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 bee

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.