****Please forgive any and all transcription errors as this was transcribed by Otter.ai.****

David Siegel 0:00

Hey, I'm David Siegel and you're listening to A Shark’s Perspective.

(Music - shark theme)

Kenneth Kinney 0:19

Welcome back, and thank you for joining A Shark’s Perspective. I am Kenneth Kinney, but friends call me Shark. I'm a keynote speaker, strategist, a shark diver host of this show and your Chief Shark Officer.

Kenneth Kinney 0:31

Have you thought about the kinds of decisions that will make or break your ability to lead? Success basically boils down to making good decisions, easy to say. But what do you do when faced with terrible options, and not just riding on the good ones? In order to divide and conquer the world? If you will, it often means being able to decide and conquer. So I ask again, about your own decision making framework. What are the decisions that will make or break all leaders?

Kenneth Kinney 0:57

David Siegel is the CEO of Meetup, the largest platform for finding and building local communities, the former CEO of Investopedia, the former president of Seeking Alpha, and an adjunct professor at Columbia University, the host of the Keep Connected podcast, and the author of “Decide & Conquer: 44 Decisions That Make or Break All Leaders.”

Kenneth Kinney 1:16

And on this episode, we'll discuss a leadership decision making framework, leadership principles, the world's largest platform for finding and building community, combating loneliness, what Rebecca once said and the WeWork rollercoaster, events in person and online, debunking some leadership advice, pivoting your strategy, Mission Impossible, famous 44's, and a lot, lot more.

Kenneth Kinney 1:38

So let's tune into a Meetup decision maker with a shark who's here to swim and conquer on this episode of A Shark’s Perspective.

[intro music]

Kenneth Kinney 1:50

David, welcome to A Shark’s Perspective. Would you please tell us a little bit about your background and your career to date?

David Siegel 1:55

Well, okay, jump right in here we go. Probably not even as exciting as as you because I don't have a nickname of shark. I'm just like plain old boring, David Siegel. But background is I was an early employee at double click, which in the late 90s, was the center of the internet bubble, when I joined the stock was a tenant went up to 200, then went back down to eight. So it was a very exciting time to kind of start your career, I now started my career in human resources, which is not very common at all. I remember the CEO of double click at one point, said to me, Hey, David, what do you focus on? You know, in HR, I'm like, I focus on recruiting people I focus on, on on building great communication, alignment and organization to focus on motivating managers and building great management processes. And things like, I kind of do the same thing. So that's what I decided, hey, I'm a CEO one day, so I made my goal to become a CEO. And I worked through a number of different big corporate, digital, always tech companies like 100 flowers I was an executive in and the place where everybody health and I became the president of a company called Seeking Alpha, which is a large financial publisher, then it became CEO of Investopedia. sold that company. And then about four years ago, I became the CEO of meetup when it was owned by WeWork at the time, and that is a very quick overview of my career.

Kenneth Kinney 3:19

Well, Meetup is 20 years strong now. So as Rebecca once said, in case anybody doesn't know what's Meetup.

David Siegel 3:27

Very nice. So yeah, so I read the book, I told I see that. So in the book, deciding conquer the opening story is this story of Rebecca Newman, where she presumably wanted to change the name of meetup because she had never heard of it, even though, you know, we probably more people know me that then then many Fortune 500 companies, and we are the world's largest platform for finding and building community. That's a pretty big deal. We have 60 million members worldwide and 200 plus countries. But the reason why I'm so like obsessed with what we do, is because meet up its goal is to cure the loneliness epidemic that exists in this world. And you know, 46% of people, not sometimes not occasionally, but regularly feel lonely. And that's like a travesty. meetups goal is how do we help people to find their people? How do we help people to be connected to other people? How do we cure loneliness for everyone in this world? And, you know, that's what we do.

Kenneth Kinney 4:24

Why do you think people don't recognize it enough as a social platform? Because I had to be honest, when I first thought of it, with meetup, even getting ready for this, I don't know that I necessarily thought of it as a social platform before, but that's obviously what it is. And zoom and a lot of ways is very similar. It's about bringing people together and making it a less lonely world. But I'm fascinated with the social side of meetup. How does that sort of continue to evolve for you?

David Siegel 4:49

Yeah, so we are quote, unquote, the real social platform getting people together in person. So what we like to say is, we use technology to get people off of technology, and part of the reason why it's not are considered, quote unquote, with Facebook and Instagram and Tiktok. And Twitter is a lot smaller, we have 60 million users, not a billion users. That's number one. But number two is they're all about online. They're all about using technology to keep people on technologies no actually ever meet each other in person. And we're the opposite of that. So, you know, we, because our focus is getting together in person, which is not easy during the pandemic. But we really differentiate ourselves. You know, we don't all these different studies, something like 95% of meetup, organizers feel like they positively impact people's lives, different people have done studies and found that, you know, the more people that use meetup, the happier that they are at Facebook, Instagram, it's kind of the opposite of that. So hopefully, after this podcast, everyone will be thinking of meetup as the best social network. Exactly. We are, we're legit and real.

Kenneth Kinney 5:58

Well, you have an interesting perspective, because of your work with meetup. Do you see anything in the tea leaves, if you will, about meetings and events and conferences going on that others may not recognize you've got kind of a unique catbird seat into the social lens of events today?

David Siegel 6:13

Yeah, so first of all, at one point meetup was 100%. In person before the pandemic, then during the pandemic, it was, you know, went all the way down to like 20% of person 80%. In line. Today, we're back up to 82% in person 18% in line. So one I can think point I would share with you is that in persons coming back, whether it's conferences coming back in person, people are so desperate to get back out in person and to do things that we're seeing our registrations at the kind of record numbers, our daily active user regular, it's kind of like 100 years ago, in the 1920s, was known as the roaring 20s. Right. And it's not a coincidence that it came right after the Spanish flu and World War One where people are stuck at home. And they just have this desperate desire to go out and do things. So number one, I would say is people's desperate desire to do things is enormous. Number two, though, is it's changing dramatically, people are going out and doing things near their homes. They're not as much going out and doing things where they work, especially people work at tech companies. So we're seeing all these meetup groups, for example, springing up in like suburban areas, in more rural areas, because people are moving into those areas, because they're not going into the office five days a week anymore. So that's been a fascinating kind of evolution. Where, you know, in where I live in New York, there's an area beautiful area called Hudson Valley. And all these tech people are moving to Hudson Valley because they could work, you know, that have to come in the office ever. And we're seeing groups springing up in outlying areas an hour, hour and a half, two hours, two and a half hours, from bigger cities. So that's an interesting trend that's happening. The last thing I would say around trends is that many of our groups are hybrid groups, meaning they're creating events in person and online. And I think that's the future people are doing things in person. And online. I don't think people have always talked about events being Hybrid Hybrid events, meaning the same event is going to be in person online. That's happening a little bit. But what's much more happening is events are being either in person or online. And the same kind of groups are doing both.

Kenneth Kinney 8:28

I can't imagine why anybody would not want to come into the city. With the smell of even fresher urine on the subways today in the crime and everything going.....

David Siegel 8:38

Who doesn't love buy ugly, beautiful smell and New York City subway?

Kenneth Kinney 8:43

No kidding? Well, I had the pleasure reading your book, divide and conquer 44 decisions that will make or break all leaders. Where in the world did you come up with 44? And what was the impetus to write this book?

David Siegel 8:55

You want the there's the made up reason for 44? And the actual reason, the actual reason? Okay, because the main one is, the main one was I was 44 years old when I started, started meetup, which is just total coincidence. The actual reason is because as I was writing it, it ended up adding up to 44. As I wrote, the whole thing I didn't like have a set number kind of planned out. And then when I did, I was like, well, I could change this to 40. It could be very biblical, 40 days, 40 days, 40 years wandering the desert, I don't know make it 50 nice, round number, but we're like, just keep it out in the hopper. I started. We just We there was no rhyme or reason or anything special to 44 in terms of the book, you know, I I also teach at a unit at Columbia University. I teach entrepreneurship and strategy and I think many teachers tend to also love helping and positively influencing, you know, the minds of leaders and students, etc. So I think for many people that are professors writing comes in very naturally to them. And kind of since I was very young, I've always wanted to write a book, even in my 20s, possibly, you know, for ego reasons, which is not a great reason to do something. But you know, in thinking about like, what are the different incentives and why people want to do things, maybe it's more immortality kind of thing, book a lot. Last year, grandchildren read a book, always want to write a book. And I have a lot of kind of leadership management philosophies that I've taken on through the years. But I did not want to write like a boring management book where like, there's one concept, it's woven with 100 examples throughout the entire thing. And the goal, Rob's a different talk shows and you say like the same one concept, bit over and over and over again, that was very uninteresting, I want to write some kind of crazy roller coaster story of experiences. And then you learn management decision making leadership principles, kind of, through this roller coaster of experiences. The problem was, like a interesting career, lots of some ups and downs and experiences. But finally, I had the ultimate experiences of being part of WeWork. And WeWork with such a crazy experience that I literally birthed this book, I'm not kidding, in like, eight weeks, I basically wrote the entire thing. Because it's just like, there's so many crazy experience that happened in life. And I, I was able to take those, it was almost a form of therapy for me honestly, just like clearing my mind and getting it on paper. And and then fortunately, someone wanted to publish it. So it worked out. That's great.

Kenneth Kinney 11:31

That's great. It's ups and downs. And then WeWork. I mean, I'm not sure where that falls, if it was still up or still down. So

David Siegel 11:39

These days WeWork is pretty down.

Kenneth Kinney 11:40

It's pretty down, you know, as a leader now, the company you're in, when you hear other leadership experts and thought leaders and other CEOs, what do you think is some of the advice that people are hearing that you would say most often challenge is maybe not right or a little to glossed over? Because one of the things I loved about the book, it was the roller coaster that you went through, and stories that we all go through. But then a lot of people sort of package a lot of leadership stuff. And it's two packages, it looks like you've always been perfect, and everything else. So I'm kind of curious what your thoughts are on now that you've run a company like this for four years? Yes, yeah. What do you hear that you can argue against in the market?

David Siegel 12:20

Okay, I mentioned this in the book, especially as about one of my failings, and I talked about a lot of mistakes and failings in the book. But I had always been of the philosophy, that the best way to manage, and you'll hear this in 1000 leadership books is to empower your people is to, you know, make as few decisions as you can, which I do believe, and try to get other people to make those decisions, because they're closest to the reasons etc. And you're constantly will read about CEOs that are, you know, overly directive, and no one wants to work for them. And then I'm, you know, dented at it. And it's a problem micromanagers, don't micromanage, Delegate everything, One Minute Manager. So constantly hearing about it. And I always lead organizations that way. And I try leaving it up that way. And I fail miserably in the first year of being very empowering. And what I learned, and this goes in conflict with, I think, a lot of kind of management philosophy out there, which is, it's extremely important to really assess the situation that you're in, and potentially, to take on a extraordinarily different approach to how you manage and how you lead, depending on whether you're, you know, quote, unquote, a wartime CEO or peacetime CEO. And, and I think that more often than not many leaders will espouse different philosophies. But reality, the right philosophy is extraordinarily dependent on the situation that you're in. And the best thing that you could do is actually not espouse a specific philosophy, but be versatile enough, in order to quickly assess and then can possibly completely change how you approach things. So in the beginning, I didn't tell people what to do, you figure this out, you figure that out, we're gonna we're gonna figure it out. And it was a mess. Everyone was figuring out different things in different ways. And there was not enough accountability. And then I basically turned into a kind of person that leader I never want to work for, which is I need this done, and this done by the such and such date, if you don't get it done, it's going to be a problem. And things started, like really moving and they got when I saw that I got more and more directive, and even more directive, like wow, I was never this type of a leader. I hated those leaders, but it worked really well. So that's an example I think, of just the need to potentially throw out a lot of the advice that you've had in the past and just really try and see something else that that that may work totally differently in the past.

Kenneth Kinney 14:54

Yeah. Well, I love the fact that you do a lot of in these decisions, the the challenges into decisions and you weave that through the timeline. You know, whether it's zero day or first 3060 90 Day love that as you build it up, but uh, let's go into some of these decisions six. So with rebuilding meetup you talk about communicating and committing to your leadership philosophy. And one of those sadly, being what some would consider controversial, you're at least to your team it was, and that was revenue. So it sounded like many of the team weren't interested in enough or understood the need that a lot of leaders don't push for that, as you just said, and that's revenue to keep the lights on. Talk a little bit further about how communicating and committing to that in order to keep the lights on for the rest of the people that wanted to be, say emotional versus pragmatic, because I think this is a common problem that we're starting to see across the board on a lot of news channels all the time today.

David Siegel 15:47

Absolutely. Especially among tech companies, especially people who would probably call themselves highly progressive in nature, which many tech companies are but not all. You will see this anti revenue, anti business, anti Wall Street kind of mentality that seeps in. And meetup was that what it was all that like to the extreme, I think if anyone mentioned that they had ever voted for a Republican, for example, I'm not saying about my personal opinions or anything, they wouldn't even be able to help me. I've been a Meetup employee and didn't have....

Kenneth Kinney 16:21

You didn't have pictures of Gordon Gekko up on the wall.

David Siegel 16:24

The opposite. So when I got him, I said, you know, emotional intelligence, very important. I was like, Yeah, mission is very important. Yeah, they said, revenue is very important, like. So So I said, Listen, we can't succeed as a company. Unless we are making a profit, we are driving revenue driving revenue growth, the company was losing $20 million dollars a year, they're spending hundreds of 1000s of dollars on on Christmas parties, and holiday parties, and barbecues, every Friday, and just tremendous amounts of waste. And, and I said, I connected revenue to our mission, I said, revenue gives oxygen to our mission, because I knew so many people deeply believed in building community. And it wasn't just revenue gives makes David seals pockets heavier, because, you know, we get higher bonuses because no one cared. It was more revenue can make our mission more successful. If we want to build community for, you know, hundreds of millions of people that's more of an impact and building more impact than if we do it for 10 people. And what happened is what was great is that all those people that were really anti revenue, anti business, they made a fuss. And then ultimately they quit. And they left. And they were frustrated with the new CEO coming in and talking about the business concepts like ROI and revenue and all these other things. But ultimately, it was a good way to actually get the right people on the bus. And we have a lot of people leaving the beginning. Because they they want to work for a company that was like a nonprofit kind of thing. And I thought, no, that's not what meetups goal is. So it was a very stressful time period. And I literally looked at myself and said, Wow, used to be like this beloved CEO that on Glassdoor, everyone gave like super high ratings. And now it's like I looked at I was looking faster. And I was like, oh my god, people really don't like me a lot. And that was hard, it was very hard, because I was the kind of person probably more so than the now that really did want to be liked. And again, it goes with the process of being more directive and doing what's right for the company, not just what's right for, you know, each individual person. And it was a process, but now we are growing revenue as a company, growing double digit. And And what's great about it, is that, you know, we had 250 employees, when I started we have 80 some odd employees now. So a lot less, we're doing like three times the amount what we did back then, and, and growing revenue faster now with a third of the number of employees. So

Kenneth Kinney 19:02

Amazing. All right. So you later on in your challenge 13, you deal with something that most businesses, at least in my opinion, completely fail with today. And that's transparency. And leaders constantly feel like they should be more transparent. And they're trying to massage and manage the message. But you say communicate directly unpack that meaning, if you will, please.

David Siegel 19:23

Sure. So here's the thing, you're you gain a lot more. The number one thing to try to focus on in building for your team is trust your team trust you, you have everything. And the best way to build trust through transparency. It's so it's much more important to share problems, negatives, The Good, the Bad, and the ugly of things that are happening because that's how you build trust, not just being some cheerleader talking about great stuff. So meet up employees before I joined had never seen the company's financials. They didn't know the company was even losing $20 million a year so it's not there. Well, they're jumping up and down for big barbecues and, you know, 10% raises and things like that's not their fault. It's leadership's fault for not sharing that. So the job of us as leaders is to help to make the best decisions that we possibly can Well, guess what? When you're transparent as possible, and everyone has access to the same information, and everyone has access to the same reports, and they have now as I do as a CEO, that smarter decisions get made, bad decisions get made, when the salesperson only has access to sales information and product personally has access to product vision, everyone has their own siloed information. Nothing's transparent, nothing's shared, the problems aren't shared. When you share a problem with a company of 100 people, that's a that's 100 smart people that can help to work on that problem, and to make it better. So I'm obsessed with sharing everything to such a degree that our legal team always gets nervous. Our HR team gets nervous. And I feel like I'm not doing my job. Actually, if our finance, HR legal teams are not getting actually getting nervous. That's a great point. They get nervous, I'm happy, because that means I'm really pushing the envelope on being on being open about everything.

Kenneth Kinney 21:08

Well, decision 36 I love this one. But what do you do when you're presented with all bad options? You said, Hang on, and hope a better one appears? Because I think a lot of people, a lot of people think they're gonna come up with something good after but elaborate, if you will, what you meant by that?

David Siegel 21:24

Yeah, I mean, what happened was at that particular time, we were in the middle of selling meat up out of we work, it was during the pandemic. And there just weren't any kind of great scenarios. And a lot of times our job is to find the best worst case, the best worst scenario out there. And that's okay. Because sometimes there aren't great answers. And the the solution is not as a leader not to make a decision, or to just pray and hope is to say, Okay, there's four bad scenarios here. Let's just choose choose the best of the least worst one. So rise, we have a quote by Winston Churchill, which I don't even know if I have in the book, and I was one of my favorite quotes, which is, democracy is the worst form of government besides every other form of government. And I think that's true. Like, I think democracy has a lot of problems, but it's also the best form of government of any other government. And I think sometimes a decision may be a terrible decision to have to make. But it might be better than any of the other decisions that you're faced with and just make the decision. Don't wait. And don't be, don't be so optimistic that you're just completely not realistic about what's going on.

Kenneth Kinney 22:35

I loved it later, in chapter nine, when you talked about relying on your own mission? How did you balance what you determined? Was your mission, personally with what uh, might might have been the mission of the former leadership, the culture, the board, or whomever you might have had to answer to? Or what whoever the team had to answer to in the past?

David Siegel 22:56

Yeah, so if memory serves me, because I don't have the whole book as memorizes you do? Apparently. It easy. By the way, thank you for being so Sharky. Yeah. So I'm pretty sure what you're referring to there is when the pandemic hit. And our mission was always about IRL, which stands for in real life, doing things in person. And we were in fact, we turned down 1000s of people want to organize virtual groups. Prior to the pandemic, we turned down millions and millions of dollars that people wanted to pay us money to organize virtual groups. Well, once the pandemic hit, we said, what is our mission actually, is our mission, actually, about IRL in real life? Or is our mission about keeping people connected, keep people away from social isolation, keep people away from loneliness. And that's our mission, we need to understand that and we need to pivot and allow for virtual events. Because there's a difference between strategy and a mission, you can pivot your strategy, but it's so important to really understand what your mission is, as a company. And if you're pivoting your mission, well, that's, that's fine. Companies can do that. But it should involve a lot of time and energy and discussions with the board, etc. So mission development is very, very important for a company and it shouldn't be taken lightly. It took us over a year to kind of create meetups new mission. And we use that as an anchor kind of an all company decisions. And we use as an anchor, it was a pivoting. And there's now been close to 4 million virtual events from zero, you know, during the pandemic, and I think it's helped hopefully, many, many people.

Kenneth Kinney 24:36

Well, and you describe it as a major pivot. So I mean, that's, you know, that was a major pivot, a major pivot. So, a lot of leaders don't know well, how to relax, but you talk about it in the epilogue. So I'm just curious, how do you go about doing that as leader today, to kind of learn to relax and just be yourself?

David Siegel 24:54

Yeah. So I think, first of all, I think that you can't be a truly effective leader. For your not as much always yourself as possible. I think that if you're having to put up a shield and try to pretend to be a different type of person in front of others, then it's it's short term, people always find out the truth could be a moment of anger could be a moment of frustration, but the truth always comes out. So I think number one is if you're as a leader, just forget leader as any individual person, having to pretend that you're pretending to be someone other than yourself, you know, at work, find it find a place to work, right. So so I would say in terms of taking care of myself, I'm extremely focused on physical health, that positive effects impacts mental health, and emotional health. So I probably at this point, exercise seven days a week, I started in the mornings, you know, I drink vast amounts of water, so I'm not dehydrated. And then I just will usually do something bike run or, or I tennis, whatever it is that I try to do waking up early, I try to get that out of the way. And then I'll go on my day and have energy and those days that I don't exercise, I'm just so much more lethargic. And my mind is so much more unclear. And I think it's about just understanding, again, there are things that you hate to be so cliche about it. But the reality is, is that you're working to live. That's it, you're not living to work, right. And there were times mentioned in the book that like things were really crazy, really insane. And I hadn't vacations because my kids are vacation from my family. And everyone said, Okay, you obviously can't go, you're way too busy. I'm like, no, no, no, that's why I have to go. Because like, we got to take care of yourself, I really believe in the leaders, everyone, I need to put the oxygen mask on, take care of themselves. And that's how you're able to take care of other people, hopefully, around you. And if you're not, it's gonna explode, and you're gonna have a breakdown and have a divorce, other things will happen in life. And by strengthening yourself, you'll strengthen those around you. So I've always deeply believe that.

Kenneth Kinney 27:06

Well, we covered a lot of the decisions in the book, but were there any that we didn't cover that stood out to you that just jumped out as the most important or not important?

David Siegel 27:14

I mean, I tend to believe that prior decisions zero is not talked about enough around the world, which is the importance of setting yourself up for success prior to even starting a job. And that your first day. And your job is not your first day on the job is the moment you accept. It's figuring out what can you do in a week, the two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, even prior to starting that job to make you success? Who could you meet? What can you read? What information can you gather, prior to starting a job to ultimately, you know, be day one as successful as possible? And then as a manager? How could you enable a person to succeed by sending them information by setting up meetings for them, as opposed to like their people? Come there day one, and they're like, they have nothing in their calendar. So I tend to, you know, be a strong believer in in helping people to succeed way prior to their first start time. That would be one.

Kenneth Kinney 28:19

Yeah, well, a lot of my favorite meetups are when I go to the coasts so that I can go scuba diving, particularly with sharks, but I asked this of all my guests, David, what is your favorite kind of shark and why? You're not going to find a lot of polluted sharks in the East River, but it might be one of the Shark Tank fellows. It could be whatever you want.

David Siegel 28:36

Oh, can be any shark. Oh, okay. Because I don't know that much about actual Sharpsville. When I was 10 years old, I went fishing in Cape Cod. And it was a pretty memorable experience. We actually caught baby sharks as a family. And that was really scary. Because we're a little boat. And we're pulling it up. You know, like, you know, the fish. I don't fish that rod and reel robbery. Exactly. And it was a shark at the other end. And we were and we we cut the line, make sure we're okay, but it was we're voting or moving or all around and getting all scared and thought of the bokeh tip over. So that was actually my first shark experience when I was 10 years old. So I guess that will be my favorite shark and kind of teaching me that boats can move up and down. The waters could be a little scary. But you know what,

Kenneth Kinney 29:32

And always throw them back.

David Siegel 29:33

You could always throw it back. You always can pivot. You can always find a way to take care of yourself. There you go. Oh, my sharks doing all right.

Kenneth Kinney 29:41

Well, David, it's a special time in the show. You're ready for the five most interesting and important questions that you're going to be asked today.

David Siegel 29:47

I'm ready.

Kenneth Kinney 29:49

Number one, Columbia University or the University of Pennsylvania, your alma mater?

David Siegel 29:56

Oh, this just doesn't get shared with Columbia University but it answers the University of Penn So I've been online or the college years where I met my wife. And, and, and you know and so many of my best friends so it's definitely University of Pennsylvania I wear I wear a pen hat. I don't wear a Columbia hat.

Kenneth Kinney 30:13

Fair enough. All right. He wrote about 44 decisions. Let's talk about famous other 40 fours, NBA legend pistol, Pete Maravich, or Major League Baseball's Hank Aaron?

David Siegel 30:25

Oh, I'm gonna have to go with Hank Aaron, yeah.

Kenneth Kinney 30:28

Yeah. Both Hall of Famers but the guy broke so many barriers, color barriers as well. It's unbelievable.

David Siegel 30:34

Exactly.

Kenneth Kinney 30:35

All right. Number three, a decision you wish you could do over today if you had one do over.

David Siegel 30:42

Ooooohhh.....

Kenneth Kinney 30:43

Uber, or Zillow?

David Siegel 30:48

Wow, my answer is Uber. My God, I wouldn't be on this podcast, I'd be owning an island and....

Kenneth Kinney 30:53

You'd be one of the sharks on Shark Tank.

David Siegel 30:55

I would be exactly if I took the Uber. First employee of Uber basically. Yeah.

Kenneth Kinney 31:01

All right. This may seem a little bit of a softball, but they did fill in the gaps. So I'm gonna give some deference to him meetups that are in person or meetups that are virtual? Oh, that's a Tee ball.

David Siegel 31:12

I love in person. I really believe in the energy that people have.

Kenneth Kinney 31:16

Then the list. Let's skip that one. I got a different number. I got a different one for you.

David Siegel 31:19

Right.

Kenneth Kinney 31:20

We talked a lot about missions. So let's talk about Mission Impossible. The original Series with Peter Graves, or the new one with Tom Cruise? You're old enough to remember at least on you know, some cable stations showing those.

David Siegel 31:35

I'm not a big Tom Cruise fan. Like I said on personal level I just don't do doesn't jive with me. So I'll go with the original.

Kenneth Kinney 31:42

Yeah, the original and it didn't rely on any good special effects. So Alright, number five. And the most important question that you're going to be asked today is biscuits or cornbread?

David Siegel 31:54

Cornbread, especially warmed up with some butternut ah, oh, cornbread guy.

Kenneth Kinney 32:00

If you're gonna have a meet up you gotta have you gotta have some bread. So what I love

David Siegel 32:03

You know what I love with cornbread when they have little pieces of corn bread this Yeah.

Kenneth Kinney 32:07

Oh, yeah.

David Siegel 32:08

That's that's the best.

Kenneth Kinney 32:09

Absolutely. Throw in some jalapeños, too. All right. So David, where can people find out more about you get a copy of this book, meet up and keep up with what you're doing and more?

David Siegel 32:19

Thank you. Sure. So I would say follow me on LinkedIn. That's probably where I'm most involved. You find David Siegel meetup and find me there. Apparently, Shark told me before we started that I'm on books and millions and bookstores and bars and opened and obviously you go to Amazon and get the book there. For meetup, I would say download the meetup app. Register for one event, go surfing, do a full join a group, join a group and meet your people.

Kenneth Kinney 32:49

Absolutely. David, again, thank you very much for being with us today on A Shark’s Perspective.

David Siegel 32:54

Loving it. Love it. And thank you.

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Kenneth Kinney 33:01

So that was my conversation with David Siegel, the CEO of meetup, the largest platform for finding and building local communities, the former CEO of Investopedia, the former president of Seeking Alpha, an adjunct professor at Columbia University, the host of the Keep Connected podcast, and the author of “Decide & Conquer: 44 Decisions That Make or Break All Leaders.” Let's take a look at three key takeaways from a conversation with him.

Kenneth Kinney 33:25

First, we sort of began with debunking some leadership jargon, a lot of preaching, if you will, comes from people coming in with a philosophy and pushing that through into that lexicon. In his mind, the right philosophy is being extraordinarily dependent on the situation you're in and being versatile enough to adapt, not enough people can adapt well to the situations they're in. So I agree with the way he expresses it in the book, which is well worth the read.

Kenneth Kinney 33:48

Second, there's a trend out there today that you often see where many employees of companies are very anti revenue, anti business, anti profit and attitude. And it's hard as a leader to realize that not everyone is going to support your mission, you need to overly explain to people that as he said, revenue gives oxygen to a mission. And you're not going to convince everyone and it's painful for leaders who are overly worried about being liked. It's fair to the employees into them, if they don't agree with you to show them what your mission is. And then let them decide if they want to stay with you or leave the company. A lot of times, it's just reminding you to get the right people on the bus. And it won't necessarily be all of them painful, but best way to move in the direction you as a leader have to take a business be strong, transparent and fair. And you'll gain a lot more trust that way as well.

Kenneth Kinney 34:34

Third, maybe they got away with it before. The leaders don't need to pretend to be who they think we think they are. Not enough leaders are strong inside their life is a mess, or too much loneliness. Too many divorces too many sacrifices for what really matters. Drop your shield and don't pretend to be anything else than who you really are. As he reminded us focus on yourself. strengthen yourself that will strengthen others around you. Sounds easy enough until you end up being that guy or that girl that's a leader that no one can stand or no one wants to follow. Don't live to work work to live take care of you.

Kenneth Kinney 35:07

Got a question? Send me an email to Kenneth at a shark's perspective.com.

Kenneth Kinney 35:11

Thank you again for the privilege of your time. And I am so thankful to everyone who listens.

Kenneth Kinney 35:15

David talked about his 44 decisions. Well, decision 1 for me is to jump in the water and dive deeper. And then join us on the next episode of A Shark’s Perspective.

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