Beautiful before its 2016 edition, Choudhry returned with Emerge. Announced in 2017 and first staged in 2018, it took his interest in combining music and ideas further. A conference could put its talks in one room and its entertainment at an after-party. He wanted those experiences to meet inside the program itself.

Emerge also made room for people still finding their audience. The focus on emerging musicians offered a different proposition from relying entirely on established names. Its relationship with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, put some of that experimentation close to students.

A Beautiful Perspective, Choudhry’s media and events company, partnered with UNLV’s Greenspun College of Urban Affairs in fall 2017. Emerge staff worked from Greenspun Hall. Students could pitch stories, work with the team and see how an event moved from an idea into a schedule, a venue and a public invitation. Four students from different disciplines were hired as interns.

By its second year, Emerge’s program explored themes including self, protest, fear and sex. These were hardly subjects designed to make conversation disappear politely into the background. Choudhry was interested in the emotional connection between performers, ideas and the people in the room. A good lineup, in his telling, had to do more than fill a timetable.

The people outside the family photograph

Chptr grew from another kind of storytelling. Choudhry watched his wife, CBS New York anchor Jessica Moore, assemble short video tributes. Her interviews extended beyond immediate relatives to friends, former teammates and colleagues. People who appeared peripheral to a life could carry vivid memories of it.

That observation gave him a problem worth working on. A person’s story is distributed among many people. The challenge is bringing those pieces together so that others can encounter them. Choudhry founded Chptr in 2020; its app launched in 2022. His festival experience had involved coordinating many contributors around one occasion. Here, the contributors were sharing memories around one person.

His ambition reaches beyond memorials. In 2024, he described the company he wanted to build in plain language: “a celebrations company.” That leaves room for graduations, weddings and other occasions when a community has something personal to announce. The attraction is the same small revelation: somebody else remembers a detail you never knew.

A local story needs a way into the room

The business has increasingly taken Choudhry into partnerships with funeral homes and local broadcasters. In August 2025, Tribute Technology and Chptr expanded Tribute Spotlights across television markets nationwide. The offering connected professionally produced video notices and tributes with local stations and their websites, with links back to the funeral home.

It is a practical answer to a distribution problem. Publishing a story online gives it an address. Helping the people who should see it actually encounter it requires another set of decisions. Choudhry’s newer work asks where those people already spend their time, rather than assuming they will arrive at a new destination.

In June 2026, Chptr announced a $5.5 million Series A led by CityRock, with Tribute Technology participating. The announcement also named strategic partnerships with iHeartMedia, Sinclair and Hearst. Chptr reported being live in 132 U.S. television markets at that point, with distribution extending into radio.

The company says it uses AI for production, formatting and distribution, with people reviewing content before broadcast. It says source material comes from families rather than generated stories or scraped data. For a business dealing in personal memories, that distinction has consequences: the details belong to actual people, and accuracy is part of the service.

“Memorials are the starting point, not the end state.”Rehan Choudhry, June 2026

The calendar has a playground in it

There is a less public version of the audience question at home. In a 2022 post, Choudhry described family and company as occupying the same highest-priority part of his life. Days away from work could begin at six in the morning and involve hours at a playground. Saturdays did not necessarily feel more leisurely than Tuesdays.

He wrote about declining happy hours and work dinners unless they mattered to the business. He had stopped jumping at every chance to attend a festival and said he had not played guitar in five years. The pleasures that survived included a considerable appetite for the Real Housewives franchises. The former festival founder had found some programming he could enjoy from the sofa.

His professional relationships have also carried across chapters. In 2025, he described having two former Vanderbilt classmates on Chptr’s cap table. Much of his fundraising network developed through introductions, including asking people who else he should speak with. The career changes can look abrupt on paper; the relationships supply some continuity.

Fifteen minutes in Times Square

In 2026, Chptr used a Times Square billboard opportunity for The First Call, a tribute to funeral professionals. For fifteen minutes, the screen showed their faces and names. Some came with family and staff to see it. After years of putting performers in front of audiences, Choudhry had helped give a public moment to people whose work usually happens much more quietly.

That choice brings the earlier chapters into focus. At the Cosmopolitan, he noticed the regulars. At Life Is Beautiful, he wanted different enthusiasms to fit inside one event. With Emerge, he brought students, musicians and ideas into closer contact. At Chptr, he is asking local media to carry stories whose significance comes from proximity.

The scale has grown, but the unit of interest remains a person: someone with a name, a few photographs and stories held by other people. Choudhry’s next audience may meet that person between familiar segments on the evening news. For a founder who once booked the bands, it is a quieter kind of attention to earn.