Ben Keene

From Tribewanted

Founder: Ben Keene

Tribe Name: Chief Bengazi

"On January 14, 2006, Ben Keene received an email that changed his life. He had just taken a sip of hot tea when the message from his friend Mark James popped up, and Keene did a double take at the subject line: "A TRIBE IS WANTED."

Keene and James, both 26, had been brainstorming ideas for an Internet start-up, and Keene was used to receiving email messages full of improbable schemes from his friend. The business plan outlined in the current message didn't disappoint: "We will establish an online community and call it a tribe, James had written. Members will create profiles, post photos, and chat online—the usual stuff—and then do something with no known precedent in the history of the Internet: The virtual tribe will become a real one. We will travel to a desert island, James wrote, and form a partnership with an indigenous tribe. We will build an environmentally friendly tourist facility and show it off to the world as a model of low-impact development. We will be a 21st-century tribe, and you, Ben Keene, will be a chief.”

Through his work in adventure travel, international development and more recently running time-out magazine, Career Break Café, Ben has often found himself in the middle of an adventure in some remote part of the world. So when Ben’s mate Mark challenged him to a bet to form a global tribe that would develop an eco-community on a tropical island, Ben knew that this would be the start of his biggest adventure yet!