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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

I liked Meetup, I didn't like it enough to pay for it. It wouldn't give me information without paying so I stopped using it.

I also note that they terms of the acquisition have not been mentioned. If it is an all stock transaction it could be an example of Wework exploiting their astonishing valuation to buy companies with stock. This was something that happened a lot in the dot com boom and didn't end well. The other thing was startups trading services to each other and the overvaluing them in dollars. For example a startup I worked for gave a database company $110,000 in advertising on the web site in exchange for a data base license and some training. They both reported it as income (we got $110,000 in advertising buys!, we got $110,000 in database sales!)

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A canonical example of how all-stock deals can go horribly, horribly wrong is the sale of Dragon Systems (the voice recognition software), whose founders lost everything when the acquirer declared bankruptcy mere months later: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/business/goldman-sachs-and...

Dragon was advised by Goldman Sachs, whose compensation was fixed regardless of the deal terms (and regardless of the sustained performance of the combined entity) so long as the deal closed - all too common in the world of investment banking. Essentially, the seller's advisors had every financial incentive to skimp on doing due diligence on the buyers; had they received compensation in the same form as the founders, the outcome might have been very different. One hopes that Meetup received better advice than Dragon did!

(Disclosure: I work for Belstone, a tech-enabled merchant bank where we attempt to align ourselves much more closely with the companies we advise and partner with. Feel free to reach out via the email in my profile if you want to learn more about what we do - we're hiring for software engineering and associate positions!)

I see Meetup - what do you mean by this:

>It wouldn't give me information without paying so I stopped using it.

Except for creating groups, I'm not sure if anything is "hidden"...

> If it is an all stock transaction

For the amount of money raised by WeWork I don't know why Meetup would take a deal like that and why WeWork wouldn't just use it's massive capital chest to do so. Generally speaking all stock transactions are ways to (1) incentivize founders/management to stay (2) it's a cheaper way to capitalize a transaction.

I have no idea what you're talking about. I've done many many meetups and never paid.

The organizers have to pay though, and that sucks. But I can understand the business model.

Completely agree. Tried using meetup several times, but the experience as a free user is too limited... Can't view all event details, can't create a group, etc.

You can definitely see all event details as a free members... You can't create a group, though.

It depends on the group. Tech events tend to be undercover head hunting events so they are usually sponsored so they waive the fee.

The smaller groups have to pay a fee too which gets put on the members. Usually it's very small and I'm happy to pay two dollars a year to goto a language exchange if it helps keep the group alive.

This. Apparently all of the things I'm interested in like SDR and Robotics and what not the groups don't pony up the cash to make things visible to non-paying members.

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