When I ask Jack Schwartz how much he’s charging for a table at his upcoming party in Manhattan, he offers to “show” me instead of answering with words. Then, the 21-year-old reaches into his black leather jacket, pulls out a white envelope containing $27,500 in cash—neatly separated into three stacks—and slides it across a countertop at WIRED’s office in New York, his right hand flashing a $10,000 diamond- and sapphire-encrusted gold ring.
Schwartz is the founder and CEO of MyPlots, a party promotion and ticketing company he started after throwing a series of legendary ragers in Los Angeles beginning at the precocious age of 14. He’s been building a cult of personality since high school, teasing his parties on Instagram and Snap to create FOMO and then packaging highlights in Reels and Stories afterward. “He was like The Great Gatsby,” says Zane Harwin, a 19-year-old former high school classmate of Schwartz’s who now does marketing for MyPlots. “That’s what we would all call him.” Harwin has traveled to New York with Schwartz for the party, and to try to raise money for their app. He’s wearing a $500 white Chrome Hearts T-shirt, a 424 jacket, and a claspless silver “permanent” bracelet he got at Coachella.
MyPlots launched its namesake app in January 2025, in part to promote “after-prom” events for high schoolers. Today, it’s the go-to app for under-21s in LA and boasts more than 1 million users. The app is also expanding its user base to older (of-age) attendees. Daniel Herring, a 30-year-old promoter who works with MyPlots, says that when he moved to LA three years ago, most events were promoted on Partiful, but “over the last year, it’s definitely been damn near all MyPlots.”
On MyPlots, a host will sign up, create an event, and invite people. The app allows promoters to target people who have attended their parties in the past and text guests updates, but it does not share phone numbers with promoters or third parties for off-platform use. Guests RSVP and purchase their tickets through the app, and the company takes a 20 percent cut of all sales. (When it launched last year, the ticketing feature distinguished MyPlots from competitors, but they’re catching up. In June, Partiful announced it would be offering in-app ticketing.) To use MyPlots, users technically need to be 18, but Schwartz concedes that “people find ways around that.” Stripe, which is integrated into the app, allows users as young as 13 if they have a parent enrolled on the account.
It’s not really the tech that sets MyPlots apart, which feels amateur compared to competitors like Partiful. Rather, it's the cool young crowd using it for exclusive, luxury parties—and how MyPlots markets to them. Scanning the app in mid July 2026 turned up an all-ages rap show at downtown LA nightclub The Mayan; a mansion party in Encino boasting “CELEBERTIES [sic]”—with a disclaimer that organizers aren’t liable for “anything negative that could happen” before, during, and after the event; and an 18-plus Daybreak Festival at the W Hollywood hotel featuring “VIP cabanas” and Schwartz’s bolded name as a headlining DJ. Ticket pricing is often tiered, sometimes varying based on gender, timing, or VIP access. A “Euphoria Mansion Party” from last spring, which did not specify an age restriction, boasted 500-plus expected guests and offered 30 minutes of “bedroom access” for $75.
No longer just a rite of passage or a chance to score clout at school, teen parties are now full-blown moneymaking enterprises for entrepreneurs savvy enough to take advantage. In addition to MyPlots, there are promoters like 310 Events, Off Campus Events, and LA Social, and ticketing apps like Plots and Turnt, all catering to young crowds.
“If you get real creative, there's always a way to make money—even without even leaving your house—if you know how to market and you can use the internet,” says Schwartz, whose role model is billionaire Mark Cuban. “So many young people are just on their phones all day.”
Standing at 5'8", Schwartz wears his dirty blond hair slicked back, and often has a pair of Oakleys perched on top of his head. He speaks with the bullish confidence of a tech founder, the occasional "like" reminding you of his age. As he tells it, he first became an entrepreneur at 14 years old. While a freshman at Palisades Charter High School—a well-known public school known as “Pali” by locals—he started a streetwear line called Loonar Clothing. His marketing strategy was to wait outside of celebrity haunts like Boa Steakhouse and the Saddle Ranch Chop House “for like 8 to 12 hours” and ask stars like Addison Rae to wear his T-shirts, sunglasses, and other swag on camera—prompting an Inside Edition story. Just before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Schwartz threw three parties in succession, building a name for himself at school. “Everyone was like, who is this Jack Schwartz kid?” he recalls. “Every kid at Pali, even the seniors, are going.”
The first was in a rec room at his dad’s apartment complex, with his dad working security and collecting payments; the other two were on Hollywood Boulevard, where he paid $2,000 cash to rent the space. Schwartz says it wasn’t hard to find venues willing to rent to minors. “If you go to Hollywood, some of these venues … they'll do anything for business.”
His parties weren’t always hosted at official venues; they popped up at warehouses, offices, even friends’ houses. “A lot of the time, the parents … wouldn't care,” Schwartz says. “They would be upstairs, and it would be in their backyard.” But this wasn’t always drama-free: One of his New Year’s Eve parties, held at a warehouse, got shut down prematurely because the cops showed up and Schwartz claims the venue didn’t have the right permit.
Schwartz isn’t the only promoter who says it’s relatively easy for underage kids to find a party venue in LA—if they have money. Matt, a venue operator in his twenties who caters to brands and celebrities, started a party-promoting Instagram account as a teen and recalls renting corporate space and buying insurance for the night on sites like Eventhelper.com or Eventsured for a couple hundred bucks. (Neither website returned a request for comment.) Asked how he secured insurance as a minor, he says he “probably” put it under his dad’s name or figured out another way of getting around it. (WIRED has given Matt a pseudonym as he’d like to avoid professional repercussions.) “Some people are desperate for money,” he offers, by way of explaining why adults would work with children and take on the liability that comes with it.
And the liabilities are many. Matt recalls that a dance studio in Brentwood, which he rented for an event while in high school, hosted another party with teen guests months later. The floor broke under the weight of the crowd. Los Angeles Magazine reported that it sent “rowdy rich kids spilling into the streets.” As a venue operator, Matt says he’s worked with “really kind, sweet high schoolers” and teen promoters who cut corners. Some hire their friends as security guards or sneak alcohol in via staging equipment. The underage guests themselves present additional problems, sometimes showing up visibly drunk and getting aggressive when they’re not allowed in.
In 2024, Schwartz appeared in Social Studies, an FX documentary series about the highs and lows of teen social media use. According to the doc, in 2022, Schwartz hosted his own birthday party, in concert with another friend. In a social media post about the event, guests were explicitly advised against bringing “visible alcohol.” Nonetheless, the show depicted the party’s debaucherous turn: drinking out of containers, smoking, hooking up, a fight among two girls, and a teenage boy hanging off an indoor balcony railing. Guests interviewed say someone threw up before passing out on the ground. His friends called an ambulance, but not before dragging him a few blocks to avoid getting the party planners in trouble. “That’s scary,” Schwartz tells the camera in a follow-up interview. “That’s also why we purchased insurance.” When asked about the FX series, Schwartz tells me he was misrepresented by the filmmakers. He now claims the birthday party in question wasn’t his, that he didn’t organize or manage it, and as such, he didn’t get insurance. FX declined to comment.
In Schwartz’s junior year, when Covid-19 lockdowns lifted, teens were desperate for in-person connection; he decided to go hard, throwing parties under the brand MyPlots—“plot” is slang for something to do—and advertised them on Instagram. But it was “messy,” he says, with people sending him money via Venmo and Zelle or paying cover charges (typically $20) at the door. Sometimes security guards would pocket the money. “There had to be a better way to facilitate these events, make them safer, and provide people with more security,” he recalls. “So that's why I created MyPlots.”
To bolster his business, Schwartz grew his TikTok following to 1.6 million by doing man-on-the-street videos asking people how much their fits cost; he also inked a deal with Snap’s Spotlight monetization program for a “lot” of money, picking up a “ton of followers,” he says. (Snap did not respond to requests for comment.) In 2023, during his senior year, Schwartz used proceeds from his parties to buy a blue BMW M340i that he says cost $50,000.
Zane Harwin was a freshman at Pali when Schwartz was a junior. The former captain of the school’s surf team, Harwin is 6'4”, with a mischievous smile and has brown hair that flows in beachy waves. He towers over his boss, but has always looked up to Schwartz. Harwin fondly recalls rolling up to one of Schwartz’s giant house parties in Brentwood, seeing cars lined down the road and Schwartz dutifully running the door. “He’s the man of the party,” Harwin says, adding that his proximity to the enterprise means some girls have offered to do “anything” to get into the events. (He says he would never take them up on that.) As a duo, they’re a modern-day Spencer Pratt and Brody Jenner—Schwartz is the brains of the operation, and Harwin the charm.
They speak with nostalgia about the chaos of their high school raging—parties in iconic LA neighborhoods like Beverly Hills and Bel Air—some so crowded that people would fall into the hot tub. Another Pali classmate and now MyPlots’ head of marketing, Lucas Ward, remembers seeing a kid “literally get knocked out cold” during a fight. “Kids would make it a mess, but it was authentic high school parties,” Harwin says.
MyPlots likely could not have been born anywhere but the affluent neighborhoods of West LA, where many teens have easy access to cars, envy-inducing houses, wealth, and the jaw-dropping beauty of the Pacific Ocean’s coastline. Zillow pegs the average home price in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood at just over $3 million. Pali High is so iconic that there was once a popular TikTok account devoted to sharing the outfits of its students. As is typical for kids in this area, both Schwartz and Harwin grew up well-off. Schwartz's mother runs a marketing agency while his father has a corporate job; Harwin is the child of a tv personality/producer and a restaurateur/hospitality real estate developer.
“It's like the number one place if you want to be an influencer,” says Harwin. “Social media is the biggest here. Hollywood, everyone knows a person in LA, and like you post one video here, it'll go viral.”
Rachel, a Culver City–based mother of a 17-year-old son and 15-year-old daughter, says both of her kids and their friends attend ticketed parties thrown by other teens, which are promoted on social media; her son’s friend has a “business” throwing parties at other people’s homes. Teenagers in the LA area “can stay out really late and, you know, just take a Waymo and be very independent,” she says. The fact that “everyone has their parents’ credit card on their phone” is a game changer, she adds. “Kids are just kind of absent-mindedly spending a lot of money.”
Outside of lavish locations, these teen parties are markedly different from the ones you hosted in the backyard when your parents went out of town. Rachel’s daughter, Amber, says parties are typically advertised on Instagram and Snapchat, and the location is dropped the day of the event. Usually, girls’ tickets cost less than guys’, and kids can prepay, showing a barcode at the door. The hosts, some of them teens themselves, use an app to sell tickets. Most crucially, they’re making real money off parties that 20 years ago would have just gotten you grounded.
In May 2025—just a few months after the launch of MyPlots—Schwartz and Harwin threw an “after-prom tour,” hosting parties for seniors to attend once their school proms ended. Harwin advertised the party “tours” on Instagram, filming from exotic cars and penthouses with stunning mountain views, sometimes using stacks of cash as props. “Nobody else in the world has done a tour like this,” he said in one reel, sitting on stone steps behind a swimming pool. Their strategy for selling tickets was getting popular high school seniors to act as brand ambassadors—a role that Harwin filled when he was still a student at Pali.
As is common with after-prom ragers, things sometimes got out of hand. Several attendees of one party say security for the event got aggressive and shoved students. Schwartz brushes this aside, first claiming that the security came with the venue and later that too many students tried to get their friends in for free. “It was like a shit show,” he says. “The crowd was so disrespectful.”
Raine, a 16-year-old who lives in Venice, attended a backyard party in the Rancho Park neighborhood advertised on MyPlots and Instagram last March. (Rachel, Amber, and Raine are all pseudonyms, in order to protect their privacy.) As they were leaving, at around 10 pm, Raine saw a girl, clearly intoxicated, lying on the grass in the front yard. The fire department showed up. The account promoting the party later posted an Instagram story with the text: “two drunk ho** ruined the party for yall NEXT ONE GON BE CRAZY.”
Schwartz wants to distance himself from promoters who use his app. He says the technology is simply facilitating ticket sales and that he has no connection to the majority of the parties on MyPlots—nor does he bear any legal responsibility. “I have no idea who 95 percent of [the promoters] are,” he says, adding that he’s very selective about what events he personally throws. “It's not worth the liability to make a few thousand dollars.”
Marley Majcher, who plans events in LA through her business The Party Goddess!, is skeptical that young party promoters are free from liability, even when they have single-night insurance. Majcher organizes high-end events, including sweet sixteens and bar and bat mitzvahs in locations like Beverly Hills and Malibu. She says her own lawyer has stressed the importance of airtight contracts to account for things like accidents and drinking and driving. “There's just no way that these people have the coverage for what they need to have … especially here, where we're very sue-happy and affluent,” says Majcher, who is 56 but tells me that she looks younger “due to the amount of Botox and skin treatments I have on a regular basis.”
William Lemmon, the principal broker at Broadway Insurance Services, says that a party host would generally need a special event permit, an occupancy sign-off if the space isn't zoned for a crowd—like a warehouse or office—the fire marshal's approval, and a permit for alcohol sales, which a minor can't apply for. Instant online insurance is perfectly fine when everyone's an adult, but if “a teenager is charging a cover at a warehouse with booze, that's about as far from the intended use as it can get,” he says. He also points out that minors generally can't be held to contracts, so the carrier could argue the policy is invalid. Liability for these events is a “pile-on” that would involve the promoter, tenant, property owner, whoever bought alcohol, and possibly parents if the party thrower is underage. “Here’s what it really comes down to: Take that same party and make everyone 21, and it’s insurable. Add minors and alcohol, and no carrier will knowingly touch it.”
For now, the business is working. Following the successful 2025 after-prom tour, Schwartz and Harwin say they took a monthslong European vacation, flying first class and hitting Amsterdam and Ibiza, among other spots. Despite Ibiza’s reputation as one of the party capitals of the world—with clubs open all night and after-hours gatherings that last the entire next day—the guys decided to throw their own event at their villa.
“We go to this post office, we create a flyer, and we're printing out like hundreds of flyers,” Harwin recalls, detailing how they went to the massive outdoor club Ushuaïa and threw the posters into the crowd. “The next thing we know, we go back to the villa, and there's already a line.” They claim they charged $100 a head and walked away with around $10,000. When I ask why they felt the need to work during a vacation, Harwin says they missed the hustle: “This is what we do. We’re good at this.”
By early June 2026, Schwartz had transitioned to throwing parties for an 18-plus crowd—and taken his talents to the East Coast. A few hours after the meeting at WIRED’s office, I head to HK Hall, a two-story nightclub in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. Schwartz and the MyPlots team are hosting an after-party for Houston rapper Don Toliver’s Madison Square Garden show—the one with a $27,500 table fee. It’s their second big New York City event, the first being a Playboi Carti after-party last November.
By 10:30 pm, a couple dozen young-looking people are in line at the door, which is being manned by Ward and Schwartz. A woman tries to haggle with Schwartz to get a discount on the $100 entry fee. He offers it to her for $75, but when she gets to Ward, he still charges her $100, telling her the extra is “tax.”
A white guy in a Bathing Ape shirt, with beaded box braids, is smoking a joint outside. It’s Daniel Herring, the aforementioned event promoter. Schwartz and his collaborators flew him out from LA. He’s a few feet away from a sign prohibiting drugs but says that, because he’s a VIP, security is holding on to his half-ounce of weed. “I chose MyPlots over a lot of these guys,” says Herring, who promotes his parties on MyPlots because he favors its customer service. “They’re very driven, they’re very humble, and they’re genuine. They’re not out here sharking or doing bad business by anybody.”
Inside the club are bottle girls with sparklers, people smoking hookah, and at least a couple of influencers livestreaming. Eight TVs repeatedly flash MyPlots’ purple logo. The place fills up quickly; By midnight, hundreds of people are lined up around the block. Schwartz says he paid “a substantial amount of money” for Toliver’s 2 am appearance.
MyPlots is in the middle of a search for angel investors, hoping to raise $10 million to set up a permanent office and hire a sales team to book talent for parties. It’s also planning a 10,000-person festival on Santa Monica beach for next summer. Schwartz is currently taking a hiatus from pursuing his economics degree at UCLA, explaining, “Every kid you know, from back in the day, they wanted to be a policeman, a firefighter. Now everyone wants to be a YouTuber, a streamer.” His ambitions go far beyond nightlife. He says he wants to eventually sell the company and start a new business: “Something in AI.”
Harwin puts the long-term goal more plainly: “Make as much money as I possibly can—as soon as I can.”
“It’s very possible,” Harwin says, “we're going to be doing something bigger than Coachella once we get older.” You know, once they’re 25.
Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at [email protected].
Comments
Back to top