As a company, Meetup has long embraced its position as a small, mission-driven operation. While other social software companies from the Web 2.0 era, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, focused on keeping their users on their sites for as long as possible, Meetup’s purpose was always to get people off the internet. By connecting people to one another, Meetup would entice them to get offline and go walk their pugs together, practice speaking French, or organize for Howard Dean.

Jessi Hempel is Backchannel’s editorial director. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

In the age of billion-person platforms that encourage users to make thousands of connections, it seemed quaint, even old-fashioned, and certainly inefficient. It was a lot harder to scale the act of organizing people—personally, around common interests—than it was to grow a company that focused on digital interactions, none of which required that people leave their couches. As those companies added users and sped toward initial public offerings, Meetup stayed focused and tiny. CEO and cofounder Scott Heiferman was never in a hurry. The last time he raised funds—in 2008—he selected patient investors like Pierre Omidyar and Esther Dyson, who believed businesses should also contribute meaningfully to society. “Our number one priority was independence and to live within our means,” says Heiferman. “Our number two priority was growth.”

So I was surprised to learn that Meetup has just sold itself to the poster child of hyper-growth: WeWork. After raising $4.4 billion from Softbank’s humongous Vision Fund, WeWork is now valued at close to $20 billion, putting it in league with Uber and Airbnb as one of the most highly valued private US tech startups. (There are new reports surfacing that WeWork executives traveled to Israel over the holidays to raise more money.)

WeWork’s cofounder and CEO Adam Neumann is rushing to build out a company that endeavors to control the future of physical space. Its executives talk in sweeping terms about an addressable market that encompasses every last square foot of office space in the world. (“Tokyo is a billion. New York City is 400 million. Kansas City is 50 million.”)

Ask Neumann what he’s building however, and he’ll describe a community-manufacturing machine—a startup that, according to its mission, is a place where people “work to make a life, not just a living.” “Community” is one of those buzzwords that gets thrown around to describe everything from the people who use LinkedIn to the Mississippi church group that passed around clothing after a recent tornado. But in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, there’s a growing awareness that digital community—the links we make online through social services—don’t always augment the act of getting people together face-to-face to meet one another.

Real-life community, it turns out, is irreplaceable. It’s also a much harder thing to program—and few people know more about how to do that than the group of executives who run Meetup. “It’s the oldest thing in the world,” says Heiferman, describing a Jersey City single moms Meetup he’d attended recently. “It’s what it means for people to show up for each other.”