Cultivating a creative community with Tina Roth-Eisenberg of CreativeMornings

“Who you hang out with determines what you dream about and what you collide with.” - Seth Godin Yearning to find community as a Swiss transplant in New York City, Tina Roth-Eisenberg was so moved by these words that she transformed an old office into a fresh co-working space for creatives. From that space, Tina would incubate her would-be biggest project yet: CreativeMornings, an event series that brings local creatives together, which has since grown to over 200 chapters around the world And best of all? It’s totally free to attend. This week on How I Built This Lab, Tina shared how her design career morphed into an unintentional, yet completely inspired path to entrepreneurship that spawned several successful businesses. Plus, she shares her perspectives on why community and collaboration are key when it comes to building new things. This episode was produced by Carla Esteves and edited by John Isabella, with music by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Brian Jarboe. You can follow HIBT on Twitter https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis, and email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 5:13Guy Raz?

  Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So back in 2008, Tina Roth-Eisenberg got tired of working alone at her home office. Tina's a graphic designer by training, and she knew a bunch of other designers who felt the same way. So that year, she rented an old office in Brooklyn and turned it into a coworking space. And she invited a bunch of friends to join her. Now, what happened next, as she remembers it, was magical. Conversations flowed. Ideas were germinated. Collaborations forged. The ideas exchanged over lunchtime conversations actually inspired multiple business ideas for Tina, including Tatly, a temporary tattoo company, and Todo, a simplified to-do list website.

• 5:58Guy Raz?

  These conversations were everything Tina had hoped for. And so she started inviting other people to the coworking space to join in. Those meetups morphed into something Tina called Creative Mornings. Fast forward to today and Creative Mornings now has more than 200 chapters around the world that host free monthly meetups and talks. Tina was born in Switzerland, where she studied graphic design. And not long after she graduated from college, she decided to move to New York City.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  When I graduated at 25 from graphic design school, I saved enough money. I was like, I am going. I have enough money for three months. I'm going to try to find an internship. And I got on a flight.

• 6:39Guy Raz?

  All right, so you get to New York. You're in your early twenties. You get, I think you get an internship in the city at a, at a design studio?

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was pretty magical. I had one interview lined up in a small design studio in downtown Manhattan. And that interview was 16 hours after arriving in New York. And after five minutes of walking into that studio and talking to Matthew Waltman, who ran it, he looked at me and said, you will never leave New York. You will marry a tall Jewish man and you got yourself an internship. And he sat me down.

• 7:14Guy Raz?

  Wow. And did that all happen?

• 7:16Speaker 01

  Yes, it all happened.

• 7:18Guy Raz?

  Even tall? He was a tall man?

• 7:20Speaker 01

  He was a tall Jewish man, yes.

• 7:22Guy Raz?

  Wow. It's like, yeah, like a crystal ball. He's like, you're gonna stay in New York, you're gonna marry a tall Jewish man, and you're gonna work in design.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  He's, he's a bit psychic.

• 7:32Guy Raz?

  So, all right, so you end up, you know, taking this job. And what kind of design were you doing?

• 7:38Speaker 01

  I was an extremely multiverse designer. I was able to do print and I taught myself HTML and web design. And so I was, I was like a typical Swiss Army knife. I could just do it all. But then very quickly became the web girl within that small design studio.

• 7:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I know that you, at that time, in those early days, you would, I mean, New York was probably this incredible, I mean, especially from a design perspective, because it's a center of design, one of the global centers of design. You, you were exposed to all these kind of creative people going to parties and going to art shows. And tell me about that world that you landed in, in New York.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Oh, it was incredible. It was still the the dot com heydays. Uh, I remember I made a really, really small salary and could barely afford, you know, living in New York City, but thank God for all these free internet parties at these internet startups. It was it was a magical time when the web was sort of, you know, exploding and everybody thought it's going to change the world forever, which it did to a certain extent, but I feel like we have similar hypes right now, you know, around just recently NFTs and then now AI and just reminds me a bit of that time.

• 8:57Guy Raz?

  Um, in 2005, you started a blog, which is still going, which is, for people who haven't seen this, awesome. I love it. It's such a great blog and it's called Swiss Miss, not the cocoa. You are a Swiss person who's a Swiss miss. It's a great name. Do you ever do you ever get any grief from Swiss Miss cocoa?

• 9:18Speaker 01

  Oh, no, never. You know, I actually got the trademark for events and design related things. And my lawyer thought he was really, really bold and they agreed to it. They said, if you put in there that you will never sell any chocolate related products, we're okay with it.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  It's pretty wild.

• 9:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. In my heydays, they really missed an opportunity to partner with me because I had like 2 million readers a month at the time.

• 9:43Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  And I sent them so much, I mean, so much traffic because everybody put in Swiss miss without a desk. Yeah, yeah, it was pretty.

• 9:49Guy Raz?

  That's what happened to me. I was like, huh, I typed in Swiss miss and I was like, wait, Swiss miss cocoa. I wonder what their website looks like. It's a great name. And this is like early blog days. This is like still kind of the GeoCities era of blogging. Tell me, tell me about that blog. What was the the idea behind starting that?

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Well, I, you know, I was just a curious designer, working in a design studio at the time. And every morning I will come in and I would spend a few minutes sort of seeing, you know, what's new on the web. It was such an exciting time because the web was such a playground. It was not a self promoting. Universe as it is now, it was just really playful. And, and I just love discovering new products or websites or typefaces or whatever it was. And, and I was like, I need a place to kind of keep my personal archive to go back to it and find it again. And so I just started a blog for myself to sort of have my personal archive. And a few months in, my friend said, do you realize that people are linking to you? Do you ever look at your stats?

• 10:54Speaker 01

  And then I realized that my personal archive was actually not that personal. And obviously that was very exciting when I realized that people are enjoying what I'm sharing.

• 11:02Guy Raz?

  And it was just cool sort of things from the design world.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yeah, I mean, I have a very distinct and specific taste, I would say.

• 11:12Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  And, and I feel like now more than ever, I personally really appreciate, sort of, I call them gardens on the internet, where people carefully curate them with their taste, with their lens on the world.

• 11:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  And, and that's what I'm trying to do. And it's just cool that people can tap into it.

• 11:33Guy Raz?

  Yeah. All right. So you're working on your blog, Swiss Smith, again, love, love the name. And meanwhile, you're working at this design firm for, I think, a pretty long time, right? And it was, I mean, you were there for a long time. I guess in the mid 2000s, something happened in your career, which would eventually lead you to Creative Mornings, which we'll talk about in a moment. But, but what was going on at the time?

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Well, actually, the big thing that happened was in 2006 or 2005, when I became pregnant with my daughter, my, my first kid. And I had some weird introspective moment going on with an angelic choir coming down of saying, hey, Tina, it's time to start your company. So I started my design studio when my daughter was born. And then through, through that, I intuitively wanted to create a space for people like me.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Uh, so they are not alone at home. And this is before co-working spaces were a thing.

• 12:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  I just had a hunch that there's people like me out there who are creative, who are entrepreneurial, who are, you know, sort of believe in living a creative life and who want to surround themselves with kind and heart-centered people. And so I built the space and I said-

• 12:43Guy Raz?

  Where was, where was the space?

• 12:45Speaker 01

  This was in Dumbo. It was very cool. It was like a white box. Yeah. In Dumbo, Brooklyn, a white box on the East River. And wow, talk about build it and they will come.

• 12:53Guy Raz?

  It was, it was like, it was like a warehouse that you rented and you built it out inside?

• 12:56Speaker 01

  It was just like a very raw office building, you know, was no heat. The bathrooms were just shitty. I'm sorry. It was horrible. I had to organize the cleaning, but I didn't care. I was just like, you know, let's be scrappy. It's fine.

• 13:08Guy Raz?

  You wanted, just to be clear, and you wanted a place where like five other people could come every day and like work if they wanted to, but just also, because you were working from home. This is before people worked from home.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 13:19Guy Raz?

  But this is what you did.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:20Guy Raz?

  This is, you were pre-work from home, long before everyone, everyone else cut on. But, but you were, you were sort of thinking, hey, there are other people like me, creative people. They work from home. They're not interacting with other people like me. They didn't have an office space to kind of throw ideas around. Let's do something. And this was the idea.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Exactly. And I just had a hunch that really magical things will unfold when you are surrounding yourself by people with similar values and sort of a creative outlook on life. And it was exactly what happened. Like our lunch conversations were magical.

• 13:51Guy Raz?

  And this was originally, it was called, you called it Studio Mates, right?

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Yes, we called it Studio Mates and we attracted just the most magical, smart people on the internet. Like it was just like when you can turn around or like just have lunch every day with people that are extremely driven and smart and working on super exciting projects. That is, it's like a little mini TED Talk every day for lunch.

• 14:16Guy Raz?

  And everyone kind of basically paid a fee to, obviously, to cover rent, right, I imagine? And it was just not a, it doesn't sound like this was a money-making venture.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  No.

• 14:25Guy Raz?

  It was designed to just be a... And how did you find the people? Like, I mean, I'm assuming you had some friends that you're like, hey, you want to join up and like work in this place with me every day?

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Well, I was lucky because I had my blog. I had an outlet and I feel like just over the years of running my blog with so much integrity and heart and generosity, like, there was just, you know, a trust that people had in that I would also equally, you know, curate a physical space.

• 14:53Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  As I'm curating an online space.

• 14:56Guy Raz?

  When I was reading about the reason that you gave for how you originally came to this idea, you had, I guess you'd read a quote from Seth Godin. I love this quote, and I'm going to read it. And it basically says, "Who you hang out with determines what you dream about and what you collide with. And the collisions and the dreams lead to your changes. And the changes are what you become."

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. That's so true.

• 15:17Guy Raz?

  "Change the outcome by changing your circle," he wrote. And so I guess that quote really applied here. Like, you were thinking, well, yeah, let's, let me surround myself with people who are thinking in creative, different ways.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  I mean, your environment matters.

• 15:33Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  You know, what do you, the people in your environment dream about pushes you. And I think that's what the world needs. We need to gently push each other to think bigger, to think bolder, to think in new ways. And that's what my coworking space does every day.

• 15:50Guy Raz?

  We're going to take a quick break. But when we come back, how Tina Roth-Eisenberg went from operating a single coworking space in Brooklyn to launching Creative Mornings, an event series that brings creatives together in cities all around the world. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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• 19:17Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz and my guest today is Tina Roth-Eisenberg, a serial entrepreneur who, among other ventures, opened a coworking space in Brooklyn back in the mid 2000s that eventually sparked the idea for the well-known event series, Creative Mornings.

• 19:34Guy Raz?

  All right, so you've got this group of like six people coming in, bringing in their lunch, chatting, sometimes working on their laptops. But there's something happening. There's an energy in this little office that you put together. And I guess this sparks an idea that would become a much, much bigger thing and that we know now as Creative Mornings. But tell me the origin of that. How did, what was the initial spark?

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Well, so as I started seeing just the magic that unfolded by gathering these creative, heart-centered humans in my coworking space, I realized just how much that puts fuel into my personal jetpack. Like just human connection is what makes me thrive. And, you know, my desk was literally on the East River, looking at Manhattan. And, you know, in moments where my heart was bursting out of my chest because what we created was so magical and so beautiful, I kept thinking, there's so many more out there. And so I became, I call myself a human gatherer at heart. And I was like, I want to gather them all. I want to create an opportunity that we can, you know, open up the circle.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  And also, just to backtrack for a second, when I moved here in 1999, I literally did not know Want Soul here in New York. I was really wondering where my people were.

• 20:55Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  I was like, where are they? Where do I find them? And my salary was so low, I could not, I could not afford industry events. So it's also kind of like a, I wanted to build the community I wish existed when I first moved to New York. And, and so it was a bit of a combo of, of hunches. And that's how the idea for Creative Morning started.

• 21:17Guy Raz?

  You knew something magical was happening. Just, I, I'm just curious, what, what was the magic happening in that space? That, that got you to think, hey, we need to expand this out. Like, what were the, was it conversations? Was it ideas? What, what was going on?

• 21:31Speaker 01

  There, there was just goodness and a sense of possibility in the air and a playfulness. And we had that. We were working hard, but we were also having a really good time. And I just felt energetically that the world needs more of that.

• 21:49Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So you guys decide, hey, let's have an event here. And just, you just like put it on your blog, like, hey, we're gonna just creative people come by this address? Is that what you did?

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm, yeah.

• 22:03Guy Raz?

  And it was just like, it was like, just come by and we'll hang out. There was no agenda.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was just breakfast. Let's hang out.

• 22:09Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  We fill a room with gentle strangers and we'll just meet each other and chat.

• 22:14Guy Raz?

  We'll see what happens. And this was in September of 2008 at, at this space in Dumbo. And how, how many people showed up?

• 22:20Speaker 01

  I think about 55, 60.

• 22:23Guy Raz?

  Yeah. All right, so cool. And a bunch of people coming in. And did magic happen? Was it, was it like all these creative people in this room? And then the sparks were flying or, or not quite?

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Well, funny enough, the first one we had in our space and the, the elevator was broken, the bagels were stale. It was, and I was like, well, I'm taking notes. This is not great. And there was no talk, which I realized made it very network-y. I, I don't know. I don't think it was magical, but people were excited to gather.

• 22:51Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  I, I think whenever there's a pure intention in gathering humans, people are somewhat buzzing.

• 22:58Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:00Guy Raz?

  All right, so they show up and and there was no agenda. So so how did you feel about it? I mean, was that, did you feel like, oh, we should do this again, or or maybe we should rethink this, or what?

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Well, you know, the the beauty of being a trained designer is that I think in a prototyp-y mindset. And I will never take this for granted, because oftentimes when I work with people that did not sort of come out of a creative space, they always think that they have to create something and it needs to be perfect. So to me, it was totally fine. I was like, OK, here's the things we can improve. And to me, it was clear that I'm going to keep going and keep prototyping and keep chiseling away at it.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  And so I just kept gathering humans every month, you know, it was such a simple concept, once a month, breakfast and a talk.

• 23:49Guy Raz?

  And a talk. OK, so so you decide it's not enough to just gather people. Let's have, let's have a presentation about something.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Yes, it was a really interesting project. But I think the the magic that I started realizing that was unfolding is people really loved seeing into other work environments.

• 24:06Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  So the first few years, we were hosted at agencies, design studios, or even within six months, we were hosted at Google, which really to me was an indicator, OK, there's something happening here. If if Google invites us in.

• 24:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And it was entirely, I mean, this was launched through your blog, and it was just an idea like, I mean, of course, there were in our TED Talks, for example, which are very kind of, you know, more formal and people have, you know, sort of a set amount of time. But the idea was these would be very informal talks and and we just, you would just do one and people would come and there'd be free breakfast and it was free and that would be it?

• 24:45Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, absolutely. And what I realized very quickly is that giving people a chance to share their gift is a really beautiful thing. And then me telling them, hey,

• 25:00Speaker 01

  You are gonna get, I don't know, 100, 150 people's attention, their time. What are you giving to them? What gift are you unfolding for them on stage?

• 25:11Guy Raz?

  So you start this in September of 2008 as a one-off and decide, let's keep doing this monthly, this monthly gathering, and we'll call it Creative Mornings. How soon before you were like, you know, maybe we should like incorporate this and, you know, and make this formalize this thing?

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Well, I would say the big, the big moment was when I received an email from Ben Chestnut, the co-founder of Mailchimp.

• 25:40Guy Raz?

  Who has been on How I Built This.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  I know, I know. I know. He's become a good friend since.

• 25:44Guy Raz?

  So he contacted you, what, just a few weeks or months after you launched?

• 25:49Speaker 01

  Four months into launching. So apparently he read my blog and he emailed me and says, hey, my team, like literally, it said, my team would poop their pants if they saw us team up. So can, can I support you?

• 26:00Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  And I remember sitting there going, I don't know. And I just emailed back, do you want to pay for breakfast? And he's like, deal. And so it was beautiful, the, the journey of sponsorship or partner, I call it partnerships, started with Ben.

• 26:16Guy Raz?

  And you just put up a sign that said like, supported by Mailchimp?

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Well, no, see, that's the beauty is that I then got connected to who at the time was the head of marketing, who's still there and is still involved in a lot of things at Mailchimp. So I was connected to him and I was like fully prepared to hang banners and do ads and whatever. And he goes, Tina, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like, I'm gonna send you some T-shirts and some monkeys. Let's make this fun.

• 26:39Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  And just from out of the gates, I mean, I could not have had a better partner in showing me that, just like I believe, you know, radical generosity is a thing. I mean, Mailchimp was literally the patron of the creative community. The things they have enabled generously is just unreal.

• 26:59Guy Raz?

  Wow. All right. So you have a sponsor and you're doing these, and how are you curating the talks? Were you, were people reaching out to you and saying, hey, Tina, can I talk this month? Or, or were you reaching out to people? And what, and what did you say? Like, what did you look for in a talk?

• 27:16Speaker 01

  Uh, I was reaching out to people, but I have to admit, man, I look back now and I kinda cringe at my curation a little bit.

• 27:22Guy Raz?

  That's fine.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  But I guess this is where we see growth, right? Yeah, yeah, this is where we see growth. Well, I was just, in the beginning, it was extremely design-heavy, of course, the speakers, because I was still running a design studio. And so the talks were mostly design-centric and I just, you know, I think I just had an antenna out, like, who would have something interesting for this community to share, period? To the point where I remember when I thought I have to stop running it when I was pregnant with my son in 2010. And I thought, I'm gonna go out with a bang and I'm gonna ask my dream speaker. I never forget when I walked up to Michael Birut of Pentagram at this event and I said, "Michael, I'm Tina, I run Creative Mornings, would you give a talk in January?" And he just said, "Yes."

• 28:05Speaker 01

  And then he gave such an incredible talk that I figured, that's the universe telling me I can't stop, so I didn't stop.

• 28:13Guy Raz?

  And Pentagram's a big design company.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:16Guy Raz?

  I should mention, for people who don't know, yeah.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  They're as renowned as it gets.

• 28:20Guy Raz?

  Um, and I guess also that year, that summer, you went back to Switzerland for the summer.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:25Guy Raz?

  Um, and decided to, to like, put on a Creative Mornings event, just kind of for fun there.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I sort of didn't wanna have gaps in, in hosting it, because it's just an event once a month. So I boldly decided to reach out to, um, the Freitag Company. It's like the coolest company in Switzerland, they make bags out of truck tarp.

• 28:47Guy Raz?

  Oh, yeah, oh, I know this company, yeah, out of, out of, uh, billboards, right?

• 28:50Speaker 01

  Uh, actually, truck, truck tarps.

• 28:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a cool company, yeah, super cool.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, and I reached out to them, to the founders, like, "Hey, do you wanna speak and do you wanna host us?" And man, they hosted us in their factory. It was the coolest thing. And we just, yeah, we did it. I mean, it was just me, I remember flying in with my kids. And I was like, "Look at this, you can, you can be so scrappy in putting on events." Like, that's what I want the world to know.

• 29:14Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  Like, don't overthink it, you know, scrappy's where it's at.

• 29:18Guy Raz?

  And were you, were you video recording these too?

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:20Guy Raz?

  Initially?

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's online.

• 29:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah, okay. So you were videoing them and putting, and you were putting the videos up, but it seems like... The the community that was showing up to these things would not let you stop this. Like you you wanted to kind of put the put this to bed, but they did not want that to happen.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what I started feeling. And that's I have to say, that's a really amazing feeling when you start something and you start realizing you can't really stop it.

• 29:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah, because people people start to become dependent on this. And and really, it was just initially, and I mean, you did a couple of these one offs in Zurich, but really, it was New York. It was in New York where you were based. You do them once a month. But I guess people started to come to you, even in Zurich. And they were like, hey, we want to keep this going in Zurich. Is that what happened?

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, the second time I brought it to Zurich, this young man, Daniel Frye, he basically coordinated me with the whole team. And he says, like, we're not going to let you go until you tell us that we can bring this to Zurich. And I mean, he said it very kindly. And I was like, OK, so lead into this. And and my gut just told me, like, Tina, figure it out. Figure it out what it would mean to let people run this and sort of create the container for it, that it's protected, yet free. Sort of asking myself, what are the nonnegotiables? What do I need to tell someone that they keep the spirit of it alive, but yet I give them enough freedom to put their own stamp on it?

• 30:45Guy Raz?

  All right, so you basically, people are like, hey, I want to start a chapter. And and then other people are like, hey, can I do one in LA? And and it just, first of all, how did you initially feel about that? Were you like, I don't know, it's just too much for me to manage? And like, what was your thinking around that?

• 31:04Speaker 01

  Well, I, to be very honest, I was super scared. I I was very scared. And but I also know that when I'm scared, that's when I need to really pay attention, because that's where the growth happens.

• 31:15Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  And and I had to ask myself, what are you scared of, Tina? And what I realized is that what I have created was so deeply personal. It's a real extension of my values, of how I want to live my life. I believe in living a very generous life. I believe in gathering humans.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  And so to me, it was like, what if? What if people don't keep that spirit alive? What if it becomes an event that doesn't feel good?

• 31:44Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  So I was afraid it would reflect badly on me. But then I also realized that I'm a big believer in trust breeds magic, that trust is the biggest compliment of all. And if you set people up right, and obviously do your homework, the people that asked me originally, I just knew they were really good people.

• 32:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Also, what I've learned over the years is that these were people that were in service of community. There's type of humans that are just showing up like that. And

• 32:12Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  And, and so in the end of the day, I, I leaned into the discomfort of it. You know, sort of, I'm also sometimes someone who just closes my eyes and says, like, oh, I hope it's gonna go okay. Denial is a good thing.

• 32:26Guy Raz?

  We're gonna take another short break. But when we come back, more from Tina about giving up complete oversight and control and letting others start Creative Mornings chapters all around the world. Stay with us. You're listening to How I Built This Lab.

• 32:43Speaker 03

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• 33:20Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. My guest today is Tina Roth-Eisenberg, the entrepreneur behind Creative Mornings. It's a free event series for creatives with more than 200 chapters all around the world. All right, so 2011 really was a turning point. You have like a chapter opens or a Creative Mornings group opens in LA and one in San Francisco. And from there, it really began to, I guess, expand organically. And as that happened, right, how did you start to think about managing it and, you know, and kind of organizing it and making sure that you could protect the brand? Or did you, or maybe you didn't worry about that?

• 34:04Speaker 01

  I never really worried that much about it, to be honest. What I realized is that I needed help. I am, I am good with system to a certain extent, but then I kind of am not good at maintaining them. So I needed someone to really think through the processes of what this means. So I was very lucky to get introduced to this really smart young man. And I hired him part time. And I literally just sat him down at the coworking space and said like, hey, here's an inbox full of emails of people wanting things from us or wanting to collaborate or starting a chapter. Can you figure out systems? And he was just incredible. And he helped me systemize what Creative Mornings is and how we work from four chapters to 111.

• 34:45Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  He was incredible.

• 34:47Guy Raz?

  And so as you were growing, right, when somebody said, hey, I want to start a chapter, what were the parameters that you gave them? And what do you, what did you say to them as they, you said, okay, well, this is what it is. Explain to me how you explained it to them.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  Well, basically, we told them what the non-negotiables are. If you want to become the ambassador, the host of a chapter in your city, and there's only one per city, you have to commit to putting on an event once a month in the morning for free. You have to find sponsors to make it happen. You have to tape the talk. You have to upload the talk.

• 35:25Guy Raz?

  To the YouTube page, right?

• 35:27Speaker 01

  At the time, we used Vimeo.

• 35:29Guy Raz?

  Okay, and it's always free. Everything's free to go.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, everything is free. Yeah, the events have to be free. So we basically told people, you have to organize a local volunteer team. You have to organize your group. You have to get them excited. You know, some, I would say a host invests probably about forty hours a month into putting on the events.

• 35:47Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  But I also was very quickly able to articulate in saying like, this will make you so visible within your city. It will make you a leader in the creative community. You will be seen as someone, you know, who gathers the creative community. So, and it really attracted the people that just saw the currency in that.

• 36:11Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 36:13Guy Raz?

  Is there a guiding principle around Creative Morning Talks? I mean, is it like, like in general, it could be somebody just coming and talking about their life? Or somebody talking about something cool they did? Or somebody talking about how they created something? Is it, is it that and more?

• 36:32Speaker 01

  It's completely open. For me, what it just needs to be is like, it needs to be hope inducing. It needs to be inspiring. I really don't care. And if I'm really honest guy, I don't care about the talk that much. I added the talk because I didn't want people to feel like they're in a networking event. But where my heart really opens is the half an hour when we have breakfast, when people start talking to each other, or the minutes of audience engagement that we, like, we have learned from our chapters around the world, how to engage the community. Like, there's, there's things that we have integrated into our events now, before the talk and after the talk, that make people talk to each other or get to know each other.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  And if I'm really honest, I believe we're in the business of connection.

• 37:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  And not in the business of talks. TED does that really well.

• 37:26Guy Raz?

  Yeah. You know, it's amazing because it is a for-profit company, Creative Mornings, but really, I mean, it's certainly not running on like a, you're not like capitalist sharks here. I mean, it's free. The fee to join is, I don't know, there's no fee for somebody to start a chapter, right?

• 37:46Speaker 01

  No, it's completely free. I mean, to be honest, the fact that we exist the way we do and the sheer size globally

• 37:53Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  is a miracle. I mean, we are a nine-people team, running a global organization on a extremely scrappy budget.

• 38:01Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  But that is possible because the power is in the collective, you know?

• 38:06Guy Raz?

  And they're volunteers, right?

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:08Guy Raz?

  Everyone, and these volunteers are kind of curating and organizing these events monthly in their cities. And they're doing all the work of like, finding a space, finding some company that will give them a free space, and finding a sponsor to pay for the breakfast, and then getting the word out. Like, and I know you've got a Creative Mornings website, so that there's a way to find these, but it's really, it's a totally distributed volunteer-based organization, but with a small professional staff in New York City.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, radical generosity is our business model.

• 38:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  You know, and you couldn't pay a PR company to help us get to this reach. But when you have so many people invested, and they're pouring their hearts into it, that is unmatched. It's just unmatched, the energy. And also, the one thing that, I was lucky enough that Bill Ury, who wrote the book Getting to Yes, Yeah,

• 39:06Guy Raz?

  Yeah, he's given TED Talks. Yeah, sure.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's wonderful. I met him at a very tiny conference I was invited to speak at, and he was sitting in the audience, and he afterwards came up to me and said, "Do you mind me telling you why what you do works?" And I love nothing more than people reflecting back to me in their own words, what I'm doing, because I'm so into Sauce, and it's just so intuitive what I do, that sometimes I'm like, I don't have the words for it. And so I was like, "Yes, please." And he said, "You know, what you're doing is, based on non-transactional giving, you're inviting people in to your space."

• 39:40Speaker 01

  But if you were to sell a ticket, then it's a transaction. You buy the ticket, you expect a good coffee and a breakfast and to talk. And if it's not good, you know, like, and then it's done. The transaction is over. But when you create an invitation that is just so generous, and then when you come to events, they're so, you're, you're basically wrapped in a blanket of love. People are so upbeat. People are so nice. Uh, you, you leave that space going, how can I contribute? How can I be part of this? How can I, you know, like, it's, it's an invitation to contribute. And I really think that's the magic, the magic sauce of Creative Mornings.

• 40:22Guy Raz?

  And how do you finance the, the, the, the operations of professional staff? Cause there are people who are employees who have to, you know, kind of administer it from New York. How are they? How, how is that financed?

• 40:35Speaker 01

  Well, thanks to the support like companies like MailChimp, who, by the way, is insane. They have been our supporter for 14 and a half years straight.

• 40:43Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Anyone who does partnerships probably goes, what the heck right now? Because that is unheard of. And so the, the, the way I've been able to run this for the last 15 years is because we had what we call partners like MailChimp.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  And they were basically mostly big tech companies like, you know, Basecamp, Squarespace, WordPress, Wix, Adobe, um, you know, uh, giving us a slice of their marketing or brand budget and supporting us. Um, what is really interesting, what is happening now? And I'm, uh, this is also one of the reasons why I became a full-time CEO just recently is that just the landscape of that, that business model is changing and, uh, we're, we're trying to figure out sort of, I, I believe that the future of Creative Mornings is. Community-led and community-supported. So we're trying to sort of shift the business model into what Creative Mornings actually always should have been.

• 41:43Guy Raz?

  Because the business model is shifting to accept more community-based support. And presumably, you own Creative Mornings, right?

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:51Guy Raz?

  And so is, I mean, I have to assume that from time to time, people may come to you and say, hey, you should do this or that, or you should monetize this or that, or you should publish books based on the talks, or you should charge money or something like that. I mean, is there a world where this becomes a, where you would be OK with it becoming a money-making venture?

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Yes, if it feeds back into the system. And if the money-making itself is based on making the community better. And I can give you an example with what I mean with that. When the pandemic hit and we realized people are really hungry for connection, we obviously moved to online gatherings, which I would have never done before, ever, because I believe in real connection happening in person. And it was a real moment of realizing I had blinders on. So we moved our chapter events to Zoom and very quickly realized how we can translate the magic of Creative Mornings to actually online events. But we also moved something that we called, and we were experimenting with here, mostly

• 43:03Speaker 01

  in New York, which were called field trips, small, community-led workshops. We moved DOSE to Zoom, too, and they have been growing massively. It's basically what I envision they will turn into is the world's most radically generous peer-to-peer learning space. And I don't know if you've seen it on our site, but we have about 10,000 people show up every month for community-led workshops from how to do SEO to make pom-poms to stretching to like, you name it. We have about 20 events a month. Of which each one of them average has 450 signups. And also, we had big tech companies come to us and say like, hey, can we do some organic field trips?

• 43:48Speaker 01

  Where people like sort of, you know, we onboard them onto, like we did this with Adobe Express with their software and they're so not webinary, they're so like grassroots and beautiful. And, and I'm starting to sort of see a business model emerge that is a literal win-win for everyone involved.

• 44:05Guy Raz?

  Um, I mean, one of the things that, that we didn't mention, and I should mention is that in the midst of the, of starting Creative Mornings and how it kind of grew and expanded, you also created two other businesses. One is a, uh, called To Do, T E U X D E U X, To Do, it's a, an app that creates to do lists. And the other was you, you started a temporary tattoo company called Tatley. Were those, I mean, do you think those came out of these creative gatherings, these, these interactions, those ideas?

• 44:41Speaker 01

  Um, they came out of my coworking space, the original. They were both ideas that basically happened over lunch. And then, you know, my personal rule of like, the best way to complain is to make things. I just can't, I can't really stop myself. I really like to figure things out. So I, I, I kind of created them and then I had to maintain them.

• 45:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  I don't know how to stop.

• 45:04Guy Raz?

  So you started this temporary tattoo company called Tatley. Uh, and, and you basically, it's designers who, who design the tattoos.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Um, well, the, the basic idea was that my daughter would bring home these hideously designed temporary tattoos from birthday parties and they were an insult to my Swiss aesthetic. So I just, as a joke said, I can make this better. And I asked my designer, illustrator, artist friends to come up with some cool temporary tattoos and, you know, I was a web designer, I could just create a website and put that, you know, put about 16 designs online. And, and it was pretty wild to see after years of me celebrating other people making cool things on my blog, for the first time ever, I, I actually talked about something I made and that I was selling. And that was a real moment when that printer started printing orders.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  And at the first day, we had about 150 orders coming from all over the world and was like, okay, we're on to something here.

• 46:04Guy Raz?

  And so while you were kind of watching this Creative Mornings thing really explode, which has had a, you know, obviously a global impact, you were running this temporary tattoo business.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  You know, when you say it like that, or whenever people ask me about it, I mean, it sounds so silly. Like, I did not wake up one day thinking, I want to run or redefine the temporary tattoo space, but I did. So we became, we very quickly became sort of the, you know, the, the high-end temporated two brand. And, and then I kept running it up until last year. And to be very honest, not knowing how to get off this carousel. Like, that's one thing that I think a lot of founders do not talk about. You know, it's, it's easy. I mean, to me, it's easy to build a thing. It was much harder to get off the carousel.

• 46:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah. You sold, you sold Tally to, to BIC, the company that best known for pens last year in 2022. And so, and, and did that change your involvement with Creative Mornings? Did you kind of double down on your involvement?

• 47:12Speaker 01

  Yes. I mean, the, the reason why I wanted to sell it really came out of the pandemic as well, because, I mean, like all of us, we probably had a bit of a introspection moment. And what became really clear to me is while I love Tally and all the companies I've built, Creative Mornings is really my legacy and the closest to my personal values and what I believe in and something I, you know, I believe we need to leave the world a little better than we found it. And I think Creative Mornings is my contribution to that. And so I really wanted to be able to, to focus 100% on Creative Mornings. And, and before I, I wasn't, before I was, you know, sort of scattered all over the companies. And so now I'm 100% CEO of Creative Mornings.

• 47:54Guy Raz?

  So where, where do you see Creative Mornings? Like, in, you know, I mean, these are free events. They happen all over the world. It's, it's usually one talk, once a month. Is that essentially what it will be in your view in, in five years, 10 years from now? Or do you see it as something different?

• 48:11Speaker 01

  I actually think Creative Mornings is just getting started. And I, I always tried to explain it in a way that I want Creative Mornings to be an organization that no matter where you're at in your discovery of that you are a creative person, we have something to offer to you. I want Creative Mornings to either inspire you or help you find your people, help you find your community. Like, I see Creative Mornings a bit as like church for creativity and as a friendship engine and an academy for living a heart-centered life.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  There's just so many ways that Creative Mornings is helping people up level, helping people step into their fullest potential, making them realize they're safe, there is a better future. And when I say I really think we're only getting started is because the amount of ideas we have, what we can build and what we will build is pretty phenomenal.

• 49:18Guy Raz?

  Awesome. Tina, thank you so much.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 49:21Guy Raz?

  That's Tina Roth-Eisenberg, founder and CEO of Creative Mornings. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show, and it's totally free. This episode was produced by Carla Esteves with editing by John Isabella. Our music was composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Brian Jarboe. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Chris Messini, Elaine Coats, J.C. Howard, Liz Metzger, Sam Paulson, and Kerry Thompson. Neva Grant is our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.