Ari Meisel

speaker

126 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard Apr 2025

Ari Meisel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Escaping the Drift with John Gafford · The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel · 29 Apr 2025 podcast

Hey, thanks for having me back.

Absolutely. Sometimes do-overs are a good thing.

That's a good question. I think that there was a really interesting statistic that I read a long time ago, which was from the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship, which said that 74% of young entrepreneurs come from households where the father is physically or emotionally absent and the mother is overbearing for whatever reason. You can draw some extrapolations. That was my setup.

My father is very emotionally absent, not physically absent. My mother is a Jewish mother, so overbearing. And I guess that just like squeezes out this like need to overachieve and get recognition and all sorts of things, which I ended up having to fix later as an adult in therapy. But I got to start my first company when I was 12. I started working as a model when I was nine.

And I was doing children's birthday parties as a magician before that, believe it or not. So I've always been working.

Website design. So it was a company called Lion Techs. Ari means lion in Hebrew and techs was technology extraordinaire. It's like the lamest thing ever. Lion Techs. So I've had like eight or more companies at this point. And I find like every company I've gotten involved in is basically like something that I like and that I'm good at. And then somebody offers to pay me.

And so that's what, you know, in 1994, I was 12. And in 1994, you either got a 12 year old who knew HTML, or you hired some giant ad company to do a website for $300,000. So I made a website for my father's art gallery. And then someone saw it and asked if I would do theirs and ended up doing like 150 or so websites before I turned 16.

So interestingly enough, yes, I've had several jobs, many, many, many jobs actually, and they just don't last very long.

Yeah. Yeah.

I get it. I would be a terrible, I would have, I mean, I was a terrible employee. I think in some ways, not because of like quality of work, because I was like always second guessing the bosses and stuff like that. I have worked for Freddie Mac, big mortgage company. I've worked for Mac cosmetics, which is part of Estee Lauder.

I worked my last job before I, my very last job, which I guess was now 23 years ago. was in real estate development with a Japanese real estate development company that was doing work in Austin, but that lasted about six months. And then since then, no, I have not worked for anybody.

Yeah, I think there's a lot more negatives. So like Freddie Mac is a good example. So Freddie Mac is the big government organization for mortgages and stuff. So I got there for a summer internship and I had seven bosses that I met my first day. All seven of them gave me a project to work on. And then all seven of them went to some convention for like a week.

And I finished all of the work that they had given me that day, that first day. And then was just like, you know, bouncing around for the rest of the day. I went to actually, I grew up in New York City. So like the Lincolns at Tyson's Corner or the Tyson, I don't know. It was some big mall in Maryland that was like line blowing for me.

I spent more time at that mall the first week than I did working at Freddie Mac. Plus, the company had flex hours. So you had to do seven hours and 45 minutes of work any given day. But the building operated 24-7. So I'd come in at like 5 and be done by lunch, essentially, and then just be done. So a lot of weird ways to organize it.

I wouldn't say a government organization is necessarily the most efficient. Yeah, so I definitely learned more about what not to do.

I don't know that I modeled, per se, after it, but I definitely had several mentors, actually. And maybe the most impactful was actually in college is a guy who's still alive named Michael Tomczyk, who ran the Innovation Center at Wharton. and I worked for him while I was there. And Michael's sort of big claim to fame is he was one of the original founders of the Commodore 64.

And wrote the book on like personal computer wars, essentially. Really fascinating guy, but he was great. He was an army officer, just really, really interesting and was an important part of my growing up, I'd say in a lot of ways.

That's the Apple, but this is what I had. A little bit after you, I guess.

I remember when a friend of mine, it was like such sour grapes, a friend of mine got a 28-8 bond modem. Like, you don't even need that if you're running a business. 14-4 is fine.

Yeah, it's interesting. There's obviously a lot of clout around Wharton, and I'm very happy that I went there, and it's definitely opened doors for me to be there, that I went there. There's no question. But like it's been for a very, very long time, it's been a known thing that like Harvard produces more CEOs and Wharton produces more operations analysts kind of people.

Showing 1–20 of 126 · page 1 of 7