Susan MacTavish Best is the founder & CEO of Living MacTavish. She hosts salons around the world on a diverse range of topics bringing together an eclectic array of influencers she knows into one room. At these salons Susan mixes cocktails and cooks for all of her guests, then interviews an expert or two on a specific topic followed by a live music performance. In an era of always-on one’s phone, always connected to technology, Susan brings people together informally and imperfectly, and encourages them to look each other in the eye and have a spirited conversation all the while tickling their senses with tasty food, yummy smells, interesting debates and live music.
Susan sits on the advisory board of the Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkeley and the Quantitative Biosciences Institute at UC San Francisco. Susan has been on the advisory board of a handful of startups, and has worked closely mentoring many entrepreneurs.
When she was 24, Susan founded Best Public Relations, a firm that specialized in influencing the public, the media and the influencers themselves around the globe. She handled the public relations needs for dozens of companies including: Bankrate, craigslist, Esurance, Founders Fund, Hampton Creek, Klout, LaLa, LuLu, MainStreet.com, Olivia, Playfish, Quid, Smugmug, Spoonflower, VentureBeat and YouNoodle. Susan was an Executive Producer of craigslistTV, the TV series that originated out of craigslist.
In the mid 90’s Susan went back to night school to learn how to code and, as a result, started Posthoc, one of the first online guides to San Francisco which she grew into a local resource managing over 100 volunteer editors and writers.
Susan graduated from Hamilton College with a BA in History. During a one year stint at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford University, she was co-Editor of the UK’s longest running university magazine, The ISIS, following in the shoes of past editors Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, John Betjeman and Sylvia Plath. While a student at Oxford, Susan won an internship at The Sunday Times (London), where she sat on the Transportation Desk outside the office of editor Andrew Neil. Here, she lasted two weeks until she realized sitting behind a desk writing about transportation news was not her calling. She left one Friday lunchtime on a train to Europe abruptly ending her journalism career. Other early jobs included Soda Jerk during summers in Connecticut at a nuclear submarine shipyard and Pickle Packer at Emandal Farm in Mendocino County.
Susan lives in Soho in NYC, SF, and on the Big Sur Coast. She is a long distance trail runner. Susan grew up in Scotland, and went to school at St. Leonards in St. Andrews. She was born on Prince Edward Island after her very pregnant mother, Laurie MacTavish, flew herself unexpectedly to Charlottetown in her Cesna to deliver her daughter.