Scott Heiferman is an American community organizer and entrepreneur. Heiferman co-founded Meetup and was CEO from 2002 to 2018.
Early life
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]
Career
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]
Meetup
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]
Personal
Scott Heiferman has a daughter and a son, born in 2010 and 2014 respectively.[15]
