Ryan Meyer, the 38-year-old regional director of General Assembly, spends most days driving from Santa Monica to downtown L.A., overseeing the company’s three Los Angeles campuses. General Assembly offers short-term and one-off classes that exist outside of the college model, and help people “hack” into the “new economy” by, for example, learning how to code.
Prior to General Assembly, he founded AlumniFunder, a crowdfunding platform for student and alumni entrepreneurs within universities, and he co-founded Minds-in-Motion Labs, a brain-training company for children. Earlier in his career, Ryan spent nearly a decade as director of sales at Dai Nippon Printing, a Fortune 500 company, running its automotive products division in North America. Today, he manages 25 staff members and 20 instructors, spending at least half of his days “addressing unforeseen issues.”
We spoke with Meyers about how a sense of humor gets him through the chaos.
Question: Describe your morning routine.
Answer: It’s recently changed, drastically. My wife and I have an 18-month-old daughter, so I went from this night-owl type of work pattern, where I would stay up until 3 a.m. and wake up at 9 a.m., to getting used to the 6 a.m. wake up call every day. It’s been a nice change because I am now a morning person. I spend an hour to an hour and a half playing with my daughter and enjoying that I have this bubbly 18-month-old child in my life. I try to go for an ocean swim three days a week. I live in Malibu, which makes that easier. Ocean swimming forces a certain amount of reflection. It’s calming on physical and mental level. It also forces you to face your fears because even though I’ve never seen a shark, when you’re a half a mile offshore, you don’t know what is there. I think if you’re not doing one thing a week that scares you, where’s the fun in that?
Your work and the work of your staff require a certain amount of creative energy. How do you cultivate that within your team?
Before working at General Assembly, I worked for a Japanese multinational Fortune 500 company at their headquarters in New York City. It was very structured and I hated the hierarchical nature of it. I tend to think that most people don’t thrive in that environment. General Assembly doesn’t really have dedicated office space. We have huge campuses and all the staff have laptops and can kind of mill about, but we don’t have a formal, “You need to be hear nine to five” setup. I don’t care when people are in as long as they are getting work done. I think that energizes the work force. You take this paternalistic micromanaging pressure out of the equation, which people respond to very well. We do a team meeting in Tongva Park in Santa Monica once a week, and that’s great because people are not reading notes or relying on PowerPoint when speaking. It creates a disconnect from the campus environment and gets the creative juices flowing. I tend to take most of my meetings walking. Some famous CEO said to avoid regularly scheduled meetings, and I do try to avoid those, but the ones I have, I try to take walking because it facilitates more of a conversation.
How do you achieve work/life balance?
I like to take a humorous approach to it. I don’t think anyone has solved the work/life conundrum. I don’t have it figured out. But if you approach the day with a fair amount of humor and are prepared for the unexpected and are not being thrown off by things that pop up in personal life, family life and work life, that helps.
How do you make time for your family?
The weekends are now sacred. I do a lot less socializing that isn’t work related. The flexibility of working at startup is fantastic in that I do get to see my daughter quite often and still manage to put in 60 to 80 hours a week.
General Assembly’s courses often focus on teaching people the latest technology when it comes to coding or design. What effect does technology have on work/life balance?
I think, in this day and age, there is the notion of the superhuman worker who sleeps with the phone next to their head and is always beholden to the ping of email or social media. We are conditioned to respond, and while it creates some level of efficiency, it takes away from having bigger, structured thoughts. It’s important to think about issues, rather than just responding. It becomes very apparent if you watch interviews on TV from the early ’80s. I had a professor who had a PBS show called “Great Decisions,” and he’d be asking these very long, well thought out, structured questions that today you would never see on TV, and don’t exist outside of academia. We are so used to responding to all these external stimuli, our attention spans have gotten shorter. So, I am a big fan of disconnecting and getting out in the water. You can’t answer your phone underwater.
