[benmarks]

It depends on the PE firm. We thought the same at Magento (eBay > Permira Funds), but in the end it was a pretty good ride into Adobe. Ryan does not strike me as a corporate raider - he seems to genuinely like building companies (e.g. MongoDB)... curious if others have more to add.

[nerpderp82]

Meetup cannot be saved, they attempt to milk their existing herd too hard rather move them to better pastures. Meetup is only a verb, elastic search and a document store replaces it with <new verb>. It has zero compelling functionality.

[ravenstine]

People don't choose sites like Meetup for the features. They use it because it provides discoverability that would otherwise take effort outside of Meetup.com.

I've run a few Meetup.com groups in my time, and I currently run the LA Ember.js meetup. I still choose to use Meetup because it's ridiculously easy to get people to join and show up. When I've done Facebook or Eventbrite, I had to put in effort, but all I have to do on Meetup is pay the monthly fee and people will come.

If what you say is true, then there would be a new verb to replace it. Can you name one? I can't really.

[zrobotics]

Eh, technically I'd agree that the site itself wouldn't be very hard to clone. However, Twitter wouldn't be hard to clone either; the value with meet up is the user's are there and people are familiar with the site.