Scott Heiferman | |
|---|---|
 Scott Heiferman at TechCrunch Disrupt in May 2010 | |
| Born | 1972 |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | University of Iowa |
| Known for | Founding Meetup |
Scott Heiferman is an American community organizer and entrepreneur. Heiferman co-founded Meetup and was CEO from 2002 to 2018.
Scott Heiferman was born in 1972 in Homewood, Illinois. Heiferman has four siblings. While attending Homewood-Flossmoor High School, Heiferman sold coupon books for a nearby town, earning enough to pay for his first year of college. [1] [2]
He attended the University of Iowa, where he began his studies as an engineering student. He later changed his degree to business and graduated in 1994. [1] [3]
Scott Heiferman's first job out of college was in Montvale, New Jersey working for Sony as an 'Interactive Marketing Frontiersman.' [1] He worked at Sony from 1994 to 1995. [3]
While there, Heiferman helped develop their first corporate website. [1]
In 1995, he moved to New York City, and started an online ad-agency called i-traffic, which was dedicated to online media. [1] I-traffic grew to about 100 employees, [3] before it was purchased by Agency.com in 1999 [2] for $15 million. [4] Heiferman sold the company just before the end of the dot-com bubble. [2] He continued working for Agency.com until 2000. [2]
After Heiferman left Agency.com, he worked at McDonald's for a few weeks, starting in 2000. [1]
At the time of the September 11 attacks, Heiferman lived just a few miles from the Twin Towers. [5] The attack caused him and his neighbors to meet each other for the first time, on the roof of his building. [4] [6] The experience made Heiferman interested in the idea of face-to-face interactions and community. [7] Heiferman was influenced by the book Bowling Alone, which is about creating connections between strangers [1] and the deterioration of community in American culture. [8] He was also a fan of the band Luna and often went to their concerts alone, because he could not find other fans to go with. [1] [2]
These events caused Heiferman to start Meetup in 2002 [1] with five co-founders [9] [7] and 10 employees. [10] Around the same time, Heiferman also started a photo-sharing service called Fotolog, which he sold five years later for $90 million. [4] During Howard Dean's 2004 Presidential campaign, Dean persuaded supporters to create or join local Meetup groups. [4] In 2004, Meetup reached one million users and Heiferman was named "Innovator of the Year" by MIT Technology Review. [4] Subsequently, then Presidential hopeful Barack Obama promised to attend any Meetup event of supporters that can get at least 100 attendees. [4] [6]
In 2005, Heiferman made the unexpected decision of charging users a fee to start and run Meetup groups, rather than using an advertising-based business model. [4] Afterwards, the activity on Meetup dropped 95%, but rebounded over time. [4] The company made a profit for the first time in 2009. [4] By 2017, Meetup had 32 million members in 182 countries. [4] That same year, Facebook invested in new features in a competing service called Facebook Groups. [11] In response, Heiferman developed a plan to redesign Meetup to focus more on activities than groups. [11] The re-design was also based on feedback from Meetup employees. [4] In late 2017, Meetup was acquired by WeWork. [12]
In 2018, Scott Heiferman stepped down as CEO and former Investopedia CEO David Siegel took his place. Heiferman became Chairman of Meetup. [13] [14]
Scott Heiferman has a daughter and a son, born in 2010 and 2014 respectively. [15]
Dotdash Meredith is an American digital media company based in New York City. The company publishes online articles and videos about various subjects across categories including health, home, food, finance, tech, beauty, lifestyle, travel, and education. It operates brands including Verywell, Investopedia, People, The Balance, Byrdie, MyDomaine, Brides, The Spruce, Simply Recipes, Serious Eats, Liquor.com, Lifewire, TripSavvy, TreeHugger, and ThoughtCo. In August 2012, About.com became a property of IAC, owner of Ask.com and numerous other online brands, and its revenue is generated by advertising. In addition to its Manhattan headquarters, Dotdash Meredith maintains offices elsewhere in the New York metropolitan area, as well as in Des Moines, Iowa, and Birmingham, Alabama.
Meetup is a social media platform for hosting and organizing in-person and virtual activities, gatherings, and events for people and communities of similar interests, hobbies, and professions. It was founded in 2002 by Scott Heiferman and four others. The company was acquired by WeWork in 2017 and remains headquartered in New York City. WeWork sold it to AlleyCorp, an early stage NY-focused venture fund and incubator, in March 2020. In January 2024, Bending Spoons acquired Meetup.
Evan "Ev" Clark Williams is an American billionaire technology entrepreneur. He is a co-founder of Twitter, and was its CEO from 2008 to 2010, and a member of its board from 2007 to 2019. He founded Blogger and Medium. In 2014, he co-founded the venture capital firm Obvious Ventures. As of February 2022, his net worth is estimated at US$2.1 billion.
Sean Parker is an American entrepreneur and philanthropist, most notable for co-founding the file-sharing computer service Napster, and was the first president of the social networking website Facebook. He also co-founded Plaxo, Causes, Airtime.com, and Brigade, an online platform for civic engagement. He is the founder and chairman of the Parker Foundation, which focuses on life sciences, global public health, and civic engagement. On the Forbes 2022 list of the world's billionaires, he was ranked No. 1,096 with a net worth of US$2.8 billion.
Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, and application development.
Angelo Sotira is an American entrepreneur who co-founded the online community DeviantArt on August 7, 2000, with Matthew Stephens and Scott Jarkoff.
Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by American technology conglomerate Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, its name derives from the face book directories often given to American university students. Membership was initially limited to Harvard students, gradually expanding to other North American universities. Since 2006, Facebook allows everyone to register from 13 years old, except in the case of a handful of nations, where the age limit is 14 years. As of December 2022, Facebook claimed almost 3 billion monthly active users. As of October 2023, Facebook ranked as the third-most-visited website in the world, with 22.56% of its traffic coming from the United States. It was the most downloaded mobile app of the 2010s.
Kevin P. Ryan is an American investor and entrepreneur who has founded several New York–based businesses, including Gilt Groupe, Business Insider and MongoDB. Ryan helped grow DoubleClick from 1996 to 2005, first as president and later as CEO. Ryan continues to found and invest in companies through AlleyCorp, a venture capital firm he founded with Dwight Merriman in 2008. He holds a B.A. from Yale University and an M.B.A. from INSEAD.
Matt Cohler is an American venture capitalist. He worked as Vice President of Product Management for Facebook until June 2008 and was formerly a general partner at Benchmark. Cohler has been named to the Forbes Midas List of top technology investors and in 2019 was named to the New York Times and CB Insights list of top 10 venture capital investors. Cohler made the Forbes 'America's 40 Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40' list in 2015.
Zynga Inc. is an American developer running social video game services. It was founded in April 2007, with headquarters in San Mateo, California. The company primarily focuses on mobile and social networking platforms. Zynga states its mission as "connecting the world through games".
Facebook is a social networking service originally launched as TheFacebook on February 4, 2004, before changing its name to simply Facebook in August 2005. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and gradually most universities in the United States and Canada, corporations, and by September 2006, to everyone with a valid email address along with an age requirement of being 13 or older.
Andreessen Horowitz is a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. As of April 2023, Andreessen Horowitz ranks first on the list of venture capital firms by assets under management, with $42 billion as of May 2024.
TaskRabbit, Inc. d/b/a TaskRabbit operates an online marketplace that matches freelance labor with local demand, allowing people to find help with tasks including personal assistance, furniture assembly, moving, delivery, and handyman work. The company was founded in 2008 by Leah Busque and was acquired by an affiliate of IKEA in 2017.
Yishan Wong is an American engineer and entrepreneur who was CEO of Reddit from March 2012 until his resignation in November 2014. With Niniane Wang he is also co-founder of the Mountain View coworking space Sunfire Offices, and was an advisor at Quora. Wong was briefly a contributing blogger to Forbes magazine.
Glassdoor is an American website where current and former employees anonymously review companies, operated by the company of the same name.
Thomas Preston-Werner is an American billionaire software developer and entrepreneur. He is an active contributor within the free and open-source software community, most prominently in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lives.
WeWork Inc. is a provider of coworking spaces, including physical and virtual shared spaces, headquartered in New York City. As of December 31, 2022, the company operated 43.9 million square feet (4,080,000 m2) of space, including 18.3 million square feet (1,700,000 m2) in the United States and Canada, in 779 locations in 39 countries, and had 547,000 members, with a weighted average commitment term of 19 months.
Squarespace, Inc. is an American website building and hosting company based in New York City. It provides software as a service for website building and hosting, and allows users to use pre-built website templates and drag-and-drop elements to create and modify webpages.
Marfeel, Inc. is an ad tech platform that allows publishers to create, optimize and monetize their mobile websites.
David Siegel is currently Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Meetup. Formerly, he was the CEO of Investopedia.