Cultivating a creative community with Tina Roth-Eisenberg of CreativeMornings

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1:53Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.com slash host. 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 co-working space. And she invited a bunch of friends to join 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 To Do, a simplified to-do list website.

2:48These conversations were everything Tina had hoped for. And so she started inviting other people to the co-working 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. 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.

3:26I'm going to try to find an internship. And I got on a flight. All right. So you get to New York. You're in your early 20s. You get, I think you get an internship in the city at a design studio. 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 sat me down. Wow.

4:05And did that all happen? Yes, it all happened. Even tall? He was a tall man? He was a tall Jewish man. Yes. Wow. It's like a crystal ball. He's like, you're going to stay in New York, you're going to marry a tall Jewish man, and you're going to work in design. He's a bit psychic.

4:23So, right. So, you end up, you know, taking this job. And what kind of design were you doing? I was an extremely multiverse designer. I was able to do print, and I taught myself HTML and web design. And so, 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. 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 were exposed to all these kind of creative people going to parties and going to art shows.

5:07And tell me about that world that you landed in, in New York? Oh, it was incredible. It was still the dot-com heydays. I remember I made a really, really small salary and could barely afford living in New York City, but thank God for all these free internet parties at these internet startups. It was a magical time when the web was sort of exploding and everybody thought it's going to change the world forever, which it did us out next time. 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. In 2005, you started a blog, which is still going, which is for people I've seen is awesome.

5:56I 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 get any grief from Swiss Miss Coco? 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. It's pretty wild. Yeah. Yeah, in my heydays, they really missed an opportunity to partner with me because I had like two million readers a month at the time.

6:33Wow. And I sent them so much, I mean, so much traffic because everybody put in Swiss Miss. Swiss Miss. Yeah, it was pretty. That's what happened to me. I was like, huh, I typed in Swiss Miss and I was like, wait, Swiss Miss Coco. 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 about that blog. What was the idea behind starting that? Well, I was just a curious designer working in a design studio at the time. And every morning I would come in and I would spend a few minutes sort of seeing what's new on the web.

7:09It 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 I just love discovering new products or websites or typefaces or whatever it was. 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? And then I realized that my personal archive was actually not that personal.

7:48And obviously, that was very exciting when I realized that people are enjoying what I'm sharing. And it was just cool sort of things from the design world. Yeah. I mean, I have a very distinct and specific taste, I would say. 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. Yeah. And that's what I'm trying to do. And it's just cool that people can tap into it. Yeah. All right. So you're working on your blog, Swiss Miss. Again, love the name. And meanwhile, you're working at this design firm for, I think, a pretty long time, right?

8:34And you were there for a long time. But 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 what was going on at the time? Well, actually, the big thing that happened was in 2006 or 2005 when I became pregnant with my daughter, 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 that, I intuitively wanted to create a space for people like me so they are not alone at home.

9:16And this is before co-working spaces were a thing. 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. Where was this space? 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. It was like a warehouse that you rented and you built it out inside? It was just like a very raw office building.

9:50You know, it 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. 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 work from home. Exactly. This is what you did. Yeah. You were pre-work from home long before everyone else caught on. But you were sort of thinking, hey, there are other people like me, creative people.

10:18They 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. 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. And this was originally, you called it Studio Mates, right? Yes, we called it Studio Mates. And we attracted just the most magical, smart people on the internet. Except 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.

11:06And everyone kind of basically paid a fee to obviously to cover rent. Right. I imagine. And it was not a doesn't sound like this was a money making venture. No. It was designed to just be a. And how did you find the people like. 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? 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 as I'm curating an online space.

11:46When I was reading about the reason that you gave for how you originally came to this idea, I guess you'd read a quote from Seth Godin. I love this quote. 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. Mm-hmm. That's so true. And 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 me surround myself with people who are thinking in creatively different ways.

12:21I mean, your environment matters. Yeah. You know, what 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 co-working space does every day. We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, how Tina Roth Eisenberg went from operating a single co-working 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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17:00Welcome 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 co-working space in Brooklyn back in the mid-2000s that eventually sparked the idea for the well-known event series Creative Mornings. 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 is Creative Mornings.

17:40But tell me the origin of that. What was the initial spark? Well, so as I started seeing just the magic that unfolded by gathering these creative heart-centered humans in my co-working space, I realized just how much that puts fuel into my personal jetpack. Like just human connection is what makes me thrive. And my desk was literally on the East River looking at Manhattan. And 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.

18:23I want to create an opportunity that we can, you know, open up the circle. And also just to backtrack for a second, when I moved here in 1999, I literally did not know one soul here in New York. I was really wondering where my people were. 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 I wanted to build the community I wish existed when I first moved to New York. And so it was a bit of a combo of hunches. And that's how the idea for Creative Morning started. You knew something magical was happening.

19:02I'm just curious, what was the magic happening in that space that got you to think, hey, we need to expand this out? Was it conversations? Was it ideas? What was going on? 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. Yeah. So you guys decide, hey, let's have an event here. And you just put it on your blog, like, hey, we're going to just creative people come by this address. Is that what you did? Yeah. And it was just like, just come by and we'll hang out.

19:50There was no agenda. Yeah, it was just breakfast. Let's hang out. Right. We fill a room with gentle strangers and we'll just meet each other. We'll see what happens. And this was in September of 2008 at this space in Dumbo. And how many people showed up? I think about 55, 60. Yeah. All right. So cool. And a bunch of people coming in. And did magic happen? Was it like all these creative people in this room and then just sparks were flying or not quite? Well, funny enough, the first one we had in our space and the elevator was broken. The bagels were stale. And I was like, well, I'm taking notes.

20:24This is not great. And there was no talk, which I realized made it very networky. I don't know. I don't think it was magical, but people were excited together. I think whenever there's a pure intention in gathering humans, people are somewhat buzzing. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So they show up and there was no agenda. So how did you feel about it? I mean, was that, did you feel like, oh, we should do this again or maybe we should rethink this or what? Well, you know, the beauty of being a trained designer is that I think in a prototype 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.

21:13So to me, it was totally fine. I was like, okay, 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. And so I just kept gathering humans every month. You know, it was such a simple concept. Once a month, breakfast and a talk. And a talk. Okay, so you decide it's not enough to just gather people. Let's have a presentation about something. Yes, it was a really interesting project. But I think the magic that I started realizing that was unfolding is people really loved seeing into other work environments. 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, okay, there's something happening here if Google invites us in.

22:03Yeah. And it was entirely, I mean, this was launched through your blog, and it was just an idea. I mean, of course, there were in our TED Talks, for example, which are very kind of more formal and people have sort of a set amount of time. But the idea was these would be very informal talks and you would just do one and people would come and there'd be free breakfast and it was free and that would be it. 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, you are going to get, I don't know, 100, 150 people's attention, their time.

22:49What are you giving to them? What gift are you unfolding for them on stage? 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? Well, I would say the big moment was when I received an email from Ben Chestnut, the co-founder of MailChimp. Who has been on How I Built This. I know, I know. An amazing story. I know, he's become a good friend since. So he contacted you, what, just a few weeks or months after you launched?

23:32Four 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 I support you? Wow. 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 journey of sponsorship or partner, I call it partnerships, started with Ben. And you just put up a sign that said like, supported by MailChimp. 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.

24:10So 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 going to send you some T-shirts and some monkeys. Let's make this fun. Wow. 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. Wow. All right. So you have a sponsor and you're doing these. And how are you curating the talks?

24:48Were people reaching out to you and saying, hey, Tina, can I talk this month? Or were you reaching out to people? And what did you say – like what did you look for in a talk? I was reaching out to people. But I have to admit, man, I look back now and I kind of cringe at my curation a little bit. That's fine. But I guess this is where we see growth. That's part of the design process. Yeah, this is where we see growth. Well, I was just – in the beginning, I was extremely design heavy, of course, to 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 Beirut of Pentagram at this event and I said Michael I'm Tina I run Creative Mornings would you give a talk in January?

25:47And he just said yes. 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. And Pentagram's a big design company. Yes. I should mention for people who don't know. Yeah. They're as renowned as it gets. And I guess also that year, that summer, you went back to Switzerland for the summer and decided to put on a creative mornings event just kind of for fun there. Yeah, I sort of didn't want to have gaps in hosting it because it's just an event once a month. So I boldly decided to reach out to the Freitag company. It's like the coolest company in Switzerland.

26:29They make bags out of truck tarps. Oh, yeah. Oh, I know this company. Yeah, out of billboards, right? Actually, truck tarps. Yeah, it's a cool company. Yeah, super cool. Oh, my God. And I reached out to them, to the founders, like, hey, do you want to speak or do you want to 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 be so scrappy in putting on events. Like, that's what I want the world to know. Like, don't overthink it. You know, scrappy is where it's at.

27:01And were you video recording these too? Yeah. Initially? Yeah, it's online. Yeah, okay. So you were videoing them and you were putting the videos up. But it seems like the community that was showing up to these things would not let you stop this. Like you wanted to kind of put this to bed, but they did not want that to happen. 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. Yeah, because people start to become dependent on this. 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.