David Siegel - CEO of Meetup | Decisions That Make or Break All Leaders

Welcome to success story the most useful podcast in the world. I'm your host Scott DeClaire. The success story podcast is part of the blue wire podcast network as well as the HubSpot podcast network. Now the HubSpot podcast network has incredible shows like the hustle daily. It's hosted by Zachary Crockett, Jacob Cohen, Rob Litterst and Juliet Bennett Ryla. Now the hustle daily brings you a healthy dose of a reverent off speed and informative takes on business, tech and news and it happens daily. So if you want to stay up to date on the latest and greatest and some of these topics are interesting to you, then you're going to love the hustle daily topics like Amazon's grocery strategy, the rise of the ugly shoe economy is AI the secret to love and America's sleep deficit problem. So if these are topics you want to get into and you love hearing up to date content whenever you wake up in the morning, go listen to the hustle daily, wherever you listen to your podcast today, my guest is David Segal. He is the CEO of meetup. He's overseeing meetups global business. They have 52 million members. They host 15,000 events daily in 193 countries as a business leader and expert in building personal and professional communities. He also hosts a podcast, keep connected. And he is the author of the best selling book decide and conquer 44 decisions that will make or break all leaders. He has 20 years. Experience leading technology and digital media organizations focused on community health care and finance. He has a significant background and innovative product development, rapid revenue growth and digital traffic acceleration. This is evident by his work at meetup in his first 18 months. He brought the social media platform to its most profitable state in the company's 18 year history in March of 2020. He oversaw its acquisition from we work that had previously acquired meetup to consortium of investors led by Ali Corp. From 2015 to 2018, he was the CEO of investopedia. He five X their growth and he led them through a successful merger of investopedia to dot dash previous to that. He served as president of seeking alpha, a crowdsourced investment research business with more than 4 million registered users between president general manager chief executive. He has had five leadership roles chief executive decision making roles in large organizations. So he's had an incredible career. What did we speak about what we spoke about lessons in leadership and business that he has learned over his career through stories that he's experienced some ups and downs, how he's applied them to the various organizations that he's worked at most recently. Some very tactical stories of how he's applied some leadership lessons that we discuss to meetup where he's obviously currently CEO. We spoke about principles of open communication, radical candor transparency, kindness to inform great decision making. We spoke about types of biases and how they impact an organization for types of particular and how to overcome them and how to make sure that your decision making process doesn't succumb to these biases. We spoke about how to hire executives. He's done it a lot. The most important and least important things to look for when hiring executives. We spoke about his decision making process to make effective speedy meaningful and hopefully correct decisions. And we also spoke about his prioritization and de prioritization framework, which is ultimately the most important framework that he deploys to be successful and to decide what he should even focus on, let alone make those decisions. So some great business stories, some lessons, some very tactical things based on all these different leadership lessons that he's learned over his career and how he actually executes some in meetup. So if you want to learn from a really great tenured executive, you want to learn how he operates his business today, this is a great show. Let's jump right into it. This is David Siegel. He is the CEO of meetup. I was born in a small log cabin in Kentucky. Don't worry. Well, we'll get a lot faster now. I was not born in a log cabin in Kentucky, but I was born in Kentucky on an R&B in Kentucky. Now let's fast forward, um, grew up in the New York metro area, upper middle class, amazing parents, incredibly lucky to have the loving household that we grew up in. Um, had really like the standard high school experience where I was kind of like a little nerdy, um, but not nerdy enough to be like super duper smart, but nerdy enough to hang out with the people who were really smart and okay in sports, enough to hang out with people who are really, really good in sports, but always like at the, at like the lower end of each of those different areas. And maybe that's why I became like a particularly competitive person. But anyway, um, I would say the most important, probably professional, um, opportunity that I had in life was after graduating college, I worked in consulting and my biggest client was double click. Now double click at the time, most people don't know this unless they're like 35 or above double click was the internet website, all advertising came through double click, most advertising on the internet came through double click and made the internet free, Google acquired double click for like $3 billion. And over 200 different CEOs of internet companies have come from double click. So it was very lucky about 24 years old to become a director actually at double click, um, and I did that. And that one experience when I was really quite young, a couple years out of college had an impact in my life to fast forward and I could rewind back a little bit to when I became CEO of meetup and we work was imploding and we worked on meetup. The person who I went back to 20 years later after having built a relationship was the CEO of double click at the time to acquire me out of we work. So I could fill in the gaps in the middle, but a lot comes down to kind of those early experiences that I had. And then just, you know, the quick quick bio is I was at one point present of a site called seeking alpha, one of the largest financial education sites. And then I became the CEO of investopedia about four years. We sold that company and then Adam Newman came knocking on my door for we work and it was an opportunity I couldn't refuse and that's the origin. Dude, that's an awesome story and you've done a lot too. So, uh, where do you want it? What's what would be some of the most interesting pre meetup stories? You can pick a few. I know there's I know there's a lot of investopedia we work those are like those aren't names of people know and plus probably some some at some at double click to so pick some fun stories that I would say were like key points defining points in your career. Um, that allowed you to speak to some of the things that you speak to in your book, some of the leadership lessons, those were not just thought thought up overnight. So there's things that you learn as people you worked with, there's good times, there's bad times for sure. So go into some stories. Okay, we'll do a good story. I will do a challenging story. So we'll do both of those. Take it from that. Good story. So, um, after double click decided to go to business school, um, and I was in Warren for business school and I didn't want to do the standard like investment baking consulting thing because just that's boring. I had a dream job. And my dream job was to become the assistant to a CEO to be like the right hand person not to get the coffee or whatever it is, but like to work on four decks and work on strategy and just learn from really, really smart people. So one night at business school, a couple months before graduation, I decided I was going to go on a blitzkrieg of like sending out insane numbers of emails. I stayed up all night. I kid you not. I figured out what the email addresses were for all these different companies like at David's at DC. At DC goal, David dot seal, they've underscores evil, whatever the email just happens to be. It sent about 10,000 emails to every executive for about a hundred different companies and said, I want to become the assistant to the CEO. Great. I ended up having conversations through that with and connections with David Stern, the commissioner of the NBA National Basketball Association at the time. Ken Chenult, the CEO of American Express, all these us like, you know, David Neelman, the CEO of JetBlue, all these companies that like were amazing companies. And I couldn't get the role of becoming an assistant CEO. I tried, I tried, I tried, I didn't work out. Okay, fast forward. I took another job three years later. I also spoke to the CEO of 100 flowers fast forward three years later. There was a posting on the word and alumni database and the posting said 100 flowers looking for an assistant to the CEO. And I was like, wait, three years ago, I spoke to Jim McCann, the founder and CEO of 100 flowers. And I begged him to become the assistant. He's like, I don't need an assistant. So I sent him an email. This is three years after graduating from business school. And I said, hey, we haven't talked into three years. But I just, if I had any way influence your decision to decide to hire an assistant CEO, then I would love to get together sometime. So he emails me back five, like, amazing words and five words were, I was looking for you. That's so funny. It was like a hurry. That's so funny. I think, you know, yeah, yeah, it's great. That's a lesson in it of itself. That, you know, like how everybody gets somewhere in life. There's this, there's this book by Alex Bannon and he, and he interviewed a whole bunch of like executives. He interviewed, I'm blanking on the names now, but like very, very notable people. And there's always like this third door. Like there's like the, the front way and the back way that you can get something done. Then there's like the third, third door, like the other opportunity where like people think outside the box and figure it out. This is what you're doing is exactly what you're doing. It sounds surprising, but there's not a single job that I got. I've had seven jobs that existed beforehand. I love every job was like a job I created except for a CEO role. That kind of had existed before because company needs to. So, but it's the reason why I think there's an illustrative comment in terms of decision making is number one. When you're making decisions, you have to think about how are you creating options for yourself? Are you limiting the number of options for yourself and making a decision now you have fewer things that you can happen to in the future? Are you creating options for yourself that can end up resulting in you just getting lucky at some points in time? And I actually believe it's crazy as it sounds that you can create your own luck by making decisions and having enormous numbers of volumes of conversation. That lucky stuff just ends up kind of like happening to you and people are like, oh my god, you're so lucky. I can't believe. Well, am I lucky? Yes, but I also had 10,000 little points out there that would create situations where I could end up becoming lucky. So, how do you make decisions that create many different options for yourself so that luck ends up happening to you? Smart, very smart. Okay, so that was great. That's a good story. So, how did that work out? Where did that place you after the assistance of the CEO that you take? It changed my career, honestly. So, I met with him. He ended up hiring me not for that role, made up role called Vice President of Strategic Initiatives, which is usually like some person on their way out of life. Like, we don't know what to do with you. So, you're going to be Vice President of Strategic Initiatives. Oh, no, what does that mean? But I was like early day. So, so I did that. And then like, we'll just figure out what you're going to do. And by the end of four and a half years at one hand to flowers, I was running all merchant acquisitions for the company, a lot of shared marketing services, international operations, just a whole bunch of other other things that, you know, just kind of took on over time. So, it really helped to make my career and was great, great opportunity to learn from some very smart people. Okay, now I'll tell you the, I mean, I have so many like crappy stories. Okay, so I have to just ask, is the bad story a WeWork story? Whatever you want. I got lots. I don't know, because I just figured there was the, or we were, I figured there was a story with WeWork. There's not not a story. No, I got like a hundred stories WeWork. Okay, here's a story for WeWork. So, this is a crazy story. So, I was running Meetup and WeWork had been acquired by WeWork in late 2018. And everyone meetup had WeWork stock. That's the only stock that they had when I came in. And WeWork stock had gone up to a valuation of $47 billion. And, you know, come late 2019, early 2020, we started seeing like the articles in Wall Street Journal of like, now we're $40 billion, now we're $30 billion, now we're $20 billion, now we're $10 billion. And we were like, oh, the, I don't know if I can say this, but the shit's going to fall down and it's going to fall on little Meetup. We know this is going to happen. So, and I kept being assured, don't worry David, it's not going to impact Meetup, it's everything's going to be fine. Like, come on, we know that like, it's not going to be fine. So, I was also coincidentally, it's kind of a random thing for like the death of a company. I was actually visiting my father's grave. Once a year I visit him in a cemetery and I get a call and the call says, David, it's about to hit the Wall Street Journal that Meetup is for sale. Just total surprise, no forewarning, no nothing. And I'm like, oh my God, if our employees are 200 plus employees, hear about this for the first time from the Wall Street Journal and from their friends, well, that's a great way for Meetup for them to lose all trust in me because they're not going to believe that I didn't know about it. They don't think I knew about it, I hit it from them and every time I try to convince them of something, you know, they're going to be surprised. I hoped it to meet up. I quickly, I quickly got a senior person that we worked to meet me there so they knew it was legit. Called all of our employees for an emergency meeting. I started telling them that, you know, Meetup is about to be for sale within like three minutes of the conversation. Every person's phone is like buzzing because it hit the Wall Street Journal. And we just caught it in time. And that's, you know, one story, but I've got many other Adam Newman crazy, you know, plane ride experiences, whatever that's out there as well. Yeah, no, definitely. Okay, so then let's, but that wasn't, that was a difficult situation. What was the most notable negative or difficult time in your career that shaped you? I had an experience in my career where I was like semi-catatonic in how deeply disturbing it was. So here's, here's the experience and it definitely helped to shape me. So prior to Meetup, I was the CEO of Investopedia. Investopedia is owned by IAC. IAC is, the chairman of IAC is a very famous individual Barry Diller, the CEO of IAC is Joey Levin. And I worked for them. We had an amazing success in Investopedia. I joined the company was doing $11 million and ended up four years later doing $35 million in revenue. So over tripled in size. One day, a senior executive, I won't say who came into my office after four and a half years being there. And he said, David, we just sold Investopedia. And I was like, wait, wait, wait, I'm the CEO. How did you do that with no due diligence without any companies wanting to talk to like the executive team? Who bought us? What happened? And like, don't worry, David, we're going to take care of you. We got a really, really good price for it. And you're going to be happy financially. I'm like, no, no, forget the financial thing. Like, what happened here? And basically, a sister company of IAC, called .dash, convinced IAC to acquire Investopedia. They knew our business because it was all part of the same umbrella brand. And that was it. It was a, I was out. Without any, with just complete and total surprise. And we were just like at the top of the mountain at the time. And I think the, and they actually IAC to their credit did do above and beyond appropriate things for me and for others. They also offered me to stay on at IAC corporate as in another role. And another executive position. But I was so. In total shock and surprised. The reason why that really did impact me is because I swore kind of after that experience that the number one job of a CEO and a leader is not to surprise people. Your job is not to surprise your employees. Your job is not to surprise your board because having been surprised actually numerous times in my career now. It's so painful because it's not about the experience of being surprised. That's hard. But it's about the loss of trust that you haven't people whom you trusted previously. And, and they weren't able to be up front with you for, for whatever reason it happens to be. And, and I think having a kind of a no surprise leadership philosophy up down and all around. Is, is, is, is certainly referenced and talked about in the book around, how do you make decisions and how do you be transparent decision making. But it definitely really impacted me. I want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode HubSpot. Now the new year might have you thinking ahead to what you want out of your career. So when you think about your success story, what do you actually picture? Is it retiring early with a beautiful view of the skyline? Is it leaving a legacy with your name on it? Or maybe it's helping influence and change some of the world's most pressing issues? Whatever it is, writing your success story starts by working smart. Because when you work smart, your success story writes itself. A HubSpot CRM platform helps your marketing campaigns work harder and smarter. With intuitive visual workflows and bot builders, you can create scalable automated campaigns across email, social media, web and chat. So your customers hear your messages loud and clear. Are you tired of your content not adapting to mobile, making it difficult for your customers to absorb your message? HubSpot CRM platform optimizes your content for multiple devices so that you can reach your customers wherever they are, which is just smart. Learn more about how you can transform your customer experience with a HubSpot CRM at HubSpot.com. You've been in so many different CEO roles and positions and this is sort of how you've built up this framework, I guess. I want to understand when you wrote Beside and Conquer, what is that meant to be? Who's this book for? What's it trying to teach? Is it for another CEO? Is it for somebody who's up and coming in their career, wants to maybe do due diligence on the company they could be joining? Who's the reader? Great question. The reader is for both leaders and aspiring leaders, is what I would say. If you don't have an interest in ever being a leader, it's really not a book for you. And what I found is that there's a number of principles that exist out there because as a leader, you're making hundreds of decisions every single day. Even deciding not to make a certain decision and to empower someone to make a decision is definitely a decision. You're making hundreds of decisions every single day. And what I wanted to is I always wanted to write a book. I teach a Columbia, so I love teaching and education. And it's always been important to me. But I didn't want to write anything boring. Text book kind of books with just like the five principles of this, the six principles of that, whatever kind of stuff. I wanted to be a story where that was riveting and through the storytelling, you end up kind of learning a ton around kind of smart decisions that you could ultimately make to become more successful. So it's for that audience. And you know, things like how do you think about whether a decision is a trapdoor decision, meaning you can't change it, which most people think many decisions are trapdoor decisions. When in fact, you can change laws, you can't change like whether you're going to have to have a kid like that's a trapdoor decision. But most decisions are incredibly changeable and people are so fearful of oftentimes making decisions because they think they're trapdoor decisions when they're actually not. And just other elements of decision making. So, you know, that's that's what we did. And the story under we work was so insane and such a rollercoaster experience and made for just some pretty crazy material. I was going to say so I feel like and like obviously you're on the inside. So I'm just going to speak like as a layman on the outside. I feel like we work as not the epitome of great leadership decision making. You learn from over not to do just as much as you learn what you do. Yes. So you've been how many how many like chief executive roles have you held over your career? Well, I would say this is my third president or CEO or CEO role and if you include general management positions, then it's my fifth. So what is out of obviously you have some experience. So what is what is what is the definition of a leader in a business context and what is the most important trait for a leader? Oh, wow. Okay. So let's go backwards. The most important trait for a leader from my perspective is understanding that your role is to enable the success of everyone around you. Is to think about the reverse organizational chart where like the leader is on the bottom of the chart, not at the top. Your role is to support and enable the success of all the executives. And the executive role is to support and enable the success of their managers and manage role to enable the success of individuals. My role is not to succeed myself. I don't need to succeed myself. I need to enable the different people on my team to succeed and guess what that I succeed. But that's my job is to enable everyone else to succeed around me and do whatever is necessary. Sometimes it means letting go of people to enable them to succeed actually. So I mean, that is the most important role of a leader. Support the success of those around you. Now, I agree with, I agree with what the role of the leader is. And I want to, I want to understand your opinion about how to do this tactically when there's interest of other parties that are that may be prompt different decision making. When you were acquired at Investopedia, obviously stakeholders, there were certain stakeholders that were making that decision because they thought it was for the benefit of those stakeholders or even shareholders. But in a business environment, how do you align that leadership principle, which I agree with, with the expectations of shareholders, for example, or owners or whatnot? Because that's the fundamental thing that I think I always see causing conflict. Everybody agrees what a good leader is, but nobody knows how to do it when they're bored and their owners feel the need to do things differently. For example, that obviously drive ROI or whatever that metric is, right? Good. Okay. So to me, the golden rule is all about transparency, meaning if I am told by my parent company or by my board, transparently, you're not doing a good enough job. You need to focus on this, not that, et cetera. Or I transmit that information to someone else. It aligns interests in a lot more effective way than if information is withheld. The biggest challenge oftentimes, and why there's lots of misalignment like you're referring to Scott, is because a board will have access to certain information like, oh, a company wants to go public or whatever the, we want to sell this company, whatever the incentive is for the board. And the management team or the employees have a completely different incentive. And then there's tension and there's problems because people have missed this asymmetrical access to information. The more that a leader can ensure that there's as consistent information as possible. So the most junior person and the board member knows the same thing, the better. And you could say, oh, David, that's unrealistic. We share all of our financials with every employee. Our board does not know any information that every single employee does not know and get access to. Is there a risk in doing so? Can that employee take screenshots of like our financials and post them on wherever? Read it. Yeah, they can. And there's a risk. But the reward of having alignment and incentives and priorities because you're brutally transparent is. You know, the way to go and it goes with managing someone. You need to be transparent. Someone's not doing a great job. It's not nice to them. Not kind to them to like say, don't worry. Keep it up. You know, everything will be okay. And then surprise them later on kind of the kindest thing you could do is give very critical transparent. Maybe overly blunt in order to be clear information in as respectful way as possible. So transparent to me see to me is like the end all be all. This is like this is like radical. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Yeah, our company we have like a book we had a book club. Yeah, and radical was one of the books in the book club. Yes. I have no doubt it was. It's a great it's a great leadership philosophy. So and this is what you're doing. This is this is one of the principles. It's got one other thing about it. Yeah, yeah. So no, it's your showman. It's your show, dude. It's not my show. It's like I'm still going to like say it. So go for it. The there's one of the most famous managers leaders ever. In fact, he won time magazines manager of the century for the 20th century was Jack Welch, the CEO of GE General Electric for 20 years at the time that he left the highest market cap company in the world. He was on IEC's board and I got to sit down with him and me with him one on one. And I said to Jack Welch, you were the manager of like the century. What can you teach me about management like on one foot? And he's like just focus on transparency. Focus on trust. If you build transparency, you'll have trust. And if you have trust, you could have anything. Make sure you have trust of your employees, trust of your board, trust of your team. That's all that's that's the most important thing. So that had an impact. It's amazing because it seems like that runs counter to almost every company operating out there that seems to hide everything from their employees. So there's always like that there's like the large companies that have probably been around for a long time that operate the way that they feel like they have to hide everything. And you don't even you don't know what the next person in the cubicle beside you is making let alone what the company's financials are like unless they're public. But outside of that, you also have to start up. It's worried about sharing information because they may not have a run rate longer than six months. So it's very it's a very scary feeling. But yeah, go ahead. No, go ahead. If you're a startup and you don't have a run rate more than six months, I know that's scary. So you get the team together and you say, okay, who do you know? What angels do you know? Or let's be aligned. We got to reduce our costs. How can we focus on a hosting cost? What do we need to do to reduce costs? Just get everyone aligned or else people are like, why are they asking us to reduce our people to start jumping to conclusions? And frankly, usually those conclusions that they jump to those assumptions that people are far worse than the actual truth that's actually going on, except in reverse case. The truth was actually worse than we were. But for many companies is not. Okay, so let's let's talk about some things that you're doing. So let's talk about this is an interesting way of doing it. Let's talk about some of the principles that you speak about in the book outside of trust and communication, not to say those are not like incredibly important. But there's other ones in there. There's like a lot. I think there's like 40 some 44 is a 44 or a lot of decisions and a lot of decisions and concepts in there. So whatever. We won't be doing 44 or whatever it is today. I hope not. Yeah, I know I got to have like lunch eventually and whatnot. But let's say let's pick a couple others. And I think that what would be great is if you pick your like your favorites. Talk about the concept and why it's important. And then I think it's really great if you speak about how you've done it in meetup. Because there's the theory and then there's the very tactical and people love the theory. But it's really good to see it executed in an actual successful company. So that's great too. So let's do that. You've done this before I think. Damn. That's a good question. Time. Okay. Sorry. As my wife says. I cracked my self out. It's terrible. Good. I laugh my own jokes too. She hates. Oh my god. Okay. So I think the one that I also we talked about a few just to remind people the ones we've talked about so far. And I'll share a new one once we've talked about so far are be surprised only about being surprised. That's kind of one. Another one is focus on being kind not necessarily being nice. A third one is focus on creating options for yourself rather than limiting options in your decision making. So the next one that I'll share is around decision making biases. So there are many major biases that we all have and I'll name a few of them. And the key is to understand how you are biased because it's not a question whether you're biased or not biased. You're biased. We are all influenced by these biases. So here's an example of three or four different biases and then could choose one out and then we'll talk about it. So first one. Recenty bias. So recenty bias is is the concept that if you had 10 data points is that last data point that's usually going to have a way over influence on how you perceive something and decision you end up get you end making. So the example I like to give around that is yoga could be exhausting. I love yoga and you're stretching all over the place. But at the end you do a shavasana and your chill and you're relaxed. And that's what you remember most that like shavasana feeling. So you want to go back to yoga because you did that shavasana at the end. You have that recenty bias or the work experience I would give to that because as you had asked for was oftentimes there'll be an executive that's not working out. And you need to unfortunately let that executive go. Hopefully you're given enough critical feedback during that process. And that executive is too extreme in one direction the executive is too aggressive or not aggressive enough or whatever the challenge happens to be. You end up hiring the next person just as the opposite of the person who had just happened to have been there when in reality there's could be 10 different factors that are important in an executive great communicator. Domain knowledge base great hire of talent whatever those four or five things happen to be. But because they skew really extreme in a challenge in one way you go the exact opposite direction because of that recency bias and hiring that next person. And that's oftentimes a mistake you have to recognize that you have this recent bias that you're going to end up trying to overly compensate for. And not let that bias overly influence the next decision that you're going to be making that makes sense does 100% that smart very smart. So we have biases what are so we can go through a few more. I'll let you I mean I'll let you lead you know which ones you know which ones are sort of like that that's a great one by the way. But you know which ones are the ones that come up again and give three more biases that people have that's fair so the next one I would say is confirmation bias which is. Things are going great so you're going to keep looking at the data when as long as it's going great and then when things aren't going so well you don't really look at that information you're looking for just things that confirm what you want to see as opposed to. Seeking out different opinions of others that can actually help you to make a smarter decision. If you surround yourself up people are just confirming confirming confirming you ain't getting making a smart decisions the key to actually great decision making is disagreement and debate. And the more disagreement and debate that you have the less confirmation bias you're going to have the better decision you're ultimately going to make so I'll give you an example of what we do. And actually a bunch of my different companies but certainly it meet up which is when we come into a meeting we don't just come into the meeting and talk about something prior to the meeting we have someone create a Google doc and in that Google doc they'll put a specific opinion out there and they'll share that opinion with everyone in the meeting and then we expect everyone who's before the meeting to give their opinions and disagreements in that document. And then we have the meeting itself it's a discussion of where there's areas of disagreement in order to then figure out how to align on those and not spending time we're already we agree on something and you know because that's kind of a waste of time. What it also does is it gives people are more introverted and opportunity to really participate as effectively as people are extroverted because this asynchronous time where individuals can share their opinions to help to influence decisions not necessarily in the room but in a document and that helps with reducing it with increasing debate and disagreement and reducing confirmation bias. It's very smart, very smart, okay. Do you have two more? Yeah, okay, two more, I'll do them quick. So one is status quo bias. You keep pausing and I'm like, listen man, I just think it's a smart idea. I'm just taking mental notes. I don't have anything else to add on to it. You're the expert here. I'm just going to do it in my next meeting. I'm like, yeah, that's a pretty damn good idea. Okay, you should. It really does. It's just very efficient actually too. Status quo bias is the next one, which is just people's fear of change and just people are oftentimes preferred to have the status quo even if it sucks and it's terrible and they're miserable and they're unhappy. Then then fear the unknown that could be potentially worse, even though it's likely going to be better and kind of helping people to understand that you need to pivot careers. You need to pivot businesses pivoting is essential to survival and status quo is just something that's incredibly dangerous as part of many people's biases. And then the last one, so I won't even give you a chance to comment on the last one around biases that I find happening oftentimes is around some cost fallacy, which on a personal note for me is things like I go don't spend some restaurant. I order lots of food. I feel sick because I ate all the food, but of course I had to eat all the food because I paid for it when reality ago was like enjoy yourself and like leave over some food. But a lot of people don't appreciate that if you already did something, it's a sunk cost. If you already invested millions of dollars into a business too often people will say, well, look how much we invested. It'll look so bad. You can't, you know, jettison that business. When reality, it's gone. It's over. Buy by two million dollars is just invested. What is the right decision at this time? How do you divorce kind of emotional connections to these costs that you had put in so that you make a smarter decision moving forward? Now, you have these biases that you have to be cognizant and aware of, which is very smart. Once you're aware of these, what is your, what's your decision making process? Once you are aware of your biases? Find as many people to disagree. And if you don't have tension or disagreement, then you probably haven't thought about all the different angles and challenges that could be in front of you. And only then, how do you do that? Oh, how do you do that? I was going to say, um, how do you, well, especially I was going to say, especially because, unless you have an extreme amount of psychological safety in your organization, people are not comfortable. But you nailed it all. You nailed it right there. I mean, you need to create an environment where people understand that the best thing that they could do to quote unquote look good. Um, and to help is to actually disagree with people in my team will say things like, I don't know if I even agree or disagree with my disagreement about to say, but I'm going to disagree now because I know that that's actually helpful in the decision making process. And, and, and the key is that when someone does disagree, you have to hold that up to a high, you have to say, thank you, you are so right. The moment that I as a leader become defensive when someone's disagreeing is the moment that you're cabashing the ability for people to feel safe and to disagree. Then what you're cabashing essentially, never said the word twice in whatever sentence, then what you're cabashing is the ability to actually make smart decisions, which is a serious problem since kind of life and business are all about kind of one decision after another. And, and as a leader, um, do you hire for that particular personality? Is that something that you look for when you bring a new exit or anybody on? I can't say about anybody. I would love to say anybody. I would love to say that because I'm not interviewing, I'm interviewing my, my reports or sometimes might be reports of my drug reports. I do have values that we do interview for like embracing change is a value that we interview for. And that's actually help we have six specific values that meet up that we interview for. But for people that are on my team, I do look for disagreement a lot. And I would say that there is a certain level of self esteem confidence, but not cockiness. It's really important for people because if you lack self esteem and you're scared to share your voice, then it's harder to disagree. My job is to then figure out how to get that disagreement out of you because some people are more introverted and less comfortable doing that. And I'll then try to talk to people in one-on-one sessions and invite disagreement if I could because I know some people in a group setting are less apt to disagree. And my job again is what can I do to help people on my team and others to feel as comfortable as possible. And that's just creating that kind of environment where you are, you are praised for being, being contrary, but you also need to at certain point obviously be the appropriate soldier. Not just continue to be contrary for contrary sake either. Very smart. And a lot of the things that we just spoke about, there are things that you have to work on internally. But you also mentioned things that I thought was a little interesting. You mentioned when you're hiring and executive, and I assume it would be for you as a CEO as well, what are the top skills, like the hard skills? So is it hiring, is it domain expertise? What is the list of things that you look for and people that you're looking to bring in at an upper level? I'll say the things that I look for and also list a couple of things that people look for, but it's actually, I think, less important than people realize. And it's one of the things I like to talk about is deprioritization is more important than prioritization. You can say, like, these 10 things are really important, what you're looking for, that's not helpful. It's here are the things that are not important, actually, or less important than people realize. So I'll start with a less important one. Actually, you head on it there, domain expertise. Now, I'm not saying that our head of marketing shouldn't be very strong in marketing. Obviously, she's amazing at marketing and very important. However, I would rather have someone who is an 8.5 or 9 out of 10 in 8.5 out of 10 even in domain expertise and is greater hiring people underneath them is a phenomenal communicator is a strong team player is highly analytical. All those things are much more important than kind of years of experience or having been there done that because you could learn things from other people and you don't need to be the absolute expert and expert in many things. So that's something that I think people actually over prioritized. They also over prioritized things like what company someone worked at or what school someone went to all that stuff is just such BS and way over prioritized brand names. So I tend to prioritize the most are trying to understand kind of the level of selfishness versus unselfishness of a potential team member when someone has a ego driven deeply selfish approach to the way in which they approach business. You can ascertain that I'll tell you how I tend to ascertain that you I don't want that person on the team no matter what no matter what. So what I tend to do is I do zero reference checking zero you might be like what how could you not do reference checking it's kind of important. All I do is back channeling. So I never asked someone for like three four or five people that I should talk to because they're only going to give me like the great people they're going to tell me feel that like think they're the bees knees or whatever. Bees knees are good I don't even know what those are but instead I am linked in like 30,000 people so I can always find someone so I find someone else when I'm connected to the person and then I just reach out and I back channel the heck out of any potential higher and it's kind of serving well and we pulled back from potential hires based on the back channeling is all because then you get the you know the unfiltered and transparent truth. What is what is back channeling I'm sorry explain that to me is basically just so I'm thinking of hiring Michael then I don't say to Michael hey who should I talk to from your past that is good I go and LinkedIn I look who's connected to Michael I reach out to those people that have worked with Michael in the past. You just ask them I say hey did you work with Michael I work that closely okay do you can you can you refer me to someone who did work closely with Michael in the organization oh yeah of course Janine work really close with Michael great I'm new I'm making instructions to Janine sure and I talk to Janine about Michael. You just see what what the average with the average you know the the average view of somebody who just you know worked a couple hours a day with this person how they treated other people what I got it understood smart very very smart and I'm also curious this can be like the the final question then I I like to do the couple rapid fire but we've been going for a bit now but I like to I like to understand people's frameworks for things so you said you like to be prioritized and that's more important than prioritizing so how do you because there's a million different ways to do that. Like the urgent important the Eisenhower matrix to all the different ways to you know to figure it out so how do you do it how do you deprioritize things yeah I try to have as objective a basis as possible in deprioritizing opportunities so the the challenges that many startups and leaders they die more of of of overeating and then of starvation you know they they they try on too many different things at the same time and they can't prioritize so I try to quantify as much as possible so every opportunity I'll say okay let's put an assumption in there how big is this market I'll put more precisely we think we get at the market where are some examples of that if we move this needle in terms of improving search on meetup and there was a 3% increase in the number of people in the market of the number of people who became organizers because we improve search what's the dollar value of that so I what I try to do in prioritization deprioritization is anything that potentially not everything can be but anything that could potentially be quantifiable we push hard to make it as quantifiable as possible and then it's oftentimes becomes more obvious I'm like why I know you think this would be great but why would we prioritize this when this other opportunity has like 10X the potential value and it just it takes things from opinions into a certain kind of subjective and to more objective which then builds higher levels of alignment you know between different different people are on resources here's some idea okay in closing any other points you want to bring up for yours but also if not and it's okay if there are but if not what do you want what do you want people to to take away after they've after they've read this book what do you want them to feel what do you want to learn what's the what's the goal I think the number one thing that I want people to take away after reading the book is their careers their life their future is more in their control than they may realize I think too often people have an external focus of control and they say these things happen it's unfortunate and they blame kind of outside forces and I think the book is kind of a story of lots of different experiences where I and others did things that were seemingly impossible like getting meet up to be acquired from by someone who I knew from 20 years ago even though there were 30 other companies that were looking to you know acquire a meetup out of we work and and persevered to make it a reality that would be the greatest thing if people felt more ownership of what happens in their lives to me that's the biggest one amazing okay and if people want to get the book connect with you chat with you where do they go social website all okay so books coming out March 8th and you get on a little bookseller that some people might have heard of called amazon as well as any other you know online bookselling place we have website it's called decide and conquer book dot com you go to the website you could check out stuff there you know just go on to any bookstore also we'll have it and in terms of reaching me um linkedin is probably the best way so you can easily find me just david single on meetup you need to send me an email david at meetup.com um and uh just love to hear from anyone who is interested in the topics we're talking about amazing no that's great okay let's do a couple rapid fire um biggest challenge you've overcome in your life what was that challenge how did you overcome it I was definitely afraid of public speaking sweaty pond really nervous is all hell look at you now I know right and um over came to practice it's just over and over and over again and uh you just get less and less nervous and then it just becomes second nature to you so now I'm like public speaking in the shower so you know it's really easy um if you had to choose one person obviously there's been many but pick one person who's been highly influential in your life who was that person and what did they teach you okay so I decided to become cited I said ambition for myself to run a company because I saw someone who became my mentor's name is david Rosenblatt he is on the he's the CEO of first dibs and he's on the board of of twitter and i see in a bunch of other amazing companies and he just took me under his wing and I used to meet with him weekly or every other week and still 20 years later whenever I have an important career decision to make or life decision to make not just career but life decision to make a kind of he's always there and he's always supportive of me and um you know he's had a big influence on me and my family amazing um a book podcast audible something that's helped you the he'd recommend people go check out oh boy okay it's an oldie but a goodie when I say oldie I mean like really oldie so controversial but I'm gonna go with Dale Carnegie's how to win friends and influence people um written in like 1930 or something and and I teach a class and I have all my students that have to read the class and a lot of it is um inappropriate let's say for our times and and it's unfortunately way way to white male however there is um such beautiful learnings in terms of um helping to kind of build relationships that um can last a lifetime so if people have not read it it's a classic I always recommend it and and candidly it was written in the 1930s so understanding the timeframe when it was definitely a different time it's a different time for sure um uh if you could tell your 20 year old self one thing what would it be don't care about money so much um money will always come focus on what you want to when you feel like you could be great at and good things will come don't put so much pressure on yourself around that it's just not that important it's important up to a point past a point that important and last question what does success mean to you success means happiness that's it being a happy person if you if you have a lot of money and you're unhappy that's your your your failure right um and if you want a family not everyone necessarily wants one but if you want a family and you have a wonderful family and you're happy in that family and that's the way that you want to live your life to me that's success