 and I knew him from another job previously and he said David how would you like to become the first outside CEO of Meetup I was like tell me more and and kind of that was it and then a simple 27 interviews later I became the CEO and you know in the book I talk about that insane interview process and a lot of times dating is a good prerequisite for marriage and like the dating process is kind of like batch it crazy then chances are marriages could be that that's what happened what's up everybody and welcome to the show today we drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends all right well welcome back to the show thank you excited to talk about your latest book Decide and Conquer 44 decisions that make or break all leaders and it felt in reading it rapid fire in your tenure at Meetup yeah they say like drinking from a fire hose when you're first first but this is like more than a fire hose this is kind of like a eight alarm fire with you know a deluge of waterfall kind of going on all the same time between we work the sale process we works crisis meetups challenges the pandemic you can't meet up anymore so it made for a good story good story and hopefully good lessons because the goal is like learning but it's boring to learn through like a textbook kind of learning we've all read books that are just very like textbooky and I always wanted to write a book around decision making and culture and leadership but I didn't want to write a boring book and fortunately we work happened and they're the opposite of boring so we're able to make something happen there well I think if we were to look at your tenure at Investopedia obviously growing and scaling tons of books on those subjects and let's be honest there's a lot of luck involved in some of that crises are where real leaders are made and there are a number of crises that you go through in the book and the decisions that you are facing and the speed at which those decisions had to be made so I love to just set up for the audience sort of a little bit of the backstory of why you even want to become a CEO in the first place because it reading the book it sounds incredibly stressful it's so true people think the life of the CEO is glamorous I remember yesterday I was like shoving food down my mouth in like you know 45 seconds while I'm eating like half cold toast and and some jam and I look at my wife and I'm like people actually think the life of CEO is fun this is what like the life of a CEO is like shoving food in your mouth three minutes in between meetings so back 20 years ago I was in human resources which most people don't go from human resources to become a CEO of a company it's not that common though frankly a lot of the things that one does in human resources higher recruiting top talent managing people motivating people organizational structure strategy alignment all that is very related to what a CEO actually does but I was in human resources at DoubleClick and I saw the stuff that Kevin Ryan who is the CEO of DoubleClick at the time and the general manager of a business that I was supporting as the HR partner David Rosenblatt who then became the CEO after Kevin we're doing and I was advising advising advising and it's a lot more fun to like be the owner and decision maker than kind of be the advisor so at that moment at like whatever 24 25 years old I was like I need to become a CEO what do we need to do so I asked them and they're like you kind of don't know anything about business you got to go to business school so that was it I went to business school and the path for me was just like manager senior manager director vice president senior vice president they became a president at a company called Seeking Alpha then a CEO and Investopedia and then see what meet up and for me it was just the opportunity to like build culture was the reason to answer your question of why I was most excited about being a CEO culture impacts everything and the person who influences the culture the most is the CEO and I thought it sounded great and it was great until you know it's also really hard so that's the main reason I want to be a CEO so let's talk about your jump to meet up and what drew you to the company sure so I had always gotten tons of meet up events so I grew up with a very strong sense of community as someone who is religious people who go to church or go to synagogue or go to the mosque one of the great things about kind of religious infrastructures and there's challenges of course as well but is the community that you get to be a part of and I grew up in an environment where if someone god forbid passed away someone would be making food for them like for lunch and dinner every day for a month like that's the world that I lived in and grew up in and that's the world that I live in right now and a lot of people don't have that most people don't have that kind of sense of community and I was just so fortunate to be able to have it and there were also times in my life where I felt you know whether it transition times going to college or graduating from college and being on my own for the first time kind of lonely and didn't have that group of people so I'd always been obsessed with people hence my HR background obsessed with community and then when someone on the board of advisors for WeWork who had been an early investor in WeWork his name is Michael Eisenberg reached out to me and I knew him from another job previously and he said David how would you like to become the first outside CEO of Meetup I was like tell me more and and kind of that was it and then a simple 27 interviews later I became the CEO and you know in the book I talk about that insane interview process and a lot of times dating is a good prerequisite for marriage and like if the dating process is kind of like batch it crazy then chances are marriages could be that way as well and that's what happened we drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends yeah it sounds like there are a few red flags through your dating process with Meetup exactly with Meetup being a community-based organization and you could even say it's parent company and what you had gone through in the book we'll discuss as well with we work to me being a community-based organization as well bringing people together working together COVID in and itself I think has made people realize how important community was to them where they didn't have what they had taken or for granted for a very long time for myself being involved in the music scene in Los Angeles was a big deal for me in fact I've been involved in music scenes since I was a teenager I love the performing arts I love going to see them but I never thought of it as a community until that was taken away from me and what I had seen for there was a lot of people in my life who the weekend show showing up to see the local band this weekend was their community and when that was taken away from them during COVID they had fallen apart in fact I had I had a lot of friends who had passed away during COVID due to isolation depression and chemical dependency because that was how they were dealing with that community taken away and when they didn't have the weekly check-ins when they weren't seeing people who were monitoring them regularly or that they feel love them and had that connection they unraveled so now upon looking back an appreciation for all of that not taking it for granted and now even more so what can I add to my local community what value do I have to be a bit of the glue to make people want to put more into it incredibly important incredibly Johnny I mean first of all I am I'm so sorry that that you had to kind of go through that with so many of your your friends and loved ones I mean it's just that we all went through a lot of different things but it sounds like it was particularly challenging you know especially the world that you and AJ kind of work in and the people that you support I'm sure it was you know really a challenge I just you know thank God I had challenges but not not to the same not to the same degree there's good things that came out of it and this there's and there's obviously terrible that that came out of and the good like you said is people's appreciation of how important community really is to their lives in a very small microcosm that is on my block I've been living here for 10 years and we're very friendly block but during COVID we became so much closer I mean in the summertime everyone is just hanging out outside for the first time in ever in the history of our block probably since I've been living here and even before we have like a block party and a music and people meeting each other's kids in an exciting way and that only happened because of COVID so like you said there's tons of tragedy and and there's hopefully higher levels of gratitude and appreciation and and it's gratitude that's really one of the most important things in the book I rename the acknowledgement sections a gratitude section just because you know gratitude and having the right lens is just so important to kind of everything in life well where I wanted to draw that parallel was that if if you don't have that religious community that is structured in that way I think as human beings we're going to find it in other ways and for my artist crowd those weekend shows the local spot where everyone hung out and created and put bands together and shown their work and got on open mics that became their religion yeah that was their church that was their church well said absolutely well said now in joining meetup there was a culture that the founder Scott had created and community sounded like it was at the forefront in fact the way they treated their employees almost ahead of the product and the consumers of the product the the meet-upers so to speak that was a challenge that you had to face and what I wanted to start with is this decision framework so as you go through the start of the book you lay out your decision framework how much of that framework was ready to go when you joined meetup and how much of that were you developing as you transitioned into the leader of a founder led company up until that point great question okay so I came in my first day when they said David welcome you're now overseeing 250 people you know and they expect you to come out there with like for the 10 commandments and saying like here's the new strategy even though I know nothing so my first day I stood up there and I said to everyone I don't know anything about the company strategy but what I will tell you is a little bit about what items are particularly important to me in helping to run a company and how I like to get work done and how I like to do things and I've listed a bunch of things one of them was you know emotional intelligence is more important than analytical intelligence in terms of success and listed a number of different items and there was one item there and I said I love revenue I love revenue because it drives company success it drives company growth that lets us reinvest better in the product and it was just like blank stairs back at me and I was like wait revenue revenue it revenue gives oxygen to our mission revenue allows us to like be able to grow meetup more without revenue we can't be a sustainable business we can't grow just like blank the culture was a wonderful group of people that deeply cared about community and deeply cared about mission many of the people that they hired the focus was there as opposed to building a sustainable business with kpis and metrics that can set us up to be successful and the company in 2019 lost 18 million dollars which is not a sustainable situation that's a great way for we work during a pandemic to decide let's just shut this meetup thing down if it's losing that much money and we're in the middle of starting a global pandemic so what I had to do is shift the business orientation to a much stronger business orientation than the company had in the past and a lot of people didn't like that and a lot of people said this is different than the culture that we had you know the company spent over a hundred thousand dollars on a Christmas party while it was losing 18 million dollars I don't think that's responsible and had it on a Friday night so I couldn't even go for religious reasons I may add but you know that's fine so we had to shift the mindset and we had to reinvest dollars in areas that would actually really drive growth as opposed to a lot of pet projects that that a lot of people had and we went around kind of killing a lot of things that were were distractions and that also did not necessarily make me popular so the job hasn't been great for the ego that's right that one well part of that number one it sounded like meetup was a great place to work at before oh my god before I came on the rooftop parties and barracud parties I mean people had a lot of fun a lot of money was being thrown around a lot of money spent on lots of different things that people had a great time around yes much more fun than you know the much watered-down picnic kind of holiday party that we got later on