Who

With partner Noah Tepperberg, Jason Strauss runs party promotion firm the Strategic Group and manages the nightspots Marquee and Tao. Strauss spends most of his time in Las Vegas these days overseeing Tao's Sin City outpost, but he remains one of New York's foremost nightlife impresarios.

Backstory

Manhattan-raised Strauss attended Riverdale and supposedly met Noah Tepperberg when he refused to let the Stuyvesant student into a party he was hosting. (He says he eventually relented.) The two first started working together as college students, promoting parties in the city when they were home on vacation. After graduating from Boston University, Strauss returned to New York and turned to promoting full-time, teaming up with Tepperberg to host events in Manhattan and the Hamptons. In 2001, they founded the Strategic Group to give their promoting and event production efforts a name. Two years later, they opened Marquee, converting a 7,500-square-foot former taxi garage in far west Chelsea into one of the city's most high profile hotspots, attracting a steady stream of boldfaced names and the attendant namechecks in Page Six.

Of note

Tepperberg and Strauss have their hands in several venues these days. There's Marquee, of course, which continues to make a mint even though the celeb quotient isn't what it was. They're also partners in the circus-like Tao in Midtown, and recently partnered with Tao's majority owners, Marc Packer and Richard Wolf, to open an Ilan Waisbrod-designed outpost of the restaurant-club hybrid at the Venetian in Las Vegas. Strauss now spends most of his time in Vegas, where he oversees the club portion of the 42,000-square-foot venue, which was the top grossing restaurant/club in the U.S. in 2008 for a second year in a row; Tepperberg oversees the biz from the firm's New York office. They also continue to promote events in New York, Miami, and LA under the Strategic Group banner. Clients include hotels like the Delano and Setai in Miami and brands like T-Mobile, Absolut, and Sprint.

Personal

Strauss is single. In New York, he lives in a condo at 260 Park Avenue South that he purchased for $1.7 million in 2006.

For the record

Invitations to Strauss's 30th birthday party in 2004 read: "In 1974, after many years of fighting an unjust war in Vietnam, the United States finally decided to pull out! That same year, thankfully, Richard Strauss did not!"