 If Adam wants to hire the next person like him because he thinks that he's great at what he does, then how could you mirror that in the type of work they do? So when I saw that person, I'm like, let's get in the closet right now. I got him to take his shirt off. I took my shirt off, we swapped. And then I walked in and Adam's like, well, if you convince someone to take the shirt off their back, then you could be a great CEO for a meetup one day. What's up everybody and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week and we wanna 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. So with that, obviously, there's this emotional intelligence piece that I felt throughout the book. So there's this great example of you going, I think it might be job interview number 26 with Adam, recognizing that you're wearing a Brooks Brothers button up. He is not a button up guy. Seeing someone walking around the office with the WeWork meetup shirt and making a quick bargain to get the shirt on. Because you knew emotional intelligence here that that would resonate with Adam, right? I gotta push him over the edge. It wasn't gonna be a spreadsheet. It wasn't gonna be a PowerPoint presentation from your consulting days that we're gonna win Adam over. It was gonna be him buying into your belief in meetup and WeWork working together. How did you approach that? How did you read that on Adam? I think you have to, generally the philosophy is that people tend to like themselves. Most people, many people I should say, that are especially in positions of power. And there is a bit of narcissism that exists oftentimes in people that are quote unquote more successful or powerful, more ego driven. That means that they like oftentimes hiring people a little bit more similar to themselves. And that's just a reality. So when you never want to act like someone different than yourself, but who I am represents lots of a spectrum of different behaviors. And part of who I am is silly and fun oriented and a bit mischievous at times. And that's part of my personality as well. So knowing that that's Adam as well, you just have to think, if Adam wants to hire the next person like him because he thinks that he's great at what he does, then how could you mirror that in the type of work they do? So when I saw that person, I'm like, let's get in the closet right now. I got him to take his shirt off. I took my shirt off, we swapped. And then I walked in and Adam's like, well, if you convince someone to take the shirt off their back, then you could be a great CEO for Meetup one day. And then you did one of the harder things, which was, well now I need to draw a boundary. I got the job, but spending more time with Adam, hopping on his private jet, doing God knows what with Adam, was not actually gonna help your mission with Meetup. And you had this other relationship of a founder who's exiting his role, giving his baby to you. That's also a very important relationship to manage early on. So how did you have one, the confidence to, I don't wanna say shun Adam, but draw such a strong boundary with Adam who had this call to personality that everyone wanted to be around, journalists included, and tell him, no, I can't get on the plane. I can't take that trip. Now's not the time for me. The answer is through making mistakes and failing in the past. Meaning in the past, I didn't set myself up for success. And I too often was a reactive to whatever my boss, my manager, director of the board had told me to do. And if you're overly reactive as a leader, you cause chaos in an organization because you're ping-ponging around from one perspective to another. So I had done that because of an aim to please, because I wanted people to like me more. I wanted to do a good job. I wanted to get promoted. And from that experience, I realized a lot of times when managers or leaders ask you to do something, they're wrong. And it's important to recognize that your job is not to follow orders, but it's to set yourself up for success. And you as a manager's job is to set other people up for success. So I knew from Scott and from others that Adam, and from just TV, that Adam is a very opinionated person and has strong opinions about everything. At one point he said to me, I'm gonna tell you what meetup strategy is and then we're gonna go from there. Well, the moment that we sit down for five hours on a plane, a private jet from New York to San Francisco, and he tells me, this is what he's gotta be, the entire rest of my time there, I'm gonna be on the defensive and having to explain what I didn't follow, what he told me to do. So I need to not be in the position where he's even sharing what the strategy is. I need to be sharing the strategy first, but I can't share a strategy in the beginning because I don't know anything yet. So one of the things I got him to do, and this is one of the most, I don't even think I put this in the book, one of the most biggest successes, pathetically, that I would say, is one time, about two months in, Adam called me up and he said, David, I was told by Artie Minson, who was the president of WeWork At The Time, that I'm not allowed to talk to you for three months and I respect that, but I just have a very little question to ask you. So essentially, Adam actually kept his promise and stayed away for a period of time and then after that period of time ended, that's where the story of him wanting to take a plane and me refusing to take the plane with him happened. So setting boundaries is really important. It's really, really important. Personal boundaries, professional boundaries. So then you have the flip side, right? So Scott built the business. He's the founder of this business. I mean, you wanna talk about the community guy, it's Scott and this is why we call it the Art of Charm because you have to read the other person at the other side of the table. Cutting off Scott, drawing strong boundaries with Scott was gonna be a huge mistake in you taking over the reins and was gonna burn a lot of people that trusted Scott in the process. So on the one hand, you have Adam, who you have to basically cast aside and say, I gotta do my job and draw that clear boundary. And then you gotta build trust with Scott in an entirely different way because his trust carries weight throughout the meetup company. All of those leaders that worked under him that bought into his vision, they had to come around to your vision and your vision was gonna be different than his. So how did you approach building trust in that realm which was totally different than how you handled Adam? We drop great content each and every week and we wanna 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, great call out. So with Adam, I wanted kind of zero communication for the first three months. For Scott, however, I wanted to make sure that I had enough space to be able to develop my own perspective, maybe even fail a couple of times and make some mistakes but at the same time, leverage him as a trusted advisor throughout. So we planned and we did get together every two weeks, every three weeks, every four weeks in the beginning. He became the chairman of the company so that his heart and soul and incredible mission orientation always be a part of things. So what I did for Adam was more separation. What I did for Scott was more, let's make sure that there's a non-operational ownership role because if he owns operations, it would be difficult to make some changes because of his history in the company. And that's not about Scott. Any CEO, it's tough to move to an operational role after you've been the founder for 16 years but at the same time, retain the greatness that Scott has to offer and it worked and it worked really well. And he would take people on visits of different meetup events and kind of build mission orientation and motivation kind of within the organization. And then when we had ideas, I would ask his for advice and he'd be like, yeah, we probably shouldn't have done that. And he was very, very incredibly honest and humble, very, very humble person, in terms of our kind of dealings together. I'll tell you one last thing AJ and Johnny, which is that our 20th anniversary is coming up in three months. And I call Scott and I said, Scott, this is your baby. This is your heart and your soul. I need you to be, I want you to be, I hope you'll be a speaker at our 20th anniversary celebration. And he said, absolutely, I'd be honored to. So I think his DNA is in the DNA of the company and to throw the baby out with the bathwater is not an optimal type situation for meetup to be able to thrive. It's about having the right role and creating boundaries around that role as well. You mentioned in the book that the founder oftentimes is making decisions based on intuition. And that intuition is great when starting a business because there are no numbers, there are no tests, there's no hard data to work from. So you kind of have to trust your gut. You make some calls right, you make some calls wrong, but you double down on the right ones and then you build what you think is a great intuition for business. And that had steered the company off course for making money, building revenue and growing in a way that would allow it to sustain itself. And there are a lot of initiatives that were his baby, that were pet projects and people that he really admired their loyalty over maybe their impact. And you had to come in and make those hard decisions. And I think for those in our audience who aren't in a leadership role, there's still this, you recognize something, but it's a tough conversation. You see something going wrong and inside the company or even in your relationship and you know in your gut you gotta speak up, but you might not have the power or the trust just yet. So how do you approach those difficult conversations when there were some blind spots that Scott had in running the company? Yeah, so what I did in that specific instance, then I'll tell you what I did and then I'll share the larger learnings of what other people can do as well. In that situation, because I was coming in, I didn't wanna seem like this arrogant person that I know it all of like kill this, do that, change this, change that. Instead, I came in the first day and said we're gonna create five or six different work streams. We're gonna tackle the most tough questions out there. And one of the questions for example was what should we stop doing? Cause we were doing too many things like you said. Had people volunteer for the group, we had 15 people volunteer for the group. They met every single day for two weeks, every day. I said that's more important than your job cause this is the future of the company. And I instituted, my focus was the process, not necessarily what the outcome would be. But the key was then what happened is that group recommended five different areas of things that we should kill. After only two weeks, things I'm working on for six months, for a year, for two years in some cases. And then rather than the arrogant CEO who doesn't know anything yet and they'd be right coming in and saying, kill this, change that. And then I said, I am going to take your exact advice of the five things we're gonna kill. We're gonna kill all five and we're gonna move forward and I'm gonna do exactly what you told me to do. So what we did there is we empowered people who may not have had the voice and the permission to be able to actually say something because people don't oftentimes appreciate the power of the sunk cost fallacy. That, oh my gosh, I put so much time into this. How could I stop doing it? I put so much time into this relationship. But this relationship for three years, I've been living in this location for 10 years. How could I extricate myself? If I do that, that means I'm a failure. If I do that, that means that all the time that I spent into this was a huge mistake. No, everything's a learning opportunity. You gain from that experience. So we have this huge bias around it that disenables us to be able to call out and make those changes and to have a person from the outside come in, enable them to be able to call it like it is, the truth ended up becoming so obvious that it became very, very easy decisions for us to do.