David Siegel: One Acquisition Away From Charting His Own Path

David Siegel is the CEO of Meetup, the world’s largest platform for finding and building local communities. David has over 20 years of experience as a technology and digital media executive leading organizations through innovative product development, rapid revenue growth, and digital traffic acceleration. Prior to joining Meetup, David was CEO of Investopedia, which provides investment dictionaries, advice, reviews, ratings, and comparisons of financial products such as securities accounts. Before Investopedia, David was President of Seeking Alpha, a crowd-sourced content service for financial markets.

David holds a BA in Philosophy, Politics, & Economics and an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania. He is an adjunct professor at Columbia University where he teaches strategic planning and entrepreneurship. He hosts the podcast Keep Connected, which is dedicated to the power of community. David’s book, Decide & Conquer, lays out the framework for decision-making that leaders can use to ensure organizational and personal success.

Transcript provided by YouTube (unedited)

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[Music]
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welcome to the one away show presented by bw missions i am brian wish and i am
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your host and thanks so much for being here on this show i sit down with compelling entrepreneurs authors and rising leaders
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to talk through their most transformative relationships experiences and epiphanies
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curated with entrepreneurial leaders in mind we’ll dig into these finite moments in people’s lives and understand how
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they helped set their path forward david siegel is the ceo of meetup the
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world’s largest platform for finding and building local communities david has over 20 years of experience as a
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technology and digital media executive leading organizations for innovative product development rapid revenue growth
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and digital traffic acceleration prior to joining meet up david with ceo of investopedia which provides
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investment dictionaries advice reviews ratings and comparisons of financial products such as securities accounts
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before investopedia david was the president of seeking alpha a crowdsource content service for financial markets
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david holds the ba in philosophy politics and economics and an mba from the university of pennsylvania
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he is an adjunct professor at columbia university where he teaches strategic planning and entrepreneurship
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he hosts the podcast keep connected which is dedicated to the power of community david’s new book deciding
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conquer lays out the framework for decision making that leaders can use to ensure organizational and personal
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success [Music]
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david welcome to the one away show i am so excited to be here i am a one
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and i am away from you so i think it makes sense you’re one away from me uh i’ve shared
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some one away moments already in our brief relationship so um couldn’t be more excited to dive in today um
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and by the way congrats on your book uh decide and conquer which we’ll we’ll talk about um but let’s let’s go in um
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what is the one away moment that you want to share with us today sure
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so my biggest moment is the time period
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when i came to realize that i had more power
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and more of an opportunity than i had realized i had thought
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here’s the back story when wework announced that they were selling meetup
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and adam newman and crew had told me that after being there for six to nine months we would be
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now separated from this kind of chaotic environment we work my first thought was yes wework was kind of a really
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problematic and challenging organization to be a part of the culture was so different than the meetup culture i was
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actually very happy but then i got scared and i said who are they going to sell us to and of course i was scared
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for myself what’s going to happen for my job but then i started thinking
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i’m the ceo whoever they sell it to hopefully it’ll work out and i just have to try to do my best to hopefully do a
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good job and whatever we work sells us to is fine i was kind of going to go along for the ride i was going to be a passenger
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in like my career and life experience i got this call got a call from the president of wework
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a guy named artie minson and he said hey david you know you don’t have to be a passenger
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think like an entrepreneur don’t think like a professional ceo you can find the person who’s going to
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acquire meet up don’t just go with whomever you know we happen to find with you who do you know that could
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potentially be the acquirer of meetup and it just got my entire brain
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completely locked on a different opportunity and way of thinking and i said i don’t have to just go along with
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whomever we work fines but rather i can
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chart my own path and find the company and the person who could actually be the absolute best acquirer for meetup who’s
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aligned most with meetup’s mission and i’m happy to share more details about that but it was that moment that just
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like changed everything for me it’s a big story you know that transition uh inside from let’s just say
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a passenger to a driver as you eloquently uh shared it’s interesting you know uh you like
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realizing your power or reclaiming the power but my question to you is maybe before we go into maybe tactics and i did it
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and how it all unfolded is what do you think prevented you from not realizing that you you were in that
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position in the first place to to step into that role that you you had
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yeah i think what what my challenge was what held me back was actually my past
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so i’ve always been a corporate guy a corporate person i i kind of rose through the ranks i was hired you know
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out of business school i worked for a consulting firm i worked for a big tech company called doubleclick i worked for
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the best e-commerce companies out there called 1-800 flowers i was president of a of a leading financial investing
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company called seeking alpha then i became ceo of investo beta so i was like a corporate person in the tech world i
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was not this big m a person this big transaction person this big mover and shaker i
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was a person who ran companies that’s what i did so the idea of being the transaction person
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of of of not just running the company but figuring out who was going to
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buy the company was just kind of out of my past experience that was one the second was i was
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actually worried about a potential conflict of interest in this particular instance
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of wework is the one who’s paying me my salary my job
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is to do and support and run this company called
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meetup that wework had asked me to run and to run it as successfully as possible what if i found someone that
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was potentially a different buyer than wework was looking for and how would i go about taking
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meetings that we work with setting up for me when i was also bringing other buyers to the table and wouldn’t that potentially create a
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conflict of interest because then i would want my buyers to succeed and i wouldn’t necessarily want we work spires
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to succeed and that could be also problematic and i thought actually i could potentially even get in trouble
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but once i was given the permission by someone and then also another we work
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executive said to me hey david stop thinking like a ceo and start thinking like an entrepreneur
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and actually opportunity presented itself very quickly that’s when i just started running with it so i think what
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kept me back was a little bit of fear and anxiety and and a lot of just feeling it was out
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of my wheelhouse i don’t know how to do you know big transactions like that so i just felt like leave it up to the
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experts to do it right totally and yeah you’re stuck in kind of the corporate mindset
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and how you break out of that and just dive into something totally new so
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let’s let’s uh unpack that a little bit so you realize hey i can go i can make a
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difference i can bring in people to the table to be a helper here make this
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happen what were your next steps what did you do and how did you start wearing that entrepreneurial cap okay so i’m a
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big believer in having like a personal board of directors meaning you have a group of people who you can go to thick
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and thin that don’t have any personal incentives except for to try to help you
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so i have four or five people that are my mentors that i go to they said hey what do you think about this i was given
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the opportunity to actually facilitate the acquisition of meetup by another party and i told someone that i told
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actually five to seven people that and someone said you know what
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there’s a guy i know that knows you and that loves meetup
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why don’t i just make an introduction so just by talking about it with a number of people to get advice not just
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one or two but a good like five to seven different people it opened up opportunities and kind of created this
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scenario where i got lucky shall we say but it wasn’t lucky it was a result of
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me talking to all these different people and someone made this introduction to me and we started going down a path and i
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actually submitted a bid to a choir meet up in partnership with this other party
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we submitted a bid of like one million dollars because the company was losing so much money and it was kind of a
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ridiculous bid and we were summarily rejected by wework and that was the result of the bid but
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it went my appetite for what we could actually then do and then i went on a just
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all out reach out to 50 to 100 companies
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private equity firms venture capital firms and relationships
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i just let volume be the driver not discerning whether it was a right
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fit or the wrong fit or what they happen to have done in the past and in a short period of time in a two-week time period
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i spoke to 50 to 100 potential acquirers and brought numerous potential acquirers to the
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table and that just i started to realize hey a lot of the experience that i have in
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running companies marketing sales relationship building analytical skills
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are applicable towards getting you know towards this thing that i have never done before which is selling a company
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and um i really learned a lot in that process it was great totally now you said you put in a bid
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and while it was rejected you said what what your appetite for what was possible
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what did you see that you couldn’t see without taking that process on yourself that made you really motivated to
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start your blitzkrieg outreach uh to find some buyers yeah i realized it’s not that
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complicated it was finding some person or organization that simply
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believed in meetup’s mission believed in our company and believed in me as a leader and then submitting an loi for a
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certain amount of dollars and although the bid was rejected because the amount that we submitted was just
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embarrassingly low and it was just kind of a low ball offer i realized we can find someone who can
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be a great owner for meetup’s mission because i believe so deeply in meetups mission at the same time what was
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happening was wework was introducing me to all these other potential companies that wanted to acquire meetup
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and their approach was let’s slash and burn let’s get rid of as many employees as possible let’s milk this company for
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as much profit as we can and we don’t really care about the company’s mission we just like the fact that it has 30 to
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40 million dollars of revenue and let’s drop you know drop down as much profit as we can i was
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like whoa i don’t want to be part of that so a big motivation for me also was seeing the
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companies that were being brought to the table by wework by our parent company made me say oh
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i can’t be a part of these types of companies i’m not aligned with what they want to do with meetup they don’t
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believe in our mission they just kind of want to milk and destroy the company potentially and i was like we can find people that
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deeply believe in what meetup does in terms of curing the loneliness epidemic i’m going to go out and find
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that right owner and be a partner to that person well that’s i mean that’s bold and brave
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and also like very aligned with following your values and and not accepting you know an ownership that
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would you know make you uninspired to do your job well and do it well every day so
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when you did those 50 100 conversations that you’re talking about when you look at them do do any stand
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out do any to do any of the individuals that you spoke with you know left you know when you look back on that period
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were there a couple conversations here or there that just completely changed the course or the direction
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100 okay so we met with
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five different venture capital firms and they were really interested but then one after another each of them
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said the restrictions of our venture capital firm are such that we can only invest in
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companies that are xyz this size or this amount of profitability or what what
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have you and one by one each of them said i know there’s a big opportunity here
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i like it but it doesn’t fit into the strategy of our fund and that was
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painful because i knew that there was an opportunity for a significant kind of investment in
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acquisition i knew we were aligned from a mission standpoint but unfortunately i hadn’t done enough due diligence
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beforehand i just kind of went on this blitzkrieg to meet with lots of people and hopes of good things happening at
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the end wework was about to give the bid to someone
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and i went to wework and i said hey can i have your sloppy seconds literally
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i said are there any people that have reached out to you that you just didn’t want to partner with you
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didn’t think they were serious and you could give me like names of those people that you haven’t followed up with that maybe i should
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follow up with because maybe there’s something there they ended up passing on a name of someone
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and i’m not going to say his name publicly but in the book i refer to him as chad and they passed me on chad chad and i
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spoke and i had one day 24 hours to be able to put a bid
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together with chad chad worked his magic was able to kind of put
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together a bid for a meaningful amount of dollars i hadn’t met him barely spoke to him but the timing what
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was we had no time left to submit a bid and i ended up going with this person chad just to stay in the game because i
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was kind of liking the opportunity and i knew that if we didn’t submit a bid by the close date then it would be out of
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my hand so even though it wasn’t necessarily the ideal partner i thought it was more important to have an
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opportunity to still be part of the process and have our bid be submitted than to have than to be outside and and
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eliminated from the process so we submitted a bid together he didn’t even have the dollars lined up but we still
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submitted a bid without the dollars by the way and um
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ultimately that bid also didn’t win um but at least we were still kind of in the game and we’re like in fifth place
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and there were four other bids that were higher than our bid and it was an interesting experience kind of
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going through the process with the kind of the higher bids and and determining whether or not it was the right fit for
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me it up or not interesting it’s like you have a personal stake and
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you know uh someone that you wanted to like make it happen with so i mean we’d love to hear you know
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about these four i mean this is such an interesting right it’s such a precise point in time that we’re speaking about
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how so you you had your list chad kind of dwindled it down you’re
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very involved in the process now uh trying to take agency and make company better long-term you know you’re
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clearly very passionate about what you’re doing how how do you navigate these four other bids with your bid like
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i would love to know kind of how this all unfolded yeah so there was a top bidder and his name was lenny
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and uh that’s not his real name he was the top bidder of for meetup and wework decided that they
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were going to exclusivity with this person lenny and we went to a full day of due
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diligence and i had had a dinner with lenny and a couple of other people and
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some red flags went off and and he he was kind of asking very kind of odd questions that didn’t make
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all that much sense um and kind of demonstrated that he really wanted to
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take me to a very different direction than kind of where we were at the moment right now just changed our business
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model a whole lot of different changes we did a day of due diligence and during that day he had the ability to like
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frustrate embarrass and really piss off
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every other executive that was in the meetup room and denigrate each of us we had to
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pull him out of the room at one point in the time and i went to wework and i said
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this meeting is over our team is all going to quit if the person who you are currently in
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due dil and signed a contract with not signed a contract with signed an loi with a
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letter of intent with to acquire meet up ends up acquiring the company i can’t even work here it’s going to be
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that ugly it’s going to be a serious problem and um ultimately
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ultimately there was so much um
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tension in that relationship that they they pulled out of
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the uh of the bid and then i was like okay now i’m fourth on the list and and we just kind of went down down
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and down until at a certain point the pandemic hit
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it was now march of 2020 and all the investors had pulled out
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no one wanted to acquire a company that was losing at the time 20 million dollars and all of our events
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were going down 80 90 percent and people just said this company’s not going to exist anymore who wants to pay anything
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for this wow and then i went to
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the former ceo of doubleclick a person who had been my
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mentor and advisor throughout this entire process and i said to him
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the price is incredible opportunity i know you haven’t done any due diligence
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wework is ready to sell would you like to acquire a meetup and he said this is probably one of the
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most i’ve ever invested personally and the least due diligence i’ve ever done but i’ve known you for 20 years let’s do
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it and he ended up acquiring meet up we made a decision in two days during the pandemic and it’s been a wonderful two
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years plus kind of since that we’ve been working together and it’s all a result of that
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pivotal moment that we mentioned up front when i was told
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david you can be the driver you don’t just have to be a passenger to your destiny
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and it’s you know been been quite successful since uh wow super special and it’s amazing
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how relationships given the the bread and butter of meet up uh
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you being the ceo tapped into an old relationship that made it all come together i mean i
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mean maybe spiritual maybe shock it up to whatever it is but it’s pretty ironic
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how it all unfolded i mean that’s incredible yeah and there were even crazier moments like at one point bill
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ackman the famous bill ackman um shoots me over an email saying because
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we had met one point saying david just want to let you know i just had a handshake agreement that i just acquired
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meet meetup from from wework and i’m like what bill ackman just acquired meetup from
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wework and i guess you see the headlines that said like from adam newman’s clutches to bill ackman’s you know
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whatever and that was like another one of the potential buyers during that
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period of time and it was just a lot of roller coaster or very very emotional time lots of ups
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and downs but i think what guided me through the process was just the belief that our mission is
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all about kind of curing the loneliness epidemic that exists in the world and and and realizing
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that that there’s something greater here that meetup is able to do in helping to
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connect people and i really did not want it to die after close to 20 years of
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connecting millions and millions of people to each other yeah yeah so powerful i mean the
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platform is incredible on me i’ve been to a number of made up events myself what i mean for you right before we talk
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about what’s happened since the uh you know goodbye and and how things have you know grown and become better what what
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attracted you david i mean you’ve had a pretty illustrious corporate career why meet up like what decided
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what do you believe and see in the mission and vision and uh to say you know what yeah i’m gonna step into a ceo
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role of a company that you know on paper isn’t maybe doing the best right now so i think there’s two parts to it one
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was i have from an early age so i started my career in human resources i was a human
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resources manager which isn’t that common going from hr manager to like a ceo of a company though in both cases
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you’re looking to recruit talent motivate people manage people build mission alignment
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align people in strategy so i’ve always been obsessed with kind of like the impact of connections and the power of
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people and i just and and the intersection of people in business and i’ve loved going to meet up events i
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loved meeting people i loved making connections between people i wasn’t a meetup organizer at the time i am right
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now but when when uh someone on the board of of wework
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knocked on my door proverbially and said hey david would you like to be the first outside ceo and
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meet up 16-year history i just said wow this is a company i get behind and the reason why i felt so
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strongly about it is because the company i was previously the ceo of which is investopedia
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we did well we had divested the business we sold the business and as ceo i was
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able to do pretty well so my priority was not financial my priority was really
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doing something that was mission based and it was really aligned with kind of what my personal priorities are and that
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was definitively meet up um in terms of community building i’ve i came from and i’m still part of a very
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very strong kind of community in my neighborhood community in my synagogue and i’ve community has always been like a big big
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part of my life and i know so many people that like can’t meet people go to bars to meet people are lonely 46
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percent of people regularly feel only 62 percent of people who are genzirs 62
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regularly feel lonely and that was before the pandemic new york city just came out with some some data in the city uh 20 of
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people regularly feel depressed i mean it’s just terrifying and meetup is like the antidote for that so
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i want to spend my time in ways that help the world and and that’s what really attracted me for meet up yeah no i mean i think it’s a great
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answer i mean not that you’re trying that in your back pocket but i mean it’s genuine right and you’re looking at the
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future you’re looking at humanity and saying how can i if this organization exists and i help it flourish well what
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does that mean for human connection right is it kind of what i’m hearing you say so i think this is a good segue into
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you know since you took over you know how has you know the company evolved what have you seen
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what are some of the changes that you’ve been able to cultivate from the inside out that you know and now that the pandemic’s over i think this is a whole
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oh not over over but there’s a whole another segway but what what have you done in your immediate kind of tenure
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and what are you excited about for the future yeah so the first thing i needed to do
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when i joined meetup was change the culture of the company scott hyphen our founder who’s
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exceptional at building mission and building product built a great mission and a great
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product but the financials were uh uh on i’ve never seen financials like in
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my life frankly the company uh was losing close to 20 million dollars a year
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which is an ex extraordinary amount the number of employees had ballooned to over 250 employees from because we were
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just one to hire people we work was all about like one of weworks kpis for meetup was how many people can you hire
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as quickly as possible that was the kpi like what kind of a key performance indicator is maximize the number of
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people that you’re able to hire people were working on pet projects all over the place people were talking to each other it was siloed silo type work
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so the number one thing that i had to prioritize was this company is not going to be sustainable if it’s losing this
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much money and not growing in any kind of there’s no growth rate that was happening either
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so unfortunately we had to lower costs and we had to stop a whole bunch of different projects
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that just were distractions and didn’t make any sense whatsoever and you know the way i did that was i
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didn’t come in and say this is what we should do because that’s not the way you lead and i didn’t know anything instead
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what i did is i created these work streams around key questions that the company
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had to face like what should we stop doing was a key question what does our brand actually stand for
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was a key question a bunch of key questions and it organized these groups of 15 to 20 people who volunteered
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to to come up with the decisions come over the answers and then they said we should stop doing this this this this
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and then two weeks later i said okay i’m gonna take your advice we’re gonna stop doing this this this
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and this i’m not coming up with these i’m creating a forum and a process for the people who really know their stuff
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to come up with these the changes of what we should stop doing so my biggest thing that i focused on the beginning
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was getting this company to be a profitable not highly profitable but just a cash flow positive business so
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that we wouldn’t be bleeding cash left and right that was probably one and we’ve accomplished that and
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it’s i mean pretty remarkably we went from an 18 million loss to a three million dollar profit um in the
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year of the pandemic in 2019 yet we lost 18 million dollars 2020
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we made 3 million so that’s a positive and that then could be
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used to accelerate for future growth for the company the other thing that we changed is kind of the mindset there was
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many people there that just you know were there for the mission but they’re only there for the mission then they were like
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you know if revenue was something that really helped us to grow they’re like we don’t want to be like the big bad business people
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revenue that’s not a good thing necessarily we want to just focus on helping people
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and and that’s great and it’s important but people didn’t understand that if you don’t have revenue then you don’t you can’t
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be a successful business so we kind of had to turn me up from a non-profit mentality to like an actual sustainable
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company’s sustainable business and um you know and that’s one thing we did the second you know significant
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change that we did is during the pandemic we all got together once the pandemic
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hit and people said well we are an irl business we could only do irl we’re not
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we use technology to get people off of technology we are the anti
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vr anti-zoom we’re all about in person and at that time 100 close to 100 of events
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were all in person but i said no no we are not our mission is not irl our mission is about
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connecting so we got everyone together we enabled um zoom and integrated with
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zoom and integrated all these other video conferencing type platforms and since the pandemic we’ve had now over six million online events over 20
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million people have participated in online events and all these people that were isolated and lonely can now be part
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of those online events and today we’re back to 75 in person and 25 online and
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we’re and we’re seeing like significant growth right now because as you said the pandemic is starting to
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wane and people are getting back outside and they’re getting two things and hopefully the roaring twenties are gonna
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happen again a hundred years after the roaring twenties happened you know in the 1920s
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holy moly um one uh take a moment let’s just uh congratulate the kind of the work and a
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serious time uh but to come in completely reshape a culture
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20 million and lost to 3 million in profit and you know now be in a position for probably some boom uh the next few
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years can i just ask more specifically if you don’t mind i mean yeah anything
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was everyone that was in person or relying on speaking or events was was lost money
28:56
you created a profit center i just i i mean i was a collective effort
29:02
of probably i’m sure some hundreds of people but what what what do you what did that look like tangibly how did you go about that
29:09
yeah so the number one thing that we did
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is we spent a tremendous amount of time
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helping each of our organizers to transition their groups and their events from in
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person to online a lot of organizers were feel full of online if you’re like you know
29:35
some of them that were older were kind of scared what is zoom and that’s complicated i don’t know how to do this thing
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but what we did is we created a lot of best practice content so for example we have a blog
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called community matters and went out to millions of people to give people best practices on how to transition from in
29:53
person to online we um have a uh
29:58
all these we created a a twice a week series called meetup live where we
30:04
brought like the head of zoom training in we brought the heads of all these different organizations and best
30:10
practice areas and we equipped our organizers with training on how to make zoom engaging
30:18
using breakout rooms or going for a run for a running group by themselves and then everyone come back
30:23
and had a beer you know while they’re while they’re on back on zoom so they can kind of bond from that perspective
30:30
um how to use other apps like icebreaker you know to build relationships one-on-one with people so what we did is
30:38
we really leaned into our mission but created a tremendous amount of best we create best practices content and then
30:45
templates for all these different types of groups of how they could go about having really great online experiences
30:52
now it’s not the same as in person but there’s so much of a need when people are isolated for online and
30:58
we got like no exaggeration thousands thousands and thousands of emails and letters from
31:04
people saying i’m isolated i’m by myself i don’t have siblings i’m you know i’m a
31:10
young person in my twenties just working and meet up like save me i would go to the ecstatic dance meetup and an egg and
31:16
a um book club meet up and all these other meetups and we’d also be really interesting we look at the data and
31:23
there are certain types of meet up groups that would do really really well like for example hiking because it was
31:28
outdoors did exceptionally well so we reached out and and encouraged many many more people to create hiking groups
31:35
volleyball did really well because again more social distance outdoors usually badminton went up like
31:41
a ton of groups whereas basketball actually went down so we look at the data and we see which types of groups we’re
31:48
doing really well and we go into our group of 57 million members and
31:54
encourage people to create groups in those very specific areas based on understanding the data of what was kind
32:00
of you know generally growing so for example the number one search term
32:05
in 2021 was finding adult friends on meetup
32:10
number two was hiking so any groups that help to facilitate friendships any groups on hiking we would just kind of
32:17
reach out to people and say hey create this group there’s no group in your area in kansas city around around hiking do
32:22
that or there’s a hiking group there’s not a gay hiking group or there’s a gay hiking group but not a black black women’s hiking group or whatever the you
32:29
know the the area may be data driven but also like really precise and
32:36
thoughtful i mean you make it sound so simple you know i know it’s not as simple as it sounds but it’s just like
32:43
yeah this is how we did it i mean you know but clearly though right like more power to you and like i think
32:48
the fact that you you’ve been a part of such a turnaround right and for a company that millions and millions of
32:55
people i’ve loved used and been inspired by um i mean what a rewarding part i
33:00
mean and let me ask you you know since the acquisitions playing a major role in that and then turning the company around
33:06
what’s been the most like intrinsically rewarding part for you in this role that you took on in a very
33:13
mission driven capacity hands down it’s letters or emails that i get from people
33:21
that just move me and motivate me and give me an opportunity to share those experiences
33:27
with other kind of meetup members and organizers i’ll give you an example just literally
33:32
a few days ago i got this email it said david i’m very grateful for meet up
33:39
my mom is in the hospital and is probably going to die because of all the great friends i’ve
33:45
met through running my groups i’m not alone and i have people here to come over and support me while this is going
33:51
on thanks and he listed his name i get this out of the blue and it happens all the time and i’m just
33:58
like oh my god think about how much we’re able to support and help this person
34:04
this person then put a post in the in a facebook channel for facebook for meetup
34:09
organizers and then i saw another person said put added to that post here’s how meetup
34:15
has helped me and then another person put a post here’s how beautiful help me there’s like six or seven people posting
34:21
this all just happened literally just this week and it happens all the time so when you hear these kinds of stories
34:27
and you realize that we could be a platform that has this kind of impact on people and you meet organizers who tell
34:34
you like i met an organizer who was a homeless vet in australia
34:39
and he was living out of his car and he wasn’t educated and he he started going to meet up events he started meeting
34:45
people started connecting with people found his first job through meet up found his wife through meetup now has
34:51
has one of the biggest meetup groups in sydney australia and it’s all happened because of our platform and like
34:58
it’s very easy to feel very very lucky to be a part of it and want to work your best to try to um
35:04
you know like as i said cure the luminous epidemic which is just terrifying depression suicide god forbid
35:10
etc oh my god i mean that’s what it was an email i mean it makes you feel good about everything and when you when you
35:17
get an email like that just curious as a ceo is that something you deploy internally
35:22
to for your whole company you see how did you how did you respond in turn to the person or did you and then how
35:29
how you should you share that with your company yeah we may not this is a video right here but this is a post that i put
35:35
on slack i i crossed out the person’s name because i didn’t think it should be public even though he ended up
35:41
publicizing on facebook later on and then i posted us on slack and said god i feel so lucky to be a part of this
35:46
company and of course i responded back to him and i said ah i’m so sorry that you’re going through this but i’m so
35:54
glad that in any way shape or form your community around you and meet up could just help you during this very difficult
36:00
time and um and now we have an ongoing relationship and there’s there’s dozens of organizers
36:06
whom i have that kind of a relationship with and you know there’s there’s just so many examples of people who
36:13
were sitting around playing video games for like 10 hours a day and then decided to just go to their
36:19
first event even though they were introvert even though they were scared even though they had anxiety about being around people
36:25
and they went to that first event and went to a second event and a third event a fifth event a 10th event and this person omar
36:32
in dallas who runs the dallas group for rock climbing that was then asked to become the organizer
36:38
of this particular group he’s had now a thousand events since then and six marriages have come to it he’s been to
36:43
six weddings of people that enjoy rock climbing together and he’s a different person he’s a confident person he’s a
36:49
totally different person than he was playing video games all day and you know it’s um it’s very
36:54
motivating and the answer is yes i do share it with our company i think one of the roles of a ceo is to share the
37:01
stories and share the motivations and um and and i try to share publicly as well
37:07
to the extent that people allow one of the things that we do and meet up is we have it every other week all hands
37:12
meeting some companies have all hands me like once a quarter we have one every other week so 26 weeks
37:18
a year we have one and every other all hands meeting we have a different organizer come to our lands meeting and we say the
37:25
organizer how has meetup impacted your life why have you chosen to be
37:31
you know to to use the meetup platform and the stories that you hear and the motivation that it comes from it you
37:37
know it makes you excited to wake up in the morning so inspiring and just to be at the front of a turnaround as well i’m
37:44
at a point where i don’t always get so excited or admire an admiration of people because i just you know it’s just
37:50
i don’t know life you know you me people are great but like this story in particular like really stands out to me
37:56
so uh you know you wrote a book um i did
38:01
you you did we’re gonna get to it although i know you talk a little bit about it um
38:08
either way it’s all good what prompted i mean i know the title
38:13
but tell us uh the title what prompted you to write it and what’s the author
38:18
journey been like sure so the book is called decide and conquer and the book is all about helping people
38:26
to make smarter business and life decisions the journey for me was i also teach at columbia
38:32
strat strategy and entrepreneurship so i’ve been a professor for last seven years and and i i love teaching others
38:39
it gives me so much gratification to help young people
38:44
build their careers and understand how to become more successful entrepreneurs and and think uh from a strategic
38:50
analytical type way so i had always had a book in the back of my mind and i’ve always been obsessed
38:56
with kind of the psychology behind decision making i remember as a young person seeing a quote by teddy roosevelt the
39:02
quote was the best decisions uh the best decisions are good decisions
39:08
the second best decisions are bad decisions and the worst decisions are no decisions and i was like yes it’s so
39:15
true because how many people do you know brian that are just inertia and they’re afraid of making decisions and they’re
39:21
stuck and they’re in bad situations but they’re afraid of but that’s a decision not making a decision is a decision so i
39:28
was obsessed with decision making and then what happened is because the wework experience was such a crazy
39:34
insane experience with adam newman and bill ackman and all these other like kind of relatively famous people and or
39:40
infamous people i said wow i’ve got to figure out a way to apply
39:46
the storytelling that i had to this decision framework that i’ve always been mentally building in my head
39:52
and i kid you not in two months i literally exhumed and
39:57
birthed out a 75 000 word kind of book in literally two months
40:03
and it was filled with grammar mistakes and and originally the title was a different title it’s called luck is hard
40:09
work because i was talking about um how you could create luck um which is a big part of the book as well
40:16
and how decisions could drive luck so i i just reached out and then i reached out to a bunch of friends like i’ve
40:22
talked about earlier i think got a good network of friends to reach out to and brian now you’re part of that network so
40:27
i’m excited um yeah and um
40:32
and and a friend a friend of mine wrote a book and he said i’ll let you ask you to my publisher so normally you have to
40:37
write like one chapter or a table of contents you you know submit it to
40:43
find a you submit it to 10 different book agents they take a cut and then they find a find a publisher
40:49
and i was like and i thought to myself what do i know about writing a book i just write a book
40:55
so i just wrote the thing submitted this manuscript into harpercollins one only one publisher no agents no nothing and
41:01
they were like this is good and this is like there’s a lot of grammar mistakes in here but this is
41:06
good so they were like okay sign the contract let’s do it and the
41:11
book came out last week and it’s uh it’s really exciting i just looked five
41:17
minutes ago on amazon it was like number five on the um under motivation leadership uh new
41:23
releases and you know that’s kind of cool yeah i mean that’s that’s awesome i mean
41:28
the fact that you put 70 000 words together in two months and that you just submitted i mean very
41:34
non-traditional and that’s your entrepreneurial spirit coming through right there so
41:39
um you know i david i i i’m excited for you i’ve read a few pages as you know
41:45
um but i’m excited to read it seems like it’s a lot of thoughtful tactical pieces but also some great stories and life
41:51
lessons and so um it’s always special when you can see a leader right but really give thought
41:57
to what they’ve learned but also do it in a way that’s so helpful for for the business community and also i’m
42:04
the professionals and people all over the world right not just business leaders so um thank you for taking the
42:10
time to write it uh question for you you know what what are you hoping for out of it
42:15
whether that’s a internal intrinsic level x you know impact on meetup you know what what’s what’s the
42:22
uh i mean what great timing too rather the pandemic you know what what are you hoping for out of this experience
42:28
yeah lucky in terms of getting out of the pandemical but also lucky because we crashed is an apple show that’s coming
42:34
out next week there’s a whole lot about we work in the book as well um and uh so i think the word that you
42:41
said is the right word and i’ll just parse it out for you which is a word i care so much about we we live you know
42:47
i’ve lived for 47 years i hopefully i have 53 plus more years ahead of me and i think about the impact that i want to
42:54
have in my life all the time and the answer is impact and the impact in two parts one is impact to meet up because
43:01
it’s impossible to kind of read this book and not feel that you want to start going to a meet up events it’s like
43:07
it’s a great thing for meet up as a brand as a business because we go into
43:12
examples of people whose lives have been changed through meetup and decisions that are made around meet up so i think
43:17
it’s positive for the company overall and then on a personal level it’s about helping to impact leaders impact
43:25
aspiring leaders impact entrepreneurs but i’ll tell you it’s crazy i thought i was writing this book to impact
43:31
entrepreneurs i got a text a couple days ago from an 83 year old grandmother
43:36
i kid you not who said i didn’t think i would normally read a business book but my daughter had
43:42
recommended it to me so i bought it and it’s changed my life i decided i want to now start a company at 83 years
43:47
old i want to be the ceo of me and i’m like whoa
43:53
you don’t know who you’re going to impact when you have a book that’s the beauty of it it’s so easy for anyone to get the audio book and the audiobook is
43:58
by the way amazing the guy does a great job he’s like very energetic kind of like me um in the book and you don’t know who
44:05
you’re gonna impact and that’s just like an exciting thing seeing like random amazon reviews of people i have no idea
44:12
who they are kind of talking about how it’s actually helping them normally the people you could help are the people and
44:18
have an impact on people directly in front of you but to be able to have that across these different areas a i’m an
44:23
orthodox jew and a priest reached out to me and said i read the book and the book is actually i’m going to be
44:29
incorporating in my sermon for the week on making decisions i was like that’s awesome
44:34
so that’s the answer it’s impact on meetup and hopefully positive impact on others and if i end up getting there’s
44:41
no financial benefit because you write books you don’t make any money in fact i would lose money likely from this book because of all the editing that i had to
44:46
have people do to kind of clean it up um and so but but i think the the benefit
44:52
is is just um you know helping people to deal with crises in their lives and
44:59
their and their businesses and have a framework for how to kind of make smarter decisions especially during
45:06
crisis can’t wait i’m super excited to get my hands fully through it
45:12
and uh and kind of have that impact for myself so thank you for writing it uh david where
45:18
can people find the book find you uh be in touch you know what where are the places
45:24
okay so first of all to find meet up i would say download our app because i want to talk about meetup always before i talk
45:30
about myself our app is a great experience ios android obviously you could use the web and you go to meet up
45:35
for there and just go to one event and you’ll see you will want to keep going to to hopefully more
45:41
in terms of me amazon has the kindle it has the audible it has the hardcover anyone can usually
45:48
get amazon but if they want to see more detail they can go to the book’s website which is decidingconquerbook.com you could find
45:55
me on twitter at davenmayorsegal my email even because reach out to me is
46:00
david meetup.com you could link send me a linkedin invite and i will accept um
46:06
and i just you know want to be connected to as many people that kind of care about community and care about
46:11
connections you know as i do well thank you uh such a gift such a joy and uh
46:17
looking forward to kind of watching you soar thank you that’s my last name that’s why i met liam is seagull seagull sword
46:23
right if you enjoyed this episode as much as i
46:28
did i hope you leave a review on the platform of your choice and share it with a friend who you think would find
46:34
it valuable if you’d like to receive a written newsletter and thought leadership head on over to bw
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46:48
[Music]
46:54
show you

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This post was previously published on ARCBOUND.COM.

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