Episode 30: The Magic of Meetups  ## Metadata - Author: [[Distributed, with Matt Mullenweg]] - Full Title: Episode 30: The Magic of Meetups - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/d6d1d3b5-5d97-4b34-a279-524a1a62f48b ## Document Notes ## Highlights - Practical advice for startups on organizing meetups and the growing demand for them • It is important for startups to set expectations for meetups as part of the job. • Many startups in the tech industry are adopting best practices from fully distributed companies for organizing meetups. • There is a growing demand for platforms and tools to help organize meetups and retreats for teams. • The ideal venues for meetups should provide an environment where teams can gather, be creative, and have a sense of freedom. Transcript: Speaker 4 Do you have any practical advice for startups that want to throw a meetup today? Speaker 3 Yeah, I think it's important to set the expectations and we have to be pretty explicit and say, no, this is part of the job. This is probably an expectation. You can skip these. And it's really important to set that up front to people and say, look, there's 52 weeks in a year from now, maybe work, you know, 40 some of those. And most of that's going to be at home and you're totally in control, but you know, probably two or three weeks a year, we're going to participate in these types of activities. Speaker 5 Another thing that I was curious about is if you've noticed meetups come in other conversations with any startups that you've been working for in the tech industry in general. Speaker 3 Oh, absolutely. I mean, I've now a true ventures. We have ours a little short, usually three days every quarter, four times a year. Most of the startups I work with, we have over 200 in our portfolio. But true, everybody is at least partially remote and fully remote and everybody's trying to figure out how to spend time together. So it's on everybody's mind. I think a lot of people are adopting these kinds of best practices that fully distributed companies have come up with. I think it's working. I feel like there's a whole set of tools and all industry growing up around it. There's a lot of people are going, okay, we can host some of these meetups and retreats and great place for people to get together. We can be a platform where people can organize their meetups. And I, one of the companies reinvested in come happy to that. And there's a huge demand for it, especially from big companies, you're saying, okay, all of our teams want to meet in person and we're not set up for it. Help us figure out how to do these things. And I think we'll just see more and more and more of it. I have friends who are essentially building retreat centers around this notion and saying, you don't need like hotels and you don't need more hotels. We need places where these teams can gather and spend several days and be creative together. It's really nice to be in a place where you feel like, oh, it's just us. We get to do our thing. I think all of our initial meetups are like, there was like a ranch in Arizona where it was just us. And there was like a breakfast in Mexico where it was just us. And we could bring our we and play we tennis, eat goofy and stay up until two in the morning and nobody cared. And I think that's that's important to us to pick venues that allow for that to happen versus again, the more scripted. Speaker 4 Here's the place with good Wi-Fi and good presentation system. ([Time 0:09:06](https://share.snipd.com/snip/af35a8db-9105-4f94-9513-7de60aedbf46))