See show notes for this episode: S 02 | Ep .. David Siegel.
0:00:00 - Alex Shevelenko
Welcome to Experience-focused Leaders. I'm delighted to introduce you to David Siegel, former CEO of Meetup, Investopedia, and Seeking Alpha. He’s led these companies to 7X and 5X exits. He’s the author of the bestseller Decide and Conquer, a professor at Columbia, and a fellow alum of the University of Pennsylvania, Class of ’97. David, welcome to the pod!
0:00:29 - David Siegel
Listen, my biggest claim to fame is just the fact that we were in the same class in ’97—so, whatever, that was 28 years ago.
0:00:40 - Alex Shevelenko
And I learned everything from you back in the day.
I’m interviewing you—I love it. I'm calling my mom right after this to say, "Look, thank you for that great education. Here are the people!"
So, David, there are so many topics to cover. I want to make sure we also talk about your latest initiatives, such as the Israel Tech Initiative that you started. But let's start at the beginning. We graduated, and then you started consulting for a company that was serving DoubleClick. Tell us about that journey—what you learned and where it paid off down the road.
0:01:22 - David Siegel
So, when we were both at Penn, I actually went to Princeton for a conference held by an organization called AIPAC for college students. I remember meeting this guy—I was 19 or 20 years old—and I said to him, "Hey, I have no idea what I want to do for the rest of my life. How do you figure that out?" And he said, "OK, if you don’t know anything at all and have no idea what you want to do, go into consulting. You don’t need to know anything—you just pretend like you do, and you get exposed to a lot of different industries."
I was like, "Sounds great! I'll go into consulting."
So, while I was in school with you, I worked for a consulting firm called William Mercer, which is a management consulting firm. I figured I’d get a little leg up on people by having an internship while I was in school and during the summer. After graduation, since I still didn’t know much, I got a job in consulting.
After a couple of years, we focused on merger and acquisition integration consulting, which is an awesome role where, after companies get acquired, you figure out what to keep and what not to keep. Our biggest client was DoubleClick. At the time, DoubleClick was—I’m not going to say the ChatGPT of today—but it was the biggest internet company in the New York City area, controlling all online advertising. It was eventually acquired by Google.
One day, the CEO of DoubleClick, a guy named Kevin Ryan, reached out to me while I was consulting. He said, "Hey, David, what do you get paid as a consultant?"
0:02:50 - David Siegel
And I'm like, "I get paid, you know, 40 grand a year," because that’s what you got right out of college back in those days—which was actually pretty good. And he’s like, "How about this? You're being billed at six times that amount per hour. Why don’t we just double your salary? That way, you make more, and we still pay less than half of what we’re paying for you now."
I’m like, "Sounds like a win-win."
So that’s how I ended up at DoubleClick.
DoubleClick was just—wow. You know how people talk about the famous PayPal Mafia, with Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and others? Well, in the New York tech scene, DoubleClick had its own version of that. Over 200 CEOs and presidents of tech companies came out of the early days of DoubleClick.
For example, the current CEO of YouTube, Neal Mohan, and I used to hang out all the time back then. And many others from that era went on to do incredible things.
0:03:58 - Alex Shevelenko
Oh my God.
0:03:59 - David Siegel
Yeah, and Neal was actually my classmate at Stanford as well.
0:04:05 - Alex Shevelenko
He’s a super smart guy too.
0:04:07 - David Siegel
Very, very smart. And actually, I set Neal up with his wife.
0:04:12 - Alex Shevelenko
That’s some serious relationship-building! And he’s happily married, so there you go.
0:04:21 - David Siegel
Yeah, I see him posting about his kids all the time. I’m like, "Oh, those kids!" Because back then, I was like, "Oh, you’re Indian? I know this really attractive Indian woman—you guys should go out."
0:04:28 - Alex Shevelenko
And he was like, "Okay." Oh, so you became an Indian auntie as well!
0:04:32 - David Siegel
I’m basically an Indian auntie. At the wedding, they even gave a standing ovation to me and a friend of mine who helped set them up.
0:04:44 - Alex Shevelenko
If you’re still single and listening to this podcast, keep in mind that David is a good person to know!
0:04:46 - David Siegel
Yes, yes, I've set up three weddings so far—I’m working on my fourth. One day, just give me a call.
0:04:58 - Alex Shevelenko
So, Kevin Ryan ran this whole DoubleClick Mafia, right? He’s actually a legendary leader in New York now. How many unicorns has one guy started? Kevin Ryan is the guy—he built MongoDB, a multi-billion-dollar company.
0:05:12 - David Siegel
Business Insider, Zola, the Gilt Group—he runs a company called AlleyCorp. And, not to spoil anything, but we stayed in touch for 25 years. Later, when I was at WeWork and got hired by Adam Neumann, I did a management buyout of Meetup from WeWork. And who did I call? Kevin Ryan. I can tell more of that story later, but yeah, it all comes full circle.
0:05:41 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, I think Kevin clearly has an eye for talent—he spotted you early on. You were just a few years into consulting, right? He saw that spark of genius in you.
And then, you went on to Seeking Alpha—a product I remember loving because, if I was too cheap to buy an equity research report...
0:06:05 - David Siegel
You’d go to Seeking Alpha.
0:06:07 - Alex Shevelenko
Exactly! Despite my work and education, I still needed to look things up there. That’s the power of democratizing finance. Tell us about that.
0:06:15 - David Siegel
Which one—CEO of Investopedia or Seeking Alpha?
0:06:17 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, both. I feel like they overlap in their focus. I'd love to hear about the key lessons you learned in making financial knowledge more accessible—helping people make investment decisions without being equity research analysts at JPMorgan or Goldman Sachs.
0:06:38 - David Siegel
The secret sauce of Seeking Alpha is something that, even if I gave you 20 guesses, you probably wouldn’t guess—most people wouldn’t. But actually, as you said, democratization is a really important concept here.
The key is the comments on the articles. Seeking Alpha has an incredibly deep and active member base—people who are passionate about fundamental stock analysis and truly understanding the metrics behind a business, rather than, say, crypto investing or speculative trends. Someone would write an article, and instead of just two or three comments, you'd often see 60, 70, 80, or even 100 on average. Some articles had hundreds of comments.
If you're interested in equity research but don't want to pay tens of thousands of dollars for Bloomberg or FactSet, Seeking Alpha offers an impressive level of research in its articles. But what’s even more impressive is the thoughtful comments, debates, and disagreements in the discussion sections. I always encourage people to read the comments—it’s almost like a Talmudic debate playing out in real time.
0:08:02 - Alex Shevelenko
This is the Torah of finance—there you go.
So how do you cultivate that? Because when we think about internet comments, we usually see something snarky, an argument, or something incredibly obnoxious on YouTube. But you managed to build a passionate, engaged community. Did you incentivize it, or did it happen naturally, and you just avoided putting obstacles in the way? How did you create this? Because it really does sound special—and you’re absolutely right, I had no idea that was the magic behind it.
0:08:36 - David Siegel
First, just to clarify—I wasn’t the founder of Seeking Alpha. It was actually started by an incredible guy named David Jackson in Israel. He was the CEO. I later became CEO of Investopedia and Meetup, and I was President of Seeking Alpha. Just wanted to make that clear.
As for what made Seeking Alpha’s model work—and what others can learn from it—it all came down to a unique editorial approach. Unlike traditional outlets like Forbes, Fortune, or The Wall Street Journal, which rely on paid journalists and experts, Seeking Alpha built a contributor network of 5,000 to 10,000 writers.
These contributors were what I like to call "prosumers"—part professionals, part consumers. They could be high-net-worth traders, finance professionals, or serious investors, but they weren’t journalists. They were deeply passionate about specific stocks and investments, and they wrote detailed articles about them. They were also incentivized based on page views, meaning their success was directly tied to how many people were interested in reading and engaging with their work.
But the people who wrote the best comments and were the most engaged were other contributors. Interesting, right? So, yes, typical users did engage, but because Seeking Alpha had such a vast network of thoughtful contributors, the engagement from those who wrote articles naturally led to more insightful comments. This created a culture of thoughtful discussion.
Of course, there were still some silly comments—things like, "This is going to the moon!" which don’t really add much value. But overall, the level of sophistication was very high. Seeking Alpha has also shifted more toward a subscription model, where users have to pay. Once you introduce that kind of barrier, it filters out a lot of less serious participants and results in a more knowledgeable, self-selected audience. That, in turn, helps maintain a high standard of discussion.
0:10:59 - Alex Shevelenko
Got it. So, you were President of Seeking Alpha, then CEO of Investopedia? That’s when it was part of IAC, right? I bet there’s a good story there.
0:11:11 - David Siegel
I gotta tell you the story, Alex. So, I was President of Seeking Alpha, and IAC—a publicly traded company run by Barry Diller, which owns Match.com, HomeAdvisor, and Angie’s List—reached out to acquire Seeking Alpha. IAC is a hugely successful, multi-billion-dollar company.
At the time, we decided to take a meeting with them because they had just acquired Investopedia and wanted to consolidate financial publishers—Investopedia, Seeking Alpha, and others—similar to how they had rolled up multiple dating platforms like OkCupid.
So, we met with them, and after three or four hours of discussion, the most important thing for a founder to say afterward is—you want to guess?
0:12:03 - Alex Shevelenko
Do it. Do it.
0:12:06 - David Siegel
“We’re not for sale.”
0:12:08 - Alex Shevelenko
Right, because that makes you even more appealing.
0:12:10 - David Siegel
Exactly. You always say, "We’re not for sale." I did the same thing with Meetup. That’s how you drive up the price and get the big returns.
0:12:14 - Alex Shevelenko
So that’s like an introduction where you say, "Hey, he’s not really looking to date you," but who knows?
0:12:30 - David Siegel
Yeah, she was a lot more interesting than he was, but he played hard to get. That’s how he won her over. There you go, there you go. I hope he’s listening now—though I’m sure he’s not.
0:12:41 - Alex Shevelenko
No, it’s just my mom listening right now, don’t worry.
0:12:46 - David Siegel
So basically, I said, "We’re not for sale." Then we met a second time, and I said, "We’re not for sale." Then the IAC head of M&A, a guy named Mark Stein, calls me up and says, "Okay, I get it, I get it. Seeking Alpha isn’t for sale. But, David, are you for sale?"
So I said, "I’m for sale."
And he goes, "Okay, this is what we’d like to pay to have you become the CEO of Investopedia and take over the company." That’s how I ended up at IAC and Investopedia. When I joined, it was a small business—maybe $10 or $11 million in revenue. Five years later, by the time I left, it had grown to $35 to $40 million in revenue. It was an incredible success story, and then we sold the company.
0:13:28 - Alex Shevelenko
Fantastic. Sounds like IAC pulled another Kevin Ryan on you.
0:13:32 - David Siegel
Yeah, they just pulled me out, paid a premium, and got a great deal. I mean, they heard that you and I were classmates, so that definitely helped.
0:13:41 - Alex Shevelenko
There you go. The legendary class of ’97. All right, now onto a company everybody has heard of—I even have their mug here, if you can see it.
0:13:54 - David Siegel
You stole a WeWork mug, didn’t you, Alex?
0:13:57 - Alex Shevelenko
I’m actually at WeWork right now.
0:13:59 - David Siegel
Oh, so no stealing, then.
0:14:03 - Alex Shevelenko
Exactly. So, on this journey—at WeWork, running a business that’s all about in-person experiences but has digital roots—what did you bring to WeWork, and what did you learn from it? Before the whole dramatic exit and everything that happened, I imagine there was something special. Well, crazy, but also special.
0:14:20 - David Siegel
Oh, I learned a tremendous amount from WeWork.
First, you learn what not to do—like setting unrealistic expectations...
But there are also things they did really well, and I think a lot of people like to rank WeWork negatively, but that’s not fair. They still created a billion-dollar company. Even if it’s not worth $47 billion like it was originally, it’s still a very impressive company.
0:15:03 - Alex Shevelenko
It’s not trivial to create anything of value.
0:15:06 - David Siegel
It’s not trivial.
0:15:07 - Alex Shevelenko
I’m a member of WeWork right now because I actually enjoy the experience.
0:15:14 - David Siegel
Very nice, very nice, okay. So, let me share a couple of things I thought WeWork did exceptionally well. Number one, they were very good at hiring incredibly talented individuals, both at the executive ranks and in leading organizations. I think their eye for talent, their aggressiveness, and their ambition really pushed every single CEO to become far more aggressive in their goals and in what they thought they could potentially achieve than they would have been without being part of WeWork.
It happened all the time. As CEO of Meetup, which I reported to the president of the company, a guy named Artie Minson—who was kind of Adam Neumann’s right-hand person, CFO, and president—I would not have been as aggressive in building Meetup into the multi-national company it is today, with over 190 countries, if not for WeWork’s cultural influence.
0:16:31 - Alex Shevelenko
Got it. So, to recap: at WeWork, the culture you build forces, by cultural norms and reporting norms, everyone to aim higher, to push to the next level, and to achieve more than you thought possible.
0:16:52 - David Siegel
Exactly. They also created a culture of being real and had an incredible mission orientation. I think that mission orientation was very motivational for employees. Talking about how you’re looking to change the world is something that I think every founder and CEO can learn from. For most people—especially millennials and Gen Zers—they’re not just looking to work and get a paycheck; they want to feel like they’re having a positive impact on the world. Finding a way to show how your company is truly improving the quality of life for others is something WeWork did exceptionally well, and I think a lot of CEOs can learn from that.
0:17:37 - Alex Shevelenko
Brilliant! So, building on the Meetup story, right? What would you like to share with us? Everyone wants to have great human experiences. I think we live in a world where we’re replacing in-person connections with media, and sometimes it works, but other times it probably hurts us more than we realize. It can be very unhealthy.
I’m at a stage where I’m managing my media inputs, even good ones, just to get control of what I’m feeding into my mind. I think a lot of people are doing the same. You know, we have kids—it’s kind of a losing fight, but it’s a fight worth fighting.
Very important, yes. So, you created a way for people to connect, get together, and discover new people. I think that’s a tremendous mission and opportunity. Tell me what you’ve learned. What surprised you about humans, and what were some fun things that came out of these meetups?
0:18:48 - David Siegel
Yeah, sure. So Meetup’s mission is to end the loneliness epidemic that exists in the world, and it’s a global epidemic. There have been many studies on it. The Surgeon General of the US recently talked about how loneliness is more dangerous than smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. Loneliness can shorten the average person’s life by 7 to 10 years. Over 40% of people regularly feel lonely at some point, and among young people, it’s much more acute. In bigger cities, it’s even more pronounced. Our goal is to use technology to get people off of technology, which is really important—especially for young people, for brain development, etc.
In terms of lessons learned—there are many—but one of the main ones is that humans are humans. We go back millions of years to Paleolithic and Neolithic times. The way we survived millions of years ago was actually by being in groups. If someone left the group and lived in their own cave, they died. To survive, they needed to be part of a hunting and gathering community. So, we have this DNA built into us for literally hundreds of thousands of years as Homo sapiens. And when we try to separate from our natural state, which is community, which is the importance of being together, it leads to depression, anxiety, and, God forbid, self-harm when people lack community.
I always believed in the importance of community. I have a strong sense of community in my personal life as well, and at times when I haven’t had it, I didn’t realize how acute it was. I’ve had dozens of people, I’m not kidding, tell me that Meetup saved their life—literally. One example is someone who is LGBTQ. They didn’t want to come out, but they joined an LGBTQ+ Meetup group and were able to find their people.
They didn’t know how to function, and they found people, therapies, and ways to cope—whether through a breast cancer support group, hiking groups, or whatever it may be. So that’s one major takeaway: the criticality of community.
0:21:03 - Alex Shevelenko
Another takeaway that I also like... David, before you go there, I think you’re probably too modest about the number of marriages you’re responsible for.
0:21:15 - David Siegel
I mean, if you consider the number of years I was in charge of Meetup and the tens of thousands of people involved...
0:21:20 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, you were like the Mother Teresa of connecting people here.
0:21:30 - David Siegel
Thank you, thank you. No, literally, tens of thousands.
This is God's work. Alright, I did a fun thing as CEO of Meetup. I’d travel around the world to do Meetup events in places like Dublin, Barcelona, San Francisco, and even Saudi Arabia, and we'd invite people to hear about community and Meetup. But every time I spoke, someone would walk over to me and say, "I met my spouse on Meetup," or "I got my job through Meetup." It’s a really special platform. It’s because, when you get people together in person—though we have digital too, of course, which started during COVID—that’s where the magic happens. So, the first thing is just how important community is.
0:22:14 - Alex Shevelenko
It’s too bad IAC didn’t acquire you. They should have been the buyer. This could have been like Match.com and Meetup combined.
0:22:28 - David Siegel
It’s actually funny you say that, because when we were looking to get acquired, we hired a banker and met with Match.com, Bumble, and others. We had even done a business development deal with Match.com, where they wanted to connect people for dating purposes by having them attend Meetup events.
0:22:58 - Alex Shevelenko
So, there was definitely something there.
0:23:00 - David Siegel
And I reached out to the CEO of IAC, a guy named Joey Levin, who I love and who I used to work for. I said, "You should acquire us," and he said, "Ah, it’s not our thing." So, it didn’t work out, but we tried.
0:23:16 - Alex Shevelenko
So, Meetup... sorry to interrupt your flow. But the first thing is just how important it is for people to connect, because it’s essential to being human. Yeah, and the second... what’s the second biggest takeaway?
0:23:30 - David Siegel
Another takeaway is when you are meeting people—because Meetup is all about meeting people, right? It’s connecting with them. It’s always interesting to me how the personal and professional aspects mix and overlap. For example, people will go to a Meetup event, and this happens all the time. I met this one Meetup organizer who said, “I organize two groups: a bowling group for fun because I like bowling, and a networking group because I’m looking for a new job.” He then told me, “I have to tell you, I got my last two jobs from my bowling group, and I met my best friend at the career networking group.” It’s amazing to me how people don’t realize that a great way to find a job is by joining a hiking Meetup group—meeting people, talking to them. A great way to meet friends is by doing something career-related. People often think of personal and professional life as two separate lanes. They see themselves as a “professional David Siegel” and a “personal David Siegel.” But no, you should be your authentic self in both. You should be the same person whether you're being professional or personal. Hopefully, you’re a good person, and you handle things well in both areas. The lesson for me is that the people who gain the most from community are the ones who are their authentic selves, both in their personal and professional lives.
0:24:49 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, this is great. A lot of our audience members are in the B2B world, communicating complex financial topics or other similar subjects. I think something strange happens in B2B—people forget that it’s actually business to human. It just happens to be within another business.
0:25:09 - David Siegel
It’s H2H, yeah.
0:25:10 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, exactly. It’s human to human. And now, increasingly, it’s AI to AI, but there’s still a human in the loop somewhere for the most high-stakes things. I think some content puts you in a place where you’re just... well, it feels like it’s so boring it could drive you to desperation or even suicidal thoughts. It’s boring to bore people. And you have to bring in your personality to tell real human stories, not some manufactured marketing case. People are afraid to do it.
0:25:42 - David Siegel
They’re afraid to be vulnerable. They’re afraid to be themselves. They think, “If 100 people say it and one person is upset, it’s not worth it.” But forget the one person. The 99 others will find it much more interesting. You’ve got to be yourself. If you try to satisfy everyone, the content will suck.
0:26:01 - Alex Shevelenko
Right. Well, this actually leads us into the next big chunk of your lessons: the book you've written, Decide and Conquer. First of all, are you more of a "decide" or a "conquer" type of guy?
0:26:12 - David Siegel
Where are you on the Genghis Khan spectrum? Alright, I’m more of a "decide and fail" kind of guy myself.
0:26:22 - Alex Shevelenko
Decide, learn, you know, and then conquer. Alright, so there are lots of fantastic lessons for a lot of people right now who are dealing with confusion as the world flips on itself. Right? AI... uh, we talked about communications and experiences, right? B2B communications haven’t changed dramatically since you and I were in undergrad. You know, PDFs were around then, and they’re still around now. Crazy. We’re trying to fight the good fight and bring these babies to life.
0:26:56 - David Siegel
PowerPoint, yes. Kill PDFs.
0:26:58 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, we don’t even want to kill them—just use them as a step to something greater, if you need to. But the gist that we see is that we obviously see people have some inertia. Right? There’s a status quo, a de facto standard. We see people want to change, want to try new things, but they default to the safer or lazier options. In your book, you talked about the faults of that worldview. Tell us about the risks of the status quo. I love it.
0:27:35 - David Siegel
Okay, so there’s a famous quote, and I’ll butcher it, so I’ll just give the summary of it, by President Roosevelt, which essentially goes something like: The best decisions are great decisions, the next best decisions are bad decisions, and the worst decision is no decision. We live in a world where people are afraid of making decisions. There’s incredible status quo bias. People believe, "Hey, the devil I know is a devil, but at least it’s the devil I know." They’re afraid of doing something else. People stay in bad relationships because it’s the devil they know.
0:28:12 - Alex Shevelenko
So, we’re a bunch of frogs boiling in water. Basically, it’s kind of like...
0:28:14 - David Siegel
Exactly, a bunch of frogs boiling in water.
0:28:20 - David Siegel
What people don’t realize is this: What I’m going to say to you is that not making a decision is a decision. You’re choosing not to make a decision, which most often is actually a very poor decision. But the reason why you’re comfortable in that situation is because you’re being reactive. I think people feel pain if they make a bad decision, then could blame themselves for making a bad decision. People don’t like to blame themselves.
Because people often lack confidence and don’t feel good about themselves, they want to avoid blaming themselves and feeling even worse. So, therefore, by not making a decision, if something bad happens, it’s no longer their fault. They can’t blame themselves anymore. It’s just unlucky. Unfortunately, that’s what happens all the time with people—they’re afraid of making a decision because they could feel bad about it. But not making a decision is actually making a decision and allows them to not feel bad or guilty about making a bad decision, when, in fact, no decision was actually the worst decision.
0:29:25 - Alex Shevelenko
This is brilliant on an individual level. Now let’s extrapolate this to an organizational level. Right? You’ve run companies. You’ve seen tendencies to do things the way they were. You’ve shaken things up. Why do you think this happens in organizations? Is it just a bunch of individuals? Are there other things going on? There’s such a social proof, like, "Oh, the group is not making this decision, so I’m not going to stick my head out." Type of thing. Tell me a little bit about that.
0:29:56 - David Siegel
Yeah, I mean it goes all the way back to, like, the 19th century. I mean, it goes all the way back to humankind. But from a business perspective, there’s the famous saying from the 1970s and 1980s: No one ever got fired by hiring IBM. I don’t know if everyone’s heard that. It’s a really old statement, but the idea is, “Oh, I’ll just take the safe route. If I take the safe route, then I’m not going to get fired.” So I think what it comes down to is a couple of different things.
Number one is incentives. If a CEO, board, or employees are incentivized to drive significant value creation, then there’s going to be much more comfort in taking bigger risks and, ultimately, failing more often and making bigger decisions, like we worked it, right? They make really, really big decisions, but oftentimes there’s this concept of, “I just want to stay under the radar. I don’t want to get fired. I don’t want something bad to happen to me, so I’m just going to take the safe route, do what my manager tells me to do.” And that manager, by the way, is also taking the safe route and doing what their manager wants to do.
And you have this horrible dynamic in organizations where, oftentimes, the CEO is a pretty aggressive person, and she or he, you know, they want to move things, shake things up, and make changes, but then you get to the next level, the next level, and then they’re afraid of getting fired. I think in a lot of organizations, there’s this fear that exists because there have been lots of layoffs in tech, right? And another layoff can happen. And if they just don’t have a target on their back by not making too many waves, they’ll be safer.
And, unfortunately, you know, incentives drive a significant amount of behavior, and that’s, I think, the case in many organizations.
0:31:53 - Alex Shevelenko
Brilliant! Guys, check out the book. We'll put it in the notes. Last thing before we wrap up: you were making waves with the Israel Tech Mission. Tell me about it. Tell me why it’s a passion project you got involved in and what impact you want to make. That’s so nice of you to bring it up.
0:32:14 - David Siegel
Thank you, Alex. So, I sold Meetup almost exactly a year ago. Literally a year and four days ago was my last day as the CEO of Meetup. Prior to that, my son, who’s actually in the Israeli army, said to me, right after October 7th—when Hamas invaded Israel—“Dad, you know a ton of people in tech, you know a lot of tech leaders. Maybe you could try to bring a few people to Israel.” So I thought, “Yeah, sure, I’ll try.” I called up a couple of big, famous people in Israel and said, “Hey, I’m thinking of bringing a few people.” They said, “Great.”
So, I started a tech mission to Israel, thinking I’d bring five, six, or seven people. We ended up bringing 65, with a huge number of tech executives—Reed Raymond from Apollo, the CFO of Warby Parker, and big names from venture capital firms, millions of dollars in investment from firms, investing in Israeli companies.
Then, I did a second trip and started an organization called the Israel Tech Mission, which is all about helping to drive investment into a country that I have a particularly strong connection to, which is Israel. Due to the war, the huge number of investments is down. Israel's economy is 50% dependent on tech, compared to 9% in the U.S., so it’s a higher percentage than in any other country. It’s a way of, quote-unquote, giving back. We’ve brought over 250 tech executives to Israel so far, and, hopefully, it will continue for many years to come.
We’re in the middle of our fifth trip right now, and I hope you come on our sixth trip, which is with a lot of founders and is happening in March. We’ll see what happens.
0:33:58 - Alex Shevelenko
David, I love this conversation. I would love to continue it. Where can people find you so they can keep getting the wisdom and discover the book?
0:34:10 - David Siegel
I’d say LinkedIn. I’m pretty active on it—about 36,000 or so followers.
0:34:14 - Alex Shevelenko
So, LinkedIn is the best place to find you.
0:34:17 - David Siegel
Send me a LinkedIn invite, and if you mention this podcast and reference content experience platforms and mention Alex Shevelenko, I will definitely accept your invite.
0:34:29 - Alex Shevelenko
Alright, everybody's paying attention. David, you’re awesome. Keep being awesome and keep deciding and conquering for us all.
0:34:37 - David Siegel
Thanks, man. Thank you for the opportunity.