On a blustery Thursday afternoon, The Gathering Spot is humming along, albeit with a smaller crowd than usual because of the rain. The rhythm of Afrobeats plays softly in the background while people mingle at the bar or enjoy an early dinner as they peck away at their laptops. Ryan Wilson, CEO of The Gathering Spot (TGS), is taking it all in, greeting members of the co-working and networking hub near Georgia Tech he helped found seven years ago.
“The next mayor of Atlanta!” Jacoria Borders jokes as Wilson walks to her table. He brushes off her suggestion, but Borders, a longtime TGS member, continues, “Mayor, governor, whatever he wants to do, we all love him.”
Though it’s raining outside, there are few signs of the internal storm that took place just weeks earlier, fracturing the Black business community of Atlanta. But invisible fault lines are still there that need to be healed.
In July, a months-long private dispute between the founders of The Gathering Spot and its parent company, Atlanta’s Black-owned financial technology company Greenwood, spilled into public view. The fight pitted Wilson and partner T’Keel “TK” Petersen on one side versus Greenwood founders Paul Judge and Ryan Glover, all of whom are members of Atlanta’s Black business elite.
A trio of lawsuits and the publicly announced dismissal of Petersen — which was later reversed — stirred concerns about the high-profile partnership aimed at helping Black entrepreneurs.
About a week after the acrimony became public, the sides said their legal disputes had been resolved and the business leaders have set out to try to heal divides that formed within their memberships.
“This thing matters to people,” Wilson told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “And that’s what I’m here to protect.”
It’s a sentiment Shila Nieves Burney, founder and managing partner of Zane Venture Fund, echoes. You can find Nieves Burney’s name on a long wall at TGS listing more than 2,000 people – all the club’s original Atlanta members, before the Washington, D.C or Los Angeles locations were launched.
“Anytime I met any potential investor, any potential partner, I brought them to The Gathering Spot because I felt like I wanted to showcase … this is what we’re building. This is who we are. This is Black excellence,” Nieves Burney said.
From conflict to resolution
Greenwood — whose founders also include rapper Michael “Killer Mike” Render and former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young — announced in May 2022 it had bought TGS in a partnership that could help bridge the racial wealth gap and build community for Black and minority people. The purchase price wasn’t disclosed then, but court records later made public pegged it at $50 million in cash and Greenwood stock.
In mid-July, Petersen, chief operating officer and co-founder of TGS, was let go by Greenwood. Oversight of all TGS locations was going to be under the purview of Greenwood’s new CFO, Mike McCloskey. Many TGS members felt McCloskey, who is white, was replacing Petersen, who is Black.
Then, lawsuits that Wilson had filed alleging financial breaches by Greenwood after its acquisition of TGS came to light. In one court filing, Greenwood alleged that Wilson and Petersen made “false and misleading statements” affecting TGS’s valuation at the time of the 2022 acquisition.
The dispute resulted in a public outcry among TGS’s 10,000 members. Some membership churn is normal, but more than 370 TGS members cancelled their memberships, Wilson said, about twice as many cancellations in two weeks than they typically have in an entire month. Around 70 of 150,000 accountholders cancelled their Greenwood accounts.
As the controversy reached a fever pitch, Greenwood and TGS announced late last month they had settled their business disputes and that Petersen would remain on the team.
“No one wins when the family feuds,” Glover, CEO of Greenwood, and Wilson said in a joint statement at the time.
In an interview, Glover added that Petersen’s firing was initially part of a reduction in workforce across all three companies in Greenwood’s portfolio, but the public response helped show Petersen’s importance to the community.
Though the two sides were able to reach an agreement, many TGS members say they still feel hurt and are now leery of Greenwood.
Wilson and Petersen held a nearly two-hour town hall the day after the settlement was announced, fielding questions from TGS members about communication during the debacle, the decision-making behind selling to Greenwood, what value Greenwood provides to TGS and how they were going to try to increase staff morale.
The dispute has also led to more questions about Greenwood’s corporate structure. When the company was launched in 2020, it billed itself as a Black-owned digital bank, a vision many TGS members say they bought into.
But over the past few weeks, some learned for the first time that Greenwood is in fact a digital banking services company, and like many other financial technology companies or fintechs (like CashApp and Chime), customer accounts are held by a separately chartered bank. Greenwood’s banking partner is Everett, Washington-based Coastal Community Bank. Most of that bank’s leaders are white, leaving some TGS members feeling like they were sold a vision that is not reality, which Glover disputes.
“We’re majority minority-owned,” Glover said. “Our workforce is close to 98% minority.”
Now, Glover and Wilson are focusing on moving forward, healing the rifts in the TGS community and reinforcing the values that made them join forces in the first place.
The two are starting by hosting dinners together with TGS community boards, an elected group of leaders at each location.
“I believe from a community perspective, you want to talk to your leaders, kind of hear a plethora of questions, concerns, insights,” Glover said. “Inquisitive folks who are really dialed into their individual communities to present those ideas in a way that we can better understand.”
From there, Glover and Wilson are planning a series of seminars on mergers and acquisitions as well as conflict resolution. They say they want to be transparent and hope that their dispute is a learning opportunity for the TGS community.
And so far, about one-third of members who originally cancelled their memberships have returned to the club, Wilson said.
Ultimately, it is the relationships and connections that keep people coming back. It’s the fact that Joey Womack, founder and CEO of the nonprofit Goodie Nation, said he could walk in to TGS 10 times in a row and walk out with an unexpected deal each time. It’s the fact that when Nieves Burney was building her company at TGS, across the dining room, businesses like Fanbase and venture firms like Collab Capital were also being built.
“This thing is special because of the collection of people that come together,” Wilson said. “The creative community is here, the small business community is here. Some of the biggest companies in the world having lunch next to people who are running some of the smallest companies in our city. That’s special.”
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