On the one hand, it's always a shame to read of cases where a company with a great culture which people clearly enjoyed and valued is changed for 'bad' reasons - takeover, or profit, or similar.
...but...
> “I really don’t think they would have been able to attract the talent they did without it because the product wasn’t there. They didn’t innovate. Meetup is not attractive except for their culture, except for their values”
If the product sucks, then a) you've got to ask why, and b) that probably needs to change, for the sake of the company (which actually offers a valuable product, IMO) and its employees.
And here's what seems to have been judged to be the issue: if your priority is to hire a diverse workforce that enables a gentle, happy, collaborative culture, then your priority isn't to hire the best possible workforce, to create the best possible product.
I don't want to come over as James Damore here (and I'm sure there are plenty of cases of a diverse workforce creating a great product) but this isn't fundamentally unreasonable. If your priority is cultural excellence, you're going to get cultural excellence, possibly to the exclusion of other factors: if your priority isn't product excellence, you're not going to get product excellence.
The greatest reason I believe a company should prioritize for cultural excellence is for its causation effect on product excellence. I firmly believe this causation exists and this mutually exclusive scenario you mention doesn't exist.
Yeah, fair point - perhaps I miswrote, as 'cultural excellence' is too broad a term. For sure, a high-performing company producing a great product needs a great culture to support it.
My points are:
a) it seems that Meetup tried to optimise their culture for aspects that were not directly related to --and controversially, maybe even opposed to-- product excellence. i.e. their initial version of 'cultural excellence' was more about creating a pleasant inclusive place to work, rather than a productive or high-performing place to work.
b) further, if (as a result) your hiring decisions are more guided by prioritising people that will fit into and perpetuate that cultural vision, you're implicitly choosing to not prioritise hiring high-performers.
(As said before, it's not mutually exclusive - there may be some high-performers that do fit into your cultural vision... but on a macro scale, if you follow that particular cultural vision, the trend will be away from excellence and performance.)
I feel like I read a different article than you. You seem to be tying Meetup's woe's to an over emphasis on their part in creating a diverse workplace. The article doesn't present any evidence that the leadership's focus on creating an inclusive culture was hurting their product. Rather, the problem is that Meetup didn't innovate would not be able to compete against Facebook.
You could argue that the reason why Meetup didn't have a culture of innovation was because leadership was too busy optimizing for an inclusive culture. But again, an innovative culture and an inclusive one are not mutually exclusive, and the article doesn't support the conclusion that Meetup's culture was getting in the way of innovation.
In fact, the employee you quote and most of the article goes against your second point. It seems that their previous culture was the only advantage Meetup had going for it when it came to recruiting. They were able to hire people of much higher caliber than the product warranted or deserved because of that culture. And once they changed that culture they began to lose talent.
Put this way, I agree. There is always a risk to lose sight of your final objective and become myopic focusing on more immediately perceived issues.
I think I read Paul Graham (or someone from YC) stating that you want diversity of background on your team, but not diversity of objectives. I wholeheartedly agree with this. The more diversity on your team (regarding every dimension: gender, race, nationality, personality traits, education, etc), the more chance you have at building a great product; as long as all of them have unity of vision and goals.
As an anecdotal example, I was hired as a software developer on a team of mostly electrical engineers, and our group develops software/supports the energy management system at a major utility company. Now when I was interviewing, what the team seemed to like the most was my background in actual electric utility operations (I was in the electrical trades for a long time before I figured out that I wanted to study CS). I was the only person on the team with actual operations experience.
My boss love it because I could go and talk with the operators, and speak "operator" with them. It made translating their requests into features/upgrades/updates a lot easier for our team, and our customer service improved as a result. By having that background in operations, which was different from the rest of my team, I was able to bring a different perspective, and most importantly, the perspective of our customers to our day to day work.
But what is "cultural excellence" in the general case? I'd argue that "a really fun place to go into work" and "a place where we are relentlessly focused on creating the best product" could both reflect cultural excellence while still optimizing for different outcomes.
[ADDED: I agree with your sibling comment. So long as a business can continue to operate in a manner satisfactory to the owners/management, a variety of different cultures and management styles are perhaps equally valid.]
While the OP may be wrong in assuming mutually exclusive scenario, the causation effect is not clear either, There are plenty of examples for both kind of cultures creating product excellence and also failing miserably.
They're not mutually exclusive but the point is that single-minded ambition towards cultural excellence is a one-way ticket to a rudderless company that has no means of averting disaster.
Such a company can only exist in a fantasy land where growth and expansion are always eschewed for social justice.
Sure, but a single-minded ambition towards product excellence at the expense of cultural excellence creates a company that acts unethically towards its employees and, likely, its consumers/surroundings as well (if it doesn't go out of business due to its cultural problems).
That's just as bad as rudderlessness, if not worse. The answer needn't be an extreme, and these discussions needn't consider business success as the sole axis of correctness--ethics should be considered as well, whether or not it has a monetary value.
A) what constitutes cultural excellence? I’ve worked in diverse, toxic workplaces, and workplaces that ran extremely well with little diversity (and vice versa).
B) your assertion seems to be disproven by the world. Look at the top tech companies with the best products; they are all embroiled in drama with regards to toxic culture one way or another. The market does not seem to select for workplace culture.
Studies like the one from project Aristotle (https://nyti.ms/20WG1yY) are a counterpoint. Hire to create the best team, not to create the best lineup of individuals. You only hear about successful teams that have drama because they have drama, not because being a successful team requires drama
This is wishful thinking. Sometimes these overlap completely. Other times, hopefully rare, there are decisions that favor one result over the other. It's not simply black and white.
If what you say were true, optimising for diversity would be totally irrelevant. I don't know if any company that is more racist than it is profit seeking.
Investment banking is largely driven by sales, as far as friends in the industry have told me. The company simply needs to support an effective sales culture, not a product one.
Given the rate of startup failure, and the sheer number of other companies whose "product wasn't there", what reason do we have to believe that hiring a diverse workforce is more relevant than all the other possible reasons for not creating the best possible product?
Yeah, it hasn't innovated, but it hasn't needed to; it has been a sufficient product since the start and never needed to change much.
It's really a shame that I can't immediately bring to mind any stories of companies like Meetup that have a simple product that makes a small amount of money, enough to provide a good living to the small cadre of staff it requires to run it. Maybe Craigslist? Wikipedia, except they're always having to beg for money. I think there may be lots more examples in B2B, but it just doesn't seem like the consumer game lends itself to such companies.
I would say Craigslist is definitely a good example. What I think happened there is that the Craigslist business model, such as it was, so thoroughly nuked the profitability of the classifieds space (which was a big part of newspapers' bread and butter for years) that it didn't make sense for a next gen competitor to move in--especially given network effects.
Maybe Ebay? It got away from its roots and is arguably less good for just about everybody concerned than it used to be. But, again, network effects and no one seems much interested in trying to recreate Ebay 1.0 in all its flea market glory.
But, yeah, in general consumer sites that go "OK, it's good enough. We're just going to hang, take long lunch breaks, and keep things going at a just profitable enough level" are going to, sooner or later, be passed by the newer/better/shinier hip kid of the moment.
I think their bread and butter is B2B though, right? I definitely think this is accomplishable in that world, but it seems like it is close to impossible in the consumer world.
There's a lot of nuance in the distinction between cultural excellence and product excellence.
In IT and a few other fields, a lot of people have come to associate "cultural excellence" with "work is a really fun activity because of perks/getting to do whatever I want/having a very fraternal relationship with all of my colleagues". That's an extreme, and, I think, harmful, spoiled, and incorrect understanding of cultural excellence.
When confronted with that that claim (that the perk/fun-based definition of cultural "goodness" is wrong), however, people tend to argue against it from extremes "Are you saying I shouldn't feel good while at work? That I should just tough it out while being abused/overworked/discriminated against? That it's some weird character-building masochistic activity?!"
No, of course not. Cultural excellence includes professionalism, compassion, making employees feel valued and rewarded, and making sure they don't feel persecuted or attacked in the workplace. But that's a line that's hard to draw, especially when participants in the conversation are entitled ("well, $big_company_x gives me a ball pit and a nap room, so I think you're stodgy!") or truly threatened ("To me as $underrepresented_demographic_x, any cultural statements short of radical inclusivity and protection sound suspiciously like excuses for discrimination and cultural oppression in the workplace!"
--a suspicion that is unfortunately justified quite often).
When it comes to product excellence, the nuance and difficulty discussing it comes from the perceived dichotomy between product/cultural values. Valuing cultural quality isn't at odds with product quality unless you do it wrong; a good culture facilitates more ideas, employee growth (an employee who grows makes better contribution to the product), and helps make the structures for acquiring, keeping, and getting rid of employees more fair and productive.
However, discussions about that dichotomy often end up with "well we can either not grow or value radical workaholism/Uber-style cults of personality/whatever, so might as well prioritize the product and forget about the irrelevant soft stuff!" That's false, because you need both to succeed. Different strategies might work better or worse depending on what phase of it's life the business is in, or on other factors, but the strategies shouldn't be split into "cultural" and "product". You can't get by with one or the other; thinking about it as a tradeoff is myopic and harmful.
TL;DR conversations about culture/product excellence are important to have but tricky to conduct in practice because of misperceptions, participants' prior bad experiences, and the tendency to argue from extremes.
The slide deck looks like a persiflage to me. Something I would expect to see in a movie [1].
Are employees in the US really such ducklings that they swallow such insult and paternalism?
If I would be a manager at Meetup and would be shown a bunch of bullshit bingo slides about how my current approach is shit and that I am supposed to become better at my job by 'pushing to achieve more' my reaction would be clear.
I would say 'Dude, I have built and refined my management approach over many years. It's based on these key values. And these metrics. Held together by the following theory. And I have a lot to show for it. I achieved this and this and this and this last year. Tell me again with a straight face how this is not exceptional performance. And now take your pile of cliches and fuck off.'.
> Are employees in the US really such ducklings that they swallow such insult and paternalism?
AFAICT: yes.
But they don't really have a choice. "At will" employment, combined with employer-based health insurance, huge debt loads (student loans, mortgages) and no social security puts employees in a pretty weak position. And that apparently weakens management skills considerably, we had an import from the US whose exclusive management skill apart from blaming the team for his obvious and blatant screwups appeared to be ultimatums of the form "if you don't like it, you can leave".
H1Bs are in an even worse situation, because in theory they have to leave the country at the very moment their employment is terminated (in practice there is a small grace period).
I threw up a little at the "binding arbitration clause" mentioned in the article forced onto employees with their contracts. In Germany, for example, arbitration clauses are simply illegal in employment law. More generally, when involving consumers, they must be separate, signed agreements, so cannot be imposed as fine-print or as parts of a different agreement.
> However, as of January 17, 2017, foreign professionals under the H-1B visa will have a 60-day grace period if their employment is terminated.
Note that the time given to leave after the end of the regular employment term is still 10 days, and that is a point of confusion for some people. IMO, 10 days, while tight, is not unreasonable if you know it’s coming far in advance.
Let me make it very clear that I am not trying to make a value judgment about the H1B visa program — rather, I just want to get some facts straight for others who are reading.
I guess the problem stems from whether you see a company as a 'family' or a 'place of work'. I'm personally pretty sceptical about the 'family'-type. In my experience this goes overboard and ends up being an ineffective day-care center for adults. On the other hand, clarity and business results done in a human but effective way tend to get people motivated and intellectually do their best work.
Disclaimer: this is from a western European perspective, where sentiments and labour laws are a bit different of course.
An apt comparison! Netflix, as a point of reference, talks about "team versus family" in their culture page:
> A dream team is one in which all of your colleagues are extraordinary at what they do and are highly effective collaborators. The value and satisfaction of being on a dream team is tremendous. Our version of the great workplace is (...) a dream team in pursuit of ambitious common goals
> If you think of a professional football team, it is up to the coach to ensure that every player on the field is amazing at their position, and plays very effectively with the others. We model ourselves on being a team, not a family. A family is about unconditional love, despite your siblings’ unusual behavior. A dream team is about pushing yourself to be the best teammate you can be, caring intensely about your teammates, and knowing that you may not be on the team forever.
Based on Meetup's slide deck, it sounds like they are trying to establish a high-performance culture with clarity of mission, when they haven't had that previously.
I joined a new team where the members never eat lunch with each other. I don't like to eat with co workers every single day but I do want to chat with them casually once in a while. So I organized a team lunch.
Honestly, the slide deck to me looks like a positive and important correction from a company that's been too lax and directionless in its management (this is an inference - I don't know anything about Meetup specifically). It's not contemptuous, it's honest and direct. Most companies would not be so honest with everyone about seeking a change in direction like this.
> Past: We debate too much without defined decision makers and don't act on decisions
> Starting now: Clear decision makers end the debate, communicate the decision, and act quickly
> Past: We wait too long to take action when someone isn't meeting expectations
> Starting now: We take actions fast and say goodbye when someone isn't meeting expectations
Someone who has been a manager for years should know how poisonous it is if people can't make a decision because they are overly focused on consensus and there is no clear decision-maker; and they should know how poisonous it is if people keeping debating the same decision after it's been made, and don't get on board with implementing it.
Lack of accountability is similarly poisonous, and lack of initiative is problematic. Letting poor performers stick around too long is poisonous (it demoralizes everyone else). These and other principles in the deck are part of the basics of good management. I don't see much to object to in here.
The slide deck makes it seem like this is an organization with a (management) culture that's gotten fairly far off-track from focusing on building a successful, thriving, growing business. Senior leadership is trying to course-correct. This slide deck is a nice way of communicating "we have a serious culture problem and need to fix it".
Managers who are achieving success and have not fallen victim to these anti-patterns probably don't need to change anything because they already understand the lessons embodied in these slides. Hopefully those managers are rejoicing because their ineffectual peers are being steered in the right direction now.
There are degrees of everything of course. I'm not sure the "It's just business" approach of a typical high-performing football team is necessarily the best model for a lot of companies. The default approach to someone going through a rough patch for family reasons or whatever maybe shouldn't be to boot them out the door.
But, yeah, to the degree that their culture was driven by the "Past" descriptions, especially taken to extremes, I don't see anything particularly problematic about that deck.
Nowhere is it implied that people going through rough patches will be judged for poor performance and “booted out the door.” The point is that people should be setting expectations ahead of time and will be held accountable for the expectations they set.
There is ample room in a high-performing workplace for the rare rough patch, just needs to be done in a way that optimally allows the team to minimize the disruption.
The main condition is that rare rough patches should be rare. Obviously people who constantly go through rough patches can not be expected to perform highly and are not appropriate employees in a high performing work environment.
Yep - was going to post something similar, but you've already put it very nicely.
Many of the 'past' statements remind me of the situation in my current (non-IT) company. The problems they bring, and the sire need for change, resonate strongly with me.
Slide decks like aren't intrinsically bad but from my experience most people who produce them don't actually live by them. A lot of the managers I respect the most don't constantly give motivational speeches but they lead by example. People notice that quickly and act accordingly.
I view people who hand out slide decks like this as weak. Instead of doing the difficult work they just talk about it and leave it to others implementing it.
In the last few months the organizers of the meetups I go to have been complaining about changes to meetup, and noted that it is obvious that the changes are being made by people with no clue about what organizers need or how they use the platform. I've been using Meetup for at least a decade, and I've never heard this topic raised before.
The conversation continued about alternatives and only Facebook was considered a viable alternative.
I am this friend. I am both a software guy and a meetup organizer. I searched high and low for an alternative to meetup last year, for my own use, and mostly because I didn't think Meetup.com provided me enough value to warrant their $180/year fee. I didn't find any usable alternatives at the time.
In the months since, I have found these platforms, which are all built by organizer/techies attempting to solve their own problems, and to tap into the groundswell of discontent with Meetup.com.
I've put a lot of energy into reading complaints about Meetup.com in the last few months, and one of the most common ones is a real frustration among organizers about being heard. There are endless stores of sending messages to Meetup support and hearing nothing, or receiving canned answers. About having no input into the interface updates. About corporate messaging that is all about the experience for meetup group MEMBERS (the ones who don't pay meetup) and not the organizers (the ones who do). And a great deal of pessimism about the WeWork purchase, and how little incentive there could be in that future, to improve things for organizers.
I help at misc non-profit orgs. Event coordination is a constant thorn. I've tried both meetup and fb. Meh.
I basically want is a lightweight whitelabel or OSS optionally self hostable thingie, backed by a repo, some kind of calendar link. I checked out a bunch of wordpress add-ons. The stuff I found it both too little and too much, if that makes sense.
I haven't had the gumption to write my own. I'll check out the links you've provided.
Meetup.com is expensive beyond any reasonable justification if we consider that most services provided by GitHub/GitLab, Facebook, Doodle, etherpads, Google calendar... are more complex and yet free.
There seems to be an overall attitude in these early comments that have seemed to reach a consensus of, "Those changes sound like what every company should have."
Personally, I'm not sure I agree.
I think it's entirely possible that those qualities are not what help startups grow, but instead please investors/people not involved in the actual success of the company, while generally decreasing real productivity, increasing turnover, and causing anyone who sticks out from the norm to be the first to go.
I might be wrong, but I've yet to be on a team under hard pressure for long periods of time that I saw productivity rise under. Instead, people stress more, and productivity drops because everyone's worrying about looking like they're working instead of figuring out the right work and nailing it.
It depends on how you view it, over the long term you are simply left with people who can cope, whether it is good way to run a team/organization is a different question, but it certainly possible to get gains over longer periods of time
For example in professional team sports you face high pressure constantly, while individuals fail all the time unable to cope with demanding physical and mental nature of the job, teams however can and do usually improve because the retain the ones who can thrive and perform in such environments and "firing" the ones who don't.
Sports teams generally contract with players. Most employees do not have contracts and golden parachutes and the like. Comparing business to pro sorts isn’t very helpful.
The key factor to me is that the pressure has to be periodic, or cyclical, so everyone knows there will be a point where it eases off a bit. Rhythms like this are built into pretty much all aspects of biological systems, and human constructs which better reflect them are, I think, more likely to be successful.
Someone mentioned a professional sports team vs. 'family' analogy elsewhere here, and while I'm not much of a sports guy the analogy seems like a good one. Pro teams have plenty of down time built into their yearly patterns.
It is but it's probably also extreme in the context of how most companies are/should be managed.
Having a bit of an off-year because you're having some trouble getting on the same page as the new quarterback or whatever. Well, nice to know you, but we're trading you. "It's just business." Hope things work out.
Mind you, some occupations are pretty much like that. Sales jobs in particular are pretty ruthlessly results-oriented. Miss your numbers a couple of times even though it's because of some external factor you may not have control over and you're probably looking at the door.
Meetup and AirBnB are the two companies that made the most profound positive impact to my life. They allow me a type of lifestyle that would not be possible without them. Travel around the world, stay in places I like and meet like-minded people.
I couldn't say which of the two companies creates more value for me. So it's interesting to see that one is valued at $20m and one at $1B.
Is the recent Meetup redesign related to the acquisition?
The redesign made the site so much worse. The UI became confusing. You constantly get 'keep waiting' spinners. And the look is kind of cold and harsh now. Would be funny if the new management style directly shows itself in the style of the site.
It will be interesting to see how Meetups journey continues. I hope it survives the new management. It's such a gem.
WeWork is growing rapidly and has a product people are willing to pay well over the cost for. Meetup doesn’t seem to have those same tailwinds.
If you could buy either company outright for $50MM, I think it’d be a grave mistake to choose meetup. If you could buy 0, 1, or 2 of them for $50MM per, I still think meetup is a hard pass. I’m thinking WeWork overpaid especially if they bought in cash. (Maybe less so if they paid in unicorn shares.)
Although I haven't studied Meetup in any detail I've known people who use it for various activities including a group that I used to be involved with. On the one hand, the $100-200 a year they charge to organizers might seem totally trivial. But, for often loosely organized volunteer activities, it's actually a surprisingly high-friction amount. The outdoor activity organization I was involved with actually debated whether to use Meetup over a couple of meetings given that we were listing our trips for free in other ways.
Raising these fees to, say, $500-1000 would probably be a complete non-starter for many groups.
Yep. Used it to organize a social entrepreneurship meetup and as the group grew, the cost quickly ended up being too much and we moved over to email newsletter with Eventbrite. This isn't fundamentally expensive for a business, but when you are just running a group to casually meet people and there's no commercial value to your group, this quickly end up being an expense that you want to avoid. We were told to just ask members of the group to contribute, but that's another friction. The other friction is that meetup emails were getting a little bit too much and most people don't want to get emails every week telling them which group they should join, which makes Eventbrite more attractive (a simple reminder the day before the event and that's it).
If I create a shared office (with lower price and similar service) right next to a WeWork office I would be able to take business away from WeWork. Hoever if I cloned the Meetup website I probably couldn't take any business from Meetup. Because Meetup is protected by network effects.
But yeah. People don't see any growth prospects for Meetup and now it has been eaten by WeWork.
In all fairness, WeWork does have plans where (for a daily fee) you can book at other locations. I honestly don't know how valuable that is. When I'm traveling on business, I have no trouble working out of my hotel or a cafe. I even rarely go into one of my company's offices unless I have some specific reason to do so. I'm not sure what would compel me to pay $50/day to sit in a shared collaborative space. I can buy a lot of coffees for that.
Co-working spaces also have capital requirements that a website doesn't. I don't disagree with your statement about network effects but dominating a market space is no guarantee that you can monetize that dominance.
Yes, especially since you hit them so quickly without actually having traction for your meetup. People join every group they are tangentially interested in, even if they then never make it to an event, and meetup's design encourages that. If you don't have a corporate sponsor (or only a small firm providing a room) that's a problem.
When you consider how long Meetup has been around (over a decade), how many employees it had at peak (hundreds), and how relatively stagnant the product had been over that period, it feels to me as though they might have prioritized the wrong things from a business standpoint even if they got the culture right.
If the exit price was truly $30 million as reported here, then that was a huge missed opportunity, since Meetup had the brand and the potential to capture much more value in the live community/events space.
I imagine the FB announcements were a wake-up call for the managers that made them reconsider their management approach. The slide deck was probably an attempt to frame positively the reality that despite a feel-good culture, their business was producing lackluster revenue/user growth, and that something needed to change.
I wouldn't say it's abnormal, but I also wouldn't say it's positive. It's clearly a move to less autonomy and more decisions-from-above. Stuff like "constantly push ourselves out of our comfort zone" literally means "we want to make this an uncomfortable place to work".
This type of culture is fine, there's nothing wrong with it, but we need to acknowledge that for people who joined in the previous setup, this is simply a management bait-and-switch.
I wouldn't say this is a bait and switch, but it is a betrayal. It sounds like a lot of people joined the company because of the work environment. An environment that placed importance of the people in it, and making it somewhere that they wanted to be and where they felt comfortable being who they were. To now turn around and imply that those same values are bad is a betrayal.
The slide deck is not surprising or positive to me either. For me, it is an example of the corporate neofeudalism that currently dominates the US workplace. Not only are you are cog in the machine, but you have to be passionate and optimistic cog too! It is not ok to simply do your job, you have to be outside your comfort zone!
From my perspective, it is dehumanizing. People have value beyond their economic potential.
The deck as a whole seemed pretty reasonable but that bullet in particular would give me some pause. A culture can be results-oriented without being managed as if people are automatons.
It is much harder to take something away, than to have never granted it in the first place.
Also if an employee chose to take a lower salary to work at a company with a relaxed culture, and that culture becomes just like any company, why wouldn't that employee expect their salary to be upped accordingly?
This article itself never mentions complaints about money. It reads to me that some employees don't want to accept the revised growth focused values, thus getting let go and still felt salty/betrayed about this.
If the culture will be gone no matter what because of the company's own reality, and they refuse to accept such changes, isn't departure an inevitable outcome?
This article itself never mentions complaints about money.
Sure, but the point I am making is that it is a material change to established terms and conditions.
Interestingly, one of the standard lies told during acquisitions is that "nothing will change", it's quite unusual for an acquisition target to do something like this. Usually its managers and even its previous owners if they become employees of the acquirer are taken by surprise when head office stamps on them.
I've often thought about what a new meetup-like startup would look like.
A few ideas from frequent pain points:
-A point system that gives you points when you actually check-in to a meetup you RSVP to. Points can be used to gain priority access to the most in-demand meetups or special events that otherwise fill up fast. On the other hand, a penalty system for people who RSVP but fail to check-in, which can help curb the current problem with people RSVP'ing to events with limited capacity with no intention of actually showing up.
-A real chat UI for those who RSVP that "lives" +/- a few days before and after the event date.
-For organizers, the ability to search for venues that are open to hosting meetups (either paid or sponsored)
-Better recommendations and search UI. Better filters. Upranking high quality meetups and downranking all the low quality ones I have to normally scroll through to find something worth attending.
-Ability to rate public meetups and/or provide feedback back to organizers.
-Ability to host "instant meetups" i.e. organizing a spontaneous happy hour same day at bar X for people who are learning Y.
I agree with pretty much everything here and I'm interested in working on a project to solve at least one of these problems. I've been a meetup organizer for a while and I can also do fullstack JS.
Maybe also a sign that the tech field is not as frothy as it was a few years ago... in general, it seems like from like 2009-2015 there was a bit more optimism and 'irrational exuberance'.
I noticed as well a shift of focus in the product, from before the acquisition: they forced users into a new flashy version of the website despite it being clearly broken, and less functional overall (e.g., meetup editing did not allow to save, and several features available only in the older version of the website). The net result for me so far has been to always have to go back to old version.
Worsening user experience does not seem a good way to grow.
I don’t really understand the criticism of Meetup not innovating enough. People create meetups and other people attend. Yes the UI could be better but, fundamentally, what innovations are needed? What is wrong with Meetup just continuing to offer the same basic service, give or take a few incremental improvements here and there?
The cynic in me reads that as the founders realized they had put a decade into something which is going to be steamrolled by corporate machines and if they didn't get out fast they wouldn't have anything to show for it. That is a sad way to go if it was the motivation.
That said, there seems to have been a wealth of ideas about how to improve the product and better serve the customers which went unimplemented. If my understanding of that is correct then the fault lays solidly on the management team for not being able to communicate and lead the troops.
> Decisiveness
> Past: We spend too much time building consensus
> Starting now: Everyone else stops debating and gets on board once the decision is made
I am going to guess $30 Million is a typo because that would be very odd...I have an easier time imagining meetup acquiring wework than the other way around :)
"There was a pervasive sense that the company wasn’t moving fast enough"
Moving fast enough where? Meetup's core product hasn't changed in over a dozen years. It's a great platform, but except for the user base, it can be cloned in a weekend or two. Do they just mean more user acquisitions? Because there's nowhere to move forward with this product. It already does its job extremely well.
This article is vague because something is being papered over.
My interpretation: “We focused our culture on creating a corporate safe space and hired a bunch of people more interested in safe spaces than actually growing the organization and competing, then we began to lose ground and had to reverse course and became so scared of our own employees we had to enact measures to prevent them from revolting on us when we asked them to work harder.”
I think the entire social justice tidal wave that hit tech is going to destroy many companies, these attitudes and building corporate cultures focused on entertaining then lead to profoundly uncompetitive behaviors. Imagine how hyper alert these people are to even the lightest pressure.
It works great when finance is plenty and times are good. Once the market turns, every company that chose diversity and inclusion for their culture is going to implode violently and face employee revolts.
Google is especially prone to this. Of the major tech companies, google have gone out of their way to hire as many blue haired safe spacers as humanly possible. These efforts are going to backfire when they need to get mean and lean.
I think that's near-completely false, and harmful/inhumane/unethical to boot. My comments elsewhere in this thread explain why.
As a separate aside/quibble: when you say "blue haired" are you referring to people with dyed hair, or people older than a certain age? Both are derogatory/prejudicial/rude terms in context, but throughout my life I've heard "blue hair" used to refer to the latter (older people), has that changed? Is "blue hair" now a stereotyped signal for political beliefs?
On the one hand, it's always a shame to read of cases where a company with a great culture which people clearly enjoyed and valued is changed for 'bad' reasons - takeover, or profit, or similar.
...but...
> “I really don’t think they would have been able to attract the talent they did without it because the product wasn’t there. They didn’t innovate. Meetup is not attractive except for their culture, except for their values”
If the product sucks, then a) you've got to ask why, and b) that probably needs to change, for the sake of the company (which actually offers a valuable product, IMO) and its employees.
And here's what seems to have been judged to be the issue: if your priority is to hire a diverse workforce that enables a gentle, happy, collaborative culture, then your priority isn't to hire the best possible workforce, to create the best possible product.
I don't want to come over as James Damore here (and I'm sure there are plenty of cases of a diverse workforce creating a great product) but this isn't fundamentally unreasonable. If your priority is cultural excellence, you're going to get cultural excellence, possibly to the exclusion of other factors: if your priority isn't product excellence, you're not going to get product excellence.