Who owns meetup

How it works. Want to do more of what you love? Create your own Meetup group, and draw from a community of millions. Follow Meetup. Skip to content. Explore your city.

Build your career. Get creative. Now, Meetup is in limbo. As tension builds at WeWork to divest its noncore businesses, Siegel has a mandate to find a buyer, and to do so within the next month or two.

In the days and months that followed, he noticed people were connecting more with neighbors, saying hello and checking up on them. The next year, along with Matt Meeker, he launched Meetup as a way to get people offline and making friends in real life. Meetup started to take off in when the presidential campaign of Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, used it as a tool for grassroots organizing in the Democratic primary.

Meetup has 49 million members, compared to 2. However, Meetup shares the same global reach and is available in more than countries. Compared to other tech companies, Meetup grew slowly but steadily. It added users and raised small rounds of funding, enjoying the kind of affinity most tech companies aspire to. Derek Andersen, CEO and co-founder of Bevy Labs, a software product that helps large companies build communities offline, said he first fell in love with Meetup in September He was able to use the platform to scale up his Startup Grind event series, which connects techies around the world, to chapters.

The company, which primarily rented office space for long leases and then offered those spaces for short term leases, had emerged as one of the rising stars among the startups of the early s, along with Uber, Lyft and Airbnb. WeWork, along with these other companies, was fueled by sizable investments from venture capitalists who funneled billions of dollars into their businesses and inflated their valuations will remaining private.

Previously, tech companies had been pushed to go public and allow their stock to trade openly. Participating in it builds my sense of purpose and connection. Why should that happen at, say, a Starbucks, when Neumann could harness that goodwill within the confines of a WeWork? He believes that a lot of organizers are entrepreneurs looking to build out small businesses around their passions.

But Heiferman is no longer intrigued by the notion of remaining small. Earlier this year, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would sink more resources into its efforts to build communities.

It convened hundreds of group administrators in Chicago for a Community Summit. This means that the kind of slow-growth strategy in which Meetup adds a half million users every month is no longer a good option for the Little Internet Company that Could.

This is admittedly a difficult thing to do at a middle-aged, midsize internet company, especially one where nothing is all that wrong. Last year, Meetup launched a redesign aimed at helping it appeal to millennials and embrace new machine learning techniques to better connect its members for more casual meetups.

This past summer, he began speaking to investors to raise money. In light of the urgent need for Meetups, he explained, he endeavored to grow Meetup to a billion members.

But starting immediately, the company will begin to hire.