Deep Dive with David Siegel

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster. And today we're going to go in deep with my friend David Siegel. David is the CEO of Meetup. He is the former CEO of Investopedia. He is a management professor at Columbia University. He hosts his own podcast, which maybe you can have me on sometime, called Keep Connected, if I'm an appropriate guest.

David Siegel: You are more than an appropriate guest and the answer is yes, we'll have you on.

Matt Blumberg: And so welcome to the Daily Bolster. We're happy to have you for the long form interview today.

David Siegel: I'm excited. I will try not to be too long tooth in the mouth and hopefully make this an awesome conversation.

Matt Blumberg: All right, so the first time I met you... Let's start with your career. The first time I met you, you were working at DoubleClick. It was 2001, 2002, something like that. And you were working in HR doing some organization development work. You've now been a CEO for a bunch of years in multiple companies. How did you get from A to B?

David Siegel: Okay, so right out of school I worked in HR consulting and for an HR consulting firm that was small in nature. And one of the best parts of being a consultant is that every time that you have a new engagement, it's a potential job interview. My biggest client was this incredible company that was growing like crazy called DoubleClick back in the late'90s. It ultimately was acquired by Google for multiple billions of dollars. I had nothing to do with that. And Kevin Ryan, who was the CEO of DoubleClick at the time, reached out to me and he said, " Hey." I was a couple years out of school. He said, " Hey, would you be interested in coming over to DoubleClick?" And I said, " Absolutely." And he said, " Okay, what are you making?" He said, " Okay, I could double your salary and only halve our costs" because they're charging me out like 4x the amount as a consultant. And that's how I moved over to DoubleClick as a human resources partner. Then the key conversation about a year later with Kevin went as following. Kevin said, " Hey David, as an HR guy, what do you do all day?" I'm like, " Okay, well I spend most of my time recruiting, helping to recruit top talent, helping to advise managers, help with training and development, help with organizational structures so that things are organized to drive success, help with communications within the group." And he looks at me and he is like, " That's pretty much what I do with all of my time as CEO." And I was like, " Maybe I can be a CEO one day. I never thought of that." Then I went back to business school and I became a CEO. Fast forward, Kevin Ryan, that same person from 25 years ago became the largest investor in acquiring Meetup out of WeWork. That relationship has obviously mattered through the years.

Matt Blumberg: Well, yeah, I love your point that kind of like every meeting is a job interview because basically you never know. You never know where people are going to end up in life and who you're meeting with and whether it's going to come around someday.

David Siegel: Yeah, I've had eight jobs in my career and not for one of them did I ever apply to a job. They were all just different people. Whether it's the David Rosenblatts of the world who is a close mutual friend of ours who referred me to someone or someone else who referred me to someone else. And I'm a believer in you take the meeting, you take the meeting, it's worth a half an hour of your time, it's worth 45 minutes of your time. You take the meeting and you never know what's going to happen. You never know what type of opportunity can happen from those kinds of conversations.

Matt Blumberg: Right. It's very interesting. I think the path from HR to the CEO job is not the path most traveled, right? Most CEOs come out of product or technology, sales or marketing, occasionally CFO, but it's pretty unusual that someone comes from HR to the CEO seat. And I love your point, which is that the perspective you have as a head of HR, if you're a really good one, is not that different than the perspective you have as a CEO. What have you seen? You know a ton of CEOs, you do a lot of advising of CEOs. What have you seen in terms of the disciplines, the functional disciplines that produce the best CEOs? And have you ever run into another one that came out of HR?

David Siegel: The most famous CEO that came out of HR is the former CEO of Xerox.

Matt Blumberg: Ursula Burns?

David Siegel: No, Anne Mulcahy.

Matt Blumberg: Oh, Anne Mulcahy. Yeah. Yeah.

David Siegel: Exactly. So she started off in human resources in her career, but the fact that I can name one and not many says a lot. I don't know her personally. I've never personally met someone that started off in human resources. Very, very rare. At the end of the day, as most CEOs know and leaders know, EQ is much more important than IQ. The way in which I feel like I have succeeded and I have a fine IQ, is the ability to understand people's needs, is to connect with people, is to communicate effectively. All those things are very important to being a successful leader. And all those are indicative of stronger levels of EQ. My experience has been that the CEOs that oftentimes flame out, now everyone can point, "But look at Steve Jobs and look at Elon Musk and look at these people, their EQs are relative to someone has a 50 or 60 IQ, they're amazing icons. They're so successful." Yes, they are. And how about John Wallerstein? I've never heard of John Wallerstein. Yes, you never heard of him. There's a good reason and that 10, 000 other people that also have 60 EQs, let's say, that you never heard of because they flame out and they're not successful. I just made that name up by the way.

Matt Blumberg: Yes, right. But no, Steve Jobs did not become successful because of that. He became successful in spite of that.

David Siegel: Exactly.

Matt Blumberg: So one of the things I love about your book, Decide and Conquer, which has become one of my favorite CEO books, is that you tell a story, you tell the story of Meetup, but not from the beginning of Meetup. You tell the story of you and Meetup, but it's a vehicle for talking about your management philosophy. I'd love to talk a little bit about both pieces of that, both the story and then the philosophy and I guess so let's start on the story by... I'll ask you one question, we can go from there. You took over Meetup. Meetup was an iconic internet brand, right? It was started very early days of the internet by Scott Heiferman, who's also a friend and wonderful entrepreneur and founder.

David Siegel: I'm having lunch with him next week actually. Very important to stay in touch with the founder

Matt Blumberg: For sure. And so you took over the company after it had been acquired by WeWork, and we'll ask some questions about WeWork in a little bit. But I'm sort of curious for your take on the process of taking over a company from a founder, in particular an iconic brand, and not only running it but kind of transforming it. And I think you probably had some transformation to do with it regardless of the owner changing from a venture capital firm to WeWork. But what was that kind of taking over from a founder and particularly a brand that has had a lot of profile to it?

David Siegel: No doubt, the hardest job of my life, incredibly painful in many ways, and also very energizing. What I mean by that is when I... Take a step back for a second. When I was the CEO of Investopedia, the company had 25 employees. We grew them from 11 million, from 11 million revenue to 35 million in revenue, 25 employees to close to 200 employees, and the company had no culture. And I put a tremendous amount of time and energy into creating a Investopedia company culture. Now I say that context only because it's so different than Meetup. When I joined Meetup, Meetup had an extraordinarily strong company culture, a tremendous number of rituals that existed, of communication mechanisms that existed, of stories that pervaded through the culture, of ways in which decisions were made as part of that company culture. And it's extremely important when you come into a company that has a very deep culture and history to respect that and to understand it and to not try to change it immediately. Because if you try to change something immediately, you'll lose everyone very, very quickly. But it's also then to recognize what was painful and challenging about the culture. Very specifically, the company had a tremendous culture of fun, just like WeWork had a culture of fun and big, big rooftop barbecues and just tremendous growth, incredible mission orientation, which was a great part of the culture, focused on helping to drive connections and community for millions of people. We didn't want to change those things. But the financial discipline in the company where the company was losing at the time, over$ 18 million a year, where the company had almost no revenue growth, where we had, I love human resources, but we had 23 employees just in human resources, I may add. There were many elements of that part of the culture around financial discipline, around ROI based decision making that definitely needed to change very, very quickly. There were quite a few things I did, I'm happy to talk more about, but how do you strike that right balance between respecting the ethos of the past but also quickly changing some things that needed to change fast?

Matt Blumberg: Well, and I would say how do you do that in the shadow of a founder? I can't remember, had Scott left when you joined, but sort of stayed on as an advisor because there was no board anymore, it was owned by WeWork?

David Siegel: Great question. This was one of the primary discussion points between Adam Neumann and myself prior to joining. And I felt very strongly that although Scott is the heart and soul of the company, my ability to enact change within the organization would've been significantly more difficult if he was there as part of the management team, as part of the decision- making process. And where we found a, what Adam Neumann described a Solomonic decision, was that we would have Scott take a 90 day sabbatical in the first 90 days after I joined, and then figure out what he would do kind of afterwards. Adam had actually insisted initially that Scott stay on fully reporting into me, and I love Scott and everything that he brought, but I thought it was also very important to have some space between the founder and myself just based on past experiences. We made that decision that it would be a 90 day break, and then after that 90 day break, we would decide what the right role would be. Ultimately we decided his right role would be more of as an advisor than as an employee. And that's what ended up happening. And what he's amazing at is his soul is the soul of the company. He would take people, for example, on Meetup runs where every employee would go and visit three, four or five different Meetup events and really connect to the company's mission, who's great at business development and building relationships with other partnerships that could potentially help us as well. And he played a really helpful role in the early days there. During that time, we always met on a monthly basis and he would give me suggestions about things we might want to change, keep, et cetera. But space is really important. That's kind of my main message to a CEO. You have space between you and the founder

Matt Blumberg: Space, but also it sounds like you did a good job of cultivating a relationship, of respecting the things he was great at and that he, I assume if I asked him the question would say he respected the things that you were great at.

David Siegel: Space plus communications. That's what it was. And we had both of those things and it has been a continued positive relationship. I get texts from him all the time of, " Have you thought about this? Here's a thought or a suggestion," and I love it and it's very helpful. Or a story of something that happened on Meetup that can then share with all employees. It's really wonderful.

Matt Blumberg: So when did you take over Meetup? 2018,'17?

David Siegel: 2018. October, 2018. WeWork had acquired Meetup in January of 2018. As a very brief WeWork story, Adam and Scott aligned on the price of the acquisition. There was a disconnect by about$ 5- 10 million. The way that they made the decision about what final price should be for the business is Scott said to Adam, " Hey, you're going to Israel. I want you to put on a Meetup t- shirt and just spend the whole day in a Meetup t- shirt, and if no one says anything to you about how much they love Meetup the entire day, then we'll go with your price. And if not, we're going to go with my price." Ended up he went running on the beach, so-and-so goes, " I love Meetup," and he got the price. Now, if I were Scott, I would dispatch about 50 to a hundred people to Israel. And he didn't do that of course, but that would've been a high ROI move to actually do that.

Matt Blumberg: That's like a $ 10 million t- shirt.

David Siegel: $10 million t- shirt could be a great header for a feature or whatever. Anyway, he acquired the company and then Adam actually had promised Scott that Scott would stay on as the CEO, and if he did make a change, then he would let Scott know. And this is an example of sometimes surprising people, which is not a great thing to do. Scott ended up finding up from someone else that they were looking for a new CEO. And coincidentally, I'd been the president of a company called Seeking Alpha, which some people might know. The biggest investor of Seeking Alpha was a fellow named Michael Eisenberg. And Michael introduced me to Adam because Michael's an early investor and on the board of advisors for WeWork, and we had nice vegan meal and went from there.

Matt Blumberg: So end of 2018, you had been running the company for 15 months when COVID happened. Now in the rear view mirror, it seems obvious. " Oh, sure, Meetup, it's all in person stuff, but we'll just move it all to Zoom." That must have been a wrenching moment and transition that you had to make. How did that go down and what does Meetup look like today? How much of it's live versus Zoom and does it matter?

David Siegel: Oh my gosh, it does matter. What a great question. I still remember it. We were in the middle of actually divesting Meetup out of WeWork. COVID had hit in China and we're like, " Ah, that's in China. It's never going to come over here. Oh, Europe. It's never going to come over here." We saw 95% of our events get shut down overnight, overnight, in early March. WeWork then said, " We should just completely shut Meetup down because COVID is going to bring the company down." Already losing$ 18 million. They can't afford to go any further.

Matt Blumberg: Did you have any digital Meetup going on at that point or like a couple percent, or?

David Siegel: Right. The number one reason why we rejected a Meetup organizer, Matt, was because the organizer wanted to be a virtual only Meetup organizer. We turned down over our history, tens of millions of dollars because we said Meetup is IRL only. Our moniker was we use technology to get people off of technology, which is beautiful. The problem is, if you say, we use technology to get people off of technology, then they're off of technology. In fact, at a WeWork Summit, Scott, who we were referencing earlier, took a sledgehammer to a VR device and started smashing it into little pieces. He was so presumably technology and virtual and online was such a negative thing in terms of connecting. It was all about in person. It was deep in our ethos, deep in our ethos. When I got the company together and I said, " Hey, I think we probably need to start allowing for online events, what do you think?" Every engineer in particular, but most of our employees also had been around the company for a longer period, said, " Never, never. We are against this. It's going to pass in a day. It's going to pass in a week and the pass in a month. What we need is stick to who we are. We are IRL only," and I actually was a bit of an island. Sometimes as the CEO, you have to kind of be contrarian, and ultimately we said, " No, we need to allow for in- person Meetup events or else we're going down." And here's the funny thing, every one of our events, the way our entire technology was built was that everything had to be connected to a location. And to try to pull our events out of a location- based system would've been three to six months of effort. We didn't have three to six months. We found that in the Faroe Islands, there hadn't been a Meetup event in a very, very long time. We're able to somehow on the backend, connect every single virtual event to as though it was occurring in the Faroe Islands

Matt Blumberg: I feel like I'm really good at geography. I play all those games every day. Where are the Faroe Islands? They like off the coast of Portugal?

David Siegel: I think so. Africa, Portugal, somewhere. And that became how we could launch virtual events within a week. We got all the engineers together. We said we need to launch virtual events ASAP, or we're going down, we launched as an MVP. All of our time zones were all messed up. We didn't have time zones. You didn't need time zones when every event is in person. We launched it. Then quickly, obviously during the heights of COVID, we had 70, 80% were online events. And we've gotten tremendously positive feedback about online events backed as COVID was winding down. The number one question we were asked was, " Please tell me that online events are not going to go away." Because people would have parents of ADHD Kids Meetup group, and they lived in Kansas City and they had people in 30 different countries. I remember I participated in an Ecstatic Dance Meetup event that they said, " We had five people in our previous one meeting in a park. Now we have 40 people online all doing ecstatic dancing together." Now we're actually 80/ 20 rule. We're back today to 80% in- person and 20% is still virtual. And for many, many people, those virtual Meetup events, we were told by many we're their lifeline during COVID and they didn't have much human connection outside of it.

Matt Blumberg: I'm sure, I'm sure. And I'm presumably now you have some that like everything else, you have some hybrid ones. Sometimes the group is in person and sometimes they're remote.

David Siegel: We have many, many hybrid events as well. In fact, the number one feature we're releasing over the next week or two is a big step function improvement in hybrid events to make hybrid events much easier for both parties. It's not like a lose- lose, but a win- win.

Matt Blumberg: All right. Let's go back to the time that WeWork, so you're the CEO of a company. You have an owner, right? You have a corporate owner, you don't have a board, you don't have venture capitalists. Your corporate owner is kind of famous and in some respects famous for good things and in some respects, famous for not good things. What was it like working with Adam Neumann? I never met Adam Neumann, but all I can think of when I think of Adam Neumann is the mission of the company of WeWork, a real estate company. The mission was to elevate the world's consciousness or something like that. And I heard about that very early on when we WeWork was great idea, obviously, and coworking is huge. But I remember hearing at the beginning that the mission of the company was to elevate the world's consciousness. And I remember scratching my head thinking, " Huh?"

David Siegel: I think many investors scratched the same head. And that's how the valuation is from 47 billion now to about$ 120 million.

Matt Blumberg: So what was it like working with him? Did you work with him closely?

David Siegel: Yeah, I mean, so one of the, again, philosophies of mine is in the beginning you need to give your executives some space to make mistakes as a CEO when you hire them. And you also need some space yourself to be able to make mistakes and figure things out prior to being overly influenced by a board member or an owner, et cetera. One of my criteria, believe it or not, I was this kind of gutsy, or you could say ballsy, in accepting the job, was that Adam couldn't contact me for the first also 90 days that I joined. My manager was the President of WeWork, an exceptional individual named Artie Minson, and he reported to Adam, and at no point, in fact, I knew that I succeeded in getting that message across. When about a month in, I saw I got a phone call and it was Adam Neumann called me up. He goes, " David, I know I'm not allowed to talk to you, but I just have a quick question about someone you used to work with to get feedback because we're thinking of hiring this person at WeWork." I'm like, " He got the message," and it's not easy to put masking tape on someone with such a charismatic... And it wasn't against Adam at all, actually. I loved him and I loved his incredible energy and his mission orientation. It was more I needed space to breathe and to figure things out for myself and to form my own opinions before I would be overly influenced by others. It started off that way, and fortunately they respected that space. I always kept talking about in the beginning they also started... The frequent mention of Meetup was how can Meetup help WeWork? How can Meetup bring more events into WeWork offices? How can inaudible-

Matt Blumberg: That must have been the thesis of the acquisition, right?

David Siegel: That was the thesis for spending close to actually over$ 160 million on this acquisition was to help this$ 47 billion company, if you do 1% improvement on$ 47 billion, it was well worth the acquisition cost. That was absolutely the thesis. I stood up in front of all the WeWork executives two weeks after I was there with a giant slide of an oxygen mask. The reason I put the oxygen mask slide on there is I said to everyone, " Before Meetup looks to help WeWork, we need to put the oxygen mask on ourselves." And for those who don't get it, the idea is when a plane is going down, the first thing you should do is put the oxygen mask on yourself before trying to help someone else. Before Meetup can help WeWork, we need to help ourselves, we need to be a financially viable company. We can't keep losing this kind of money. We need to drive revenue growth. They got that message and they really did give me a meaningful amount of flexibility to focus on helping Meetup versus spending all of our time and taking a non- healthy company with a business model that was challenging to try to help the parent company, which would've been more short- term oriented than anything.

Matt Blumberg: Which is great. And it's amazing that they gave you that space, which probably made all the difference in the world.

David Siegel: And I told them, by the way, just to add Matt, I said, " I'm not going to accept unless you give me that space," which is important. I think a lot of times CEOs don't do enough of, and leaders don't do enough of is understand that when you're negotiating the beginning, the least important thing is usually frankly, compensation. And it's what are the ways in which processes and decision- making happens and communication happens within this organization, and let's get aligned on that. That's one of the most important things to get aligned on prior to actually taking a job.

Matt Blumberg: So one of the things that I always thought was interesting, I think before, if I remember correctly, before WeWork bought Meetup, they bought Conductor and possibly a couple other things too. They started buying software companies, things that were totally unrelated, at least operationally.

David Siegel: They bought a surfing company. That wasn't too related either.

Matt Blumberg: To do a real estate company. How did that work? Was there any DNA at the executive level that served you well or served Conductor well? I can ask Seth that question too, or was it just an odd fit from the beginning?

David Siegel: Meetup specifically, or some of the other companies?

Matt Blumberg: As you know it.

David Siegel: As I know it? Okay. Listen, WeWork drove phenomenal success because they, number one, were incredibly aggressive in their approach to decision- making, in their approach to capital deployment and in their willingness to take risks. That culture can be extremely valuable to companies that were much more worried about taking risks, deploying capital, et cetera. Meetup was one of those companies that had historically not taken many risks because they were a private company and they wanted to ensure the continued growth of the brand. And I think from that perspective, there was a lot of value in approaching that, but only from that perspective, meaning 95% of it was probably more problematic. For example, one of the KPIs and Bolster might like this one, actually, one of the KPIs for Scott and the Meetup team when I joined, I looked at the 10 most important KPIs, was to maximize the number of people hired as quickly as possible. When I looked, there were a lot of KPIs in red, very few were in green, that one was in green. That's not necessarily a great KPI, that is directly as a result of the WeWork mantra, but I think it's very important to scale once you have the right fit to scale and not just scale for scale's sake. That was not exactly a significant value that was being brought to the table. By and large I would actually just be very honest and say the biggest thing they brought to the table for most of the companies they acquired was capital. Flatiron School is a company that they acquired. Flatiron School was growing at a decent pace beforehand. Flatiron School and their founder, Adam Enbar, ended up growing at a much faster accelerated pace because of the capital that they were able to get for WeWork and which is very valuable for growth.

Matt Blumberg: All right, so Adam Neumann, visionary, Adam Neumann, by most accounts, at least a little bit eccentric. Did you ever have a moment where you met the eccentric side in a way that was kind of odd or uncomfortable or entertaining?

David Siegel: I mean, yeah, all three all the time. And again, I really want to emphasize that Adam, when he talked about elevating the world's consciousness, which you referenced, he really did want to elevate the world's consciousness.

Matt Blumberg: I'm sure he did. I'm sure he believed his company would do it. I just had a hard time connecting the two.

David Siegel: Yeah. There are leaders that just put things out there to sound good and don't necessarily believe in them. He deeply believed and he truly wanted and continues to want to help to make the world a better place, which I think is a incredibly noble cause and really beautiful thing. How he goes about doing that is a different story. One story that comes to mind, aside from the ones that we've shared so far, is after the 90 days was up, he said, " Okay, David, the 90 days is up, now I get to sink my teeth into Meetup. I'm going to be visiting every week. I'm going to spend a lot of time with you. We're going to kickstart this off by we need six straight uninterrupted hours together and we can get that uninterrupted time together. If you come with me and you fly with me from New York to San Francisco and then you'll just take a flight back." And I said, " Oh, what are we going to do on the flight and when are we going to do it?" He said, " Well, the time we're going to do it is my hours are kind of atypical. The flight is going to take off close to midnight and then we'll arrive at six o'clock in the morning, drink lots of coffee, we're going to figure out the company's strategy." And I don't really operate well past 10 o'clock. I'm much more of a morning person, shall we say. And I also didn't think it would work well figuring out what the company strategy was together versus me kind of communicating, " This is the company strategy" in a more thoughtful kind of direction, and getting feedback about what the company strategy was. And I wasn't in a position after 90 days yet because I spent my first 90 days, frankly eliminating the entire executive team. So I had 12 people that report to me. Within six months, none of them were still there, none of them were there anymore. Not a single person was still at the company six months later. I spent most of my time figuring out the who before the what, which is a Jim Collins principle. I spent my time in that. Now that I had the right executive team, I wanted to work with them to figure out the strategy and I wanted to avoid it. Adam looked at me at one point and when trying to get me to fly, and I told him, " No, I'm not going to do it." And he said, " If Barack Obama asked you to fly with him, would you turn down Barack Obama?" And I said, " No, but I'm not sure you're Barack Obama." But bottom line is, after that kind of altercation, we actually never spoke again.

Matt Blumberg: Wow.

David Siegel: We really never had another really meaningful conversation after that rebuff. And that was perfectly... It was uncomfortable, but it was also fine. And again, I loved many of my previous and other group interactions with him, and that's an experience of a bit of an eccentricity, shall we say.

Matt Blumberg: That is a darn good one. All right, so I want to talk for a few minutes about your book and then we can kind of wrap up. Your book again, it's called Decide and Conquer. It is not just the telling of the story of Meetup from the point when you took over as CEO forward, but it is one of the clearest and most comprehensive documentations of a management philosophy that I've ever seen. It's very succinct. It's very clear you have-

David Siegel: I'm the first startup CEO by the way, just so you know.

Matt Blumberg: We can come back to that another time. You have about, I don't know, 10 or 12 principles that you talk about in the book. And not only you, it's not like you have a chapter about each one. Anytime one of them comes up in the book, it's in bold and it's just a reminder like, " Oh, this is one of those principles." You probably have a dozen stories about each of the dozen principles. I have one question that I sort of wondered as I was reading the book, which is it's such a clear documentation of you as a leader and that people who come to work for you at Meetup, presumably someone says to them, " Oh, you've got to read David's book." Or maybe you make it part of onboarding or something, or you got to read David's book.

David Siegel: Every employee gets a .

Matt Blumberg: So it's an instruction manual for your CEO, for understanding your CEO. How does that work for you practically? What happens if you don't follow one of them for either intentionally or unintentionally? Or do people reference it with you? How does that work in day- to- day David Siegel life?

David Siegel: I get called out on anything that I say that is inconsistent with what I believe, which is the exact way it should be. It is a beautiful thing if one of my principles is, let's say be speedy in decision making and I'm taking too long to make a decision and someone on my team goes, " David, you talked about the importance of speed of decision making, what's going on?" Or I mentioned about the importance of not surprising someone in a decision and someone is surprised by a decision that's made. And I get called out. One of the goals in life, forget business, is to grow as a person. And just like my wife is amazing at calling me out and my kids are increasingly great at calling me out and my friends also hopefully in respectful and thoughtful ways, and especially the kids, sometimes not. You want that from people around you because ultimately that's how you become a better person, it's how you become a better leader. If you're able to create a mechanism and CEOs don't need to write books to do this, they could have core values to do this as well. If you create a mechanism of the ways in which you operate and those are shared with others and they're communicated effectively and over and over again and it creates an environment where you could be then be called out on not being consistent with that, that'll only help to make you hopefully a more consistent leader and hopefully ideally a better person.

Matt Blumberg: So, have your kids read the book? Do they actually call you out on things from the book?

David Siegel: The kids do not call me out on things from the book. They call me out on other things in life. It's funny, my daughter who is 16, she's like, " Dad, the problem with the book is it's so cringey reading about all the things that you did." A friend of hers came over and she saw the book in her room and she starts reading the book out loud. She's like, " This is really good." They just read the first 30 pages of it out loud and it made me very happy.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, you realize it's only cringey because you're her dad.

David Siegel: Of course. Of course.

Matt Blumberg: All right. So of all these principles you have, I'm going to read them all out because they're just great, right? There's be kind, be confident, be bold, expand your options, focus on the long- term picture, be pragmatic, be honest, be speedy. Do what's right for the business, work for your people and they'll work for you. And be surprised only about being surprised. I think I extracted the full list from the book. It's a tremendous list of principles and almost all of them, if you think about it's like, yes, that makes sense for a CEO principles, the one that stands out for me that's a little different that hopefully every founder CEO growth stage company thinks about expanding their options. If they don't, they have no business being in business. Hopefully they're honest. If not, they should go to jail. But the one that stands out for me that's a little bit different is be kind, which I think is actually the first one that you reference in the book. I don't know if it gets the most play or the least play as the book goes on, but it's the first one you talked about. And so I'd love to sort of wrap up the episode here by you talking about the importance of being kind a little bit in business.

David Siegel: Oh, I love it. And you don't need to hear this, but I would say you're one of the kindest CEOs I know. And that's why I really respect and love our friendship and relationship. Notice I use the word be kind and I'll say be nice. And I think it's very important to differentiate between those two words being nice and being kind. What I mean by that is it isn't nice to have to fire someone, but you could be kind while doing so. It makes someone feel bad when you have to fire someone. It isn't nice to go to someone who's been working on a project and say, " I know you spent the last three months working on this. I need you to pivot. Even though it's 80% done." That makes someone feel uncomfortable and makes someone not feel great. There's nice at the one end, which people sometimes don't want to upset other people. And if you're a CEO that doesn't want to upset other people, you're not going to be effective CEO, full stop. Being kind though is so critical because ultimately as a leader, you build your management team with people who trust you, who want to go to battle with you. The way in which you want to be treated is the way in which you should treat others. As the saying goes, if you are kind, you are going to be able to hire a higher caliber person and have them come back to continue to work for you. I know Matt, you've had multiple people on your team that this is the second or third or maybe even more times that they've worked with you. My CTO, this is the third company we've worked together. Another person, this is fourth company that we've worked together. I think if you're kind, then you do that. Kindness means being upfront. It means being honest. It means open. It means being transparent. It doesn't necessarily mean being nice, it means being humble at the appropriate times as well. And so much comes down to your reputation and the relationships which you build. And if you turn off significant numbers of people, if you are highly arrogant, if you behave inappropriately, if you're not a kind person, it will come back to you. It will hurt you ultimately. And that's one thing. It is in one's best interest to become, and you'll be more successful CEO if you are kind. But taking that away, it's also just the right thing to do. And being just a good human being,

Matt Blumberg: Good for the soul and good for the business. That is a very happy intersection. David Siegel, CEO of Meetup, thank you so much for spending time with us today.

David Siegel: Thank you for having me.