In this conversation
Here’s our interview with Adib Shadid, founder and CEO of Gatherly, hotelier, professor, and SaaS founder, on his rules for success.
Adib Shadid set out to be an archaeologist. Today he runs a virtual events company, and a series of failed Zoom career fairs sits between those two points.
Adib came to technology through luxury hospitality, and it shows in what he builds. Gatherly rests on one belief: people stay in a community because of the other members they meet there. If you run a community of any size, his conversation with Joseph Varghese gives you a different way to measure whether it is working.
Adib’s rules for success from this conversation:
- Notice where your energy comes from and build your work around it.
- Members stay for other members, so design for relationships first.
- Choose technology that amplifies the human experience.
- Fun takes design. Plan it into the event.
- Give it time and enjoy the journey.
Background of Adib Shadid
Adib Shadid was a straight B-minus student who reached eighteen with no idea what he wanted to do. In college he scraped by in nearly every class. History was the exception. One day a student success advisor called him in and asked why a student close to failing everything was excelling in one elective. Adib said the class felt like a movie every day. The advisor asked whether he knew that could be a career.
He took the question seriously. He changed his major and pictured himself as a real-life Indiana Jones. His undergraduate thesis on how far back the conflict between East and West goes was published as an academic article, which brought an invitation from a University of Illinois dean to join a larger excavation in Greece. The dig turned up a statue, and Adib says his name is on a plaque beside it in a museum in Santorini. A full scholarship to NYU’s master’s program in classical studies followed.
At the same time, Adib was waiting tables in a hotel restaurant, and he was good at it. Some nights he left with two or three hundred dollars in cash tips. The job showed him a career path in hospitality, and he kept getting promoted. Eventually he had to choose. Archaeology meant days alone with a textbook and a computer. Hospitality meant people. He chose hospitality and built a career in luxury hotels, including the Four Seasons. He also holds an MBA in international hospitality and service industries management.
That career held until COVID. Niagara College was opening a new campus in downtown Toronto and invited Adib to help build a faculty of hospitality and tourism. He had never planned to leave hotels, but he took the offer and found that education satisfied the same itch to support people. He still keeps in touch with many of his students. In his telling, they were among the most employable students at graduation.
Then the problem arrived. Universities had taken in more students during virtual learning than their campuses could hold, so online classes dragged on after everything else reopened. By summer 2023, Adib says, 70% of the students in his faculty had earned diplomas without ever setting foot on campus, and employability fell. His fix was a series of virtual career fairs on Zoom, with employers in breakout rooms and students in the main session. They were a disaster.
Adib and a few colleagues tried to build a better platform with developers, but the back and forth and the budgets piled up. Then he found a platform that came out of Georgia Tech and came close to what he had pictured. Adib says his team acquired it and built the company, Gatherly, around it. The first virtual career fair ran for his own faculty in February 2024 and worked right away. Adib says Gatherly has since helped more than 1,500 students land entry-level roles and co-ops, and it now runs events at universities including Georgia Tech and the University of Toronto. Higher education remains one of its largest market segments.
Adib calls himself a startup founder like any other, without a technologist’s background. His conviction comes from the road he took: people want to feel seen and heard, and technology works best when it makes that easier.
In this episode of Rules for Success, Adib Shadid shares his insights with Joseph Varghese about community, belonging, virtual events, hospitality, entrepreneurship, and the human side of technology.
Questions and Discussions with Adib Shadid
Here’s a bullet-point summary of the questions and discussions from our interview with Adib:
1. Adib Shadid on Following Your Energy
- Solo research drained his energy. Hospitality, where every conversation added to it, fit him better
- He starts each day at zero and builds energy with every conversation
- His wife is the opposite: she starts at 100% and loses energy with each person she meets
- Joseph says knowing your energy pattern helps you stay in your zone of genius
2. Why Zoom Falls Short for Events
- Zoom is a meeting platform, built for team meetings and one-on-one calls
- Past 10 people, cameras and microphones go off and engagement drops
- A grid of boxes strips out the nonverbal cues people rely on
- Adib says most virtual learning became a patch to get by
- Each tool has a place
- Gatherly for a weekly departmental meeting is “killing a fly with a hammer”
- Zoom for a hundred-person networking event is not what it was built for
3. Inside a Gatherly Venue
- Attendees move through a building with rooms and stages instead of sitting in a grid
- Joseph compares the interactive map to walking through a house or a college campus
- Movement brings back nonverbal signals
- Someone who walks up to you has something to say
- A poke means they want a chat
- Traveling quickly between floors signals someone is not stopping to talk
- Adib remembers a review from an attendee who had never felt socially awkward at a virtual event before
- He took it as a sign the platform was working
- Joseph notes that leaving a room online carries no noise or awkward exit
4. What Gatherly Replaces: Webinars
- Adib says Gatherly replaces webinars and will never replace in-person events
- A community that can host in person is playing a different game
- Many communities cannot afford a million-dollar budget and a hotel ballroom
- Virtual events reach people worldwide and cost less to attend
5. Engagement Measured in Conversations
- Gatherly’s tagline is “Redefining event engagement,” and Adib measures engagement in conversations and connections
- Behavior inside the venue signals intent
- Attendees choose among networking areas, the webinar, and rooms on specific topics
- On Zoom, attendees are either there or they are not
- Organizers receive analytics after an event
- Joseph got a report the next day showing engagement by room
- A hotel ballroom host cannot see how Bob and Sally spent their time
6. Why Relationships Beat Content, According to Adib Shadid
- Adib believes humans evolved to seek groups they identify with
- An introvert may be satisfied with a few connections, while an extrovert wants many
- Members stay for other members
- Adib says most people stay in a community for the people they meet there, and seldom for the content or the organizer
- A relationship built in one community becomes the reason to join the next
- Being seen matters
- In a community of 500 or more you can hide, while a smaller group makes you a seen, contributing member
- Joseph adds that belonging includes contributing value and receiving it
- Adib’s design goal: build a virtual environment modeled on how people already engage
- He says there is no one-size-fits-all answer to belonging
7. High Tech, High Touch: Lessons From Luxury Hospitality
- Hospitality trains people to anticipate what guests need
- Adib says this rests on strategy and training, and applies in any industry, banking included
- Luxury goes hand in hand with being seen, heard, and recognized by humans
- His example: a kiosk speeds up ordering, but does it belong in a five-star restaurant?
- Technology can amplify the human experience or replace it
- Adib says the difference is sometimes subtle
- He wants AI and video tech to serve the human side of events
8. Licenses, Growth Partners, and Sponsors
- Gatherly began by running events for clients, with its platform as the edge
- The license model lets communities subscribe, build a venue, and self-host as many events as they like
- Gatherly encodes its hosting experience into tips for subscribers
- Adib says Gatherly already has a handful of facilitators, called Gatherly Growth Partners, who can lead events (details at Gatherly.io)
- Sponsors
- Organizers use sponsor capital to make events happen
- Sponsors want direct exposure to qualified buyers and measurable conversion
- Adib says sponsor support can let a community host an event at no cost
9. Making Events Fun
- Adib says fun takes design: “You have to make it fun”
- Students in a university master’s program in computational sciences built a rooftop arcade and a photo booth with filters as a final project
- Both are now options when launching a Gatherly event
- Gatherly acts on feedback from attendees, sponsors, and organizers quickly
- Returning users sometimes barely recognize the platform
- Joseph connects this to Success Circles, which treats life as a game and awards prizes for interaction
10. Adib Shadid’s Founder Lessons
- Be a kinder critic of yourself
- Treat yourself the way you would treat a best friend who is founding a company
- Mistakes will come, and many will be costly
- Look after your team
- Gatherly runs with five people, and Adib urges small-team founders to give them the best experience
- His rule for success is patience: whatever it is, it takes time, so enjoy the journey
- Adib admits his daily habits are inconsistent
- He sometimes reaches 8 PM without eating
- He aims for a real breakfast and a break outside
Adib Shadid started Gatherly by producing events end to end for clients. Today communities can license the platform, build their own venue, and host as many events as they like, while Gatherly works to pass along what it has learned about hosting well. His mission stays the same: help people meet, get seen, and build relationships that last past the event.
Adib invites listeners to attend a Gatherly event and to reach out to him directly. He says he gives freebies.
To learn more about Adib Shadid and his current projects, visit Gatherly.io.
💬 Notable Quotes
“We’re not here to replace in-person interaction. We’re here to replace webinars.” – Adib Shadid
“The moment you get more than 10 people on a Zoom call, bye-bye engagement for everybody.” – Adib Shadid
“It’s my relationship with you that’s actually going to be the most powerful driver for me to join the next one, not anything I’ve gotten from the organization.” – Adib Shadid
“Being a member of a five-hundred-plus community and being able to hide will not have the same impact as being a seen, contributing member of a smaller group.” – Adib Shadid
“There are ways to use technology to amplify the human experience, and there are ways to use technology to replace the human experience.” – Adib Shadid
“It’s not fun unless it is. If you want it to be fun, it doesn’t happen by accident. You have to make it fun.” – Adib Shadid
“Treat yourself the same way you would treat a best friend who is founding a company.” – Adib Shadid
“Whatever it is, it’s going to take time. Let it take time. It’s supposed to take time.” – Adib Shadid
🙌 Connect with Adib Shadid
Adib Shadid’s picture of belonging is a seen, contributing member of a smaller group, and it suggests a question every established entrepreneur can ask of their own circle: how many members started a conversation with each other this month without you?
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