Scale Like a CEO

Re-thinking The Urban Planet with 25K Leaders: A Conversation with City Age CEO Miro Cernetig

• Justin Reinert • Season 1 • Episode 28

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The quest for genuine human connection has never been more challenging—or more valuable—than in today's AI-dominated business landscape. Miro Cernetig, founder of CityAge, brings this paradox into sharp focus as he shares his journey from foreign correspondent to innovative business leader on this illuminating episode.

Drawing from his background in journalism with Canada's Globe and Mail, Cernetig reveals how he built CityAge into a powerful platform connecting 25,000 leadership-level professionals across government, business, research, and philanthropy. At its core lies a commitment to nonpartisan neutrality and genuine curiosity—values increasingly rare in our algorithm-driven world. "We're using as much technology as we can without losing the human touch, which is essential," Cernetig explains, highlighting the delicate balance modern organizations must strike.

Perhaps most fascinating is Cernetig's "elastic workforce" model, a documentary filmmaking-inspired approach that keeps his organization remarkably nimble. With just 3-4 core team members and a rotating cast of specialized talent, CityAge adapts quickly to new opportunities while maintaining its strategic focus. This approach extends to their innovative use of AI tools for project management and their upcoming venture, CityAge Investments, which will connect promising urban technology companies with their extensive network of decision-makers. For leaders struggling to scale efficiently while preserving authentic human connections, Cernetig's insights offer a compelling roadmap through our increasingly complex digital landscape.

Ready to reimagine how your organization balances technology and human connection? Visit cityage.com to discover more about their work and approach, or connect directly with Miro at miro@cityage.com.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Scale Like a CEO, the podcast that brings you insights from innovative leaders who are reshaping the business landscape. Today, we're excited to welcome Miro Cernetig, the founder of CityAge. In this episode, we'll explore leadership, innovation and the future of cities through Miro's unique lens. Get ready for an engaging conversation that will challenge your perspective on urban development and business leadership.

Justin:

Miro, thanks so much for joining me on Scale Like a CEO. Just to get us started, if you wouldn't mind give us a 90-second intro to you and your business.

Miro:

Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Well, my business is called CityAge and you can find it at cityage. com, and we've been around for about 12 years and it basically brings people, leaders and investors together in really, I would say, quite intimate settings to talk about the technologies and investments to build what I call the urban planet, which is really our cities and regions and towns. It's where most of the people live and most of the decisions and investments happen, and we help bring people together to talk about what's on the cutting edge, and we've been doing it since 2012. And there's about 25,000 people in our database who are all at a leadership level, which is really exciting.

Miro:

And it really started from my journalism career. I was a foreign and national correspondent for the Globe and Mail, which is Canada's sort of version of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and so I covered a lot of different things, mainly in North America and in Asia. I was based in Beijing for a while and I always really enjoyed the original research and meeting people who were very from eclectic backgrounds. I always thought that's where you really found insight and knowledge and opportunities. So that's what I wrote about.

Miro:

And then, in 2010, I left journalism because I was asked to help brand the Foster Beer Company's wine division and nobody knew they had really a wine division. It turned out to be the second biggest in the world and they asked me to come down and write an identity for them, for the brand identity. I did that and then they used it to IPO the company and it's now called Treasury Wine Estates and you probably drank a lot of their wine or some of it, and now it's a multi-billion dollar company, and so that's how I got into this, and so CityAge came out of the idea of how to use brands to investment and influence, and what underlies CityAge is a very journalistic principle of nonpartisan neutrality and really curiosity and getting the smartest people in the room you can find.

Justin:

That's great. And what do you see as the biggest problem in your industry and how are you solving that?

Miro:

I think, the big. Well, it's very interesting because we've entered the age of AI and everybody's using it Not everyone, but most people. Everyone will be using it pretty soon and most of the people I know are using it to some degree, and I think what's happening there, too, is we're losing. It's a great tool, scary and great at times. It does have the cost. Oh, there is one real cost, which is it gets human connection. It does have the cost. There is one real cost, which is it gets human connection.

Miro:

So one of the real things I'm finding is that people are having trouble finding people who really are good writers, are really original thinkers, who aren't just pressing chat GPD's button and keep regenerating content. That is a big issue with the people we talk to, so they really want to find the expert humans. And the other thing is, let's call it screen world, but the amount of time we spend on screen has just accelerated, exploded. Chat, GPT, things like that have even increased that. So the idea of human connection with people who are really building things and getting together in a physical space or at least in a small group, even if it is digital, is something that is hard to do but people really want.

Justin:

And what makes you unique in the way that you're helping others.

Miro:

I think we're unique because we bring thought leaders together and business leaders, government leaders we work with organizations, even the White House, but we also are really oriented on the ground, like we really talk to the people who are in cities, who are running them, the city managers, the local companies, the philanthropies, the colleges. So we bring them all together and that makes it quite unique. And then inside, it is a method that we often help with companies but we use in our conferences or events, or it's really campaigns, which is a branding method, what I call the CDH system, and it basically allows people to really hone in on need, whether it's earned media at a high level, whether it's investments, whether it's getting to government the right people in government. So that makes us quite unique. We're not a lobbying company and we're not a traditional agency, so we overhead and we don't do the. So we're really quite nimble, I think, and I think we're using as much technology as we can without losing the human touch, which is essential.

Justin:

Yeah, and along with that being nimble, you know we were talking before we hit record and you know you have what I would describe as kind of an elastic workforce that you know expands and contracts as you need. I'd love to hear a little bit more about your talent strategy and how you go about identifying. You know how you scale up or down your talent.

Miro:

Well, I part of my background is documentary filmmaking for networks, and and the way documentaries work is a little bit like how you make a studio film as well is that if you ever watch a movie, you'll see the credits. They have an enormous number of people and you wonder why they're there, but of course they don't work there all the time, right, they're all doing bits and pieces of it. So that's how we do our campaigns and our events. We scale up when we go to a place In Washington DC, we scale up with partners and we go back to this. Our workforce is not necessarily full-time, but it is a group of people that we go back to, so we know each other and I think it's a great way to get talent, because you get people who are really motivated, very entrepreneurial when you do that and because they're cross-pollinating. They're doing other things, but they're coming back to you. They're always coming back with ideas and new ways of doing things and they generally stay really enthusiastic about what they're doing. They're doing it because they want to, so that is one thing I've found is really great. The other thing is also post-pandemic.

Miro:

Before the pandemic, we were really an in-person sort of company.

Miro:

Everybody came to the venue we would pick or the place we would pick, and during the pandemic we had to go virtual, like so many people.

Miro:

We discovered Zoom and things we're using here, and it really saved our company, but it also broadened the company. It made me realize that you could capture content in incredible ways and then put it out to either your network or beyond your network, and so that's another way, because we consider the speakers at our events, even the audience, because it's such an elite audience. Usually we consider that talent as part of our membership and so we often do interviews with them and then we put them out to the network and then they get to meet other people. We're really using the digital world that we live in now to basically grab the talent, the best talent we can, and so we don't get and there's, we don't get stuck with a group of employees that have been here for 10 or 12 years, because the model doesn't really fit that and the kind of people that that do that probably wouldn't like the speed at what you move.

Justin:

Anyway, I don't know if that answers your question yeah, I'm curious can you got a lot of this kind of transient talent coming in and out of the business? How big is your permanent staff that you keep versus this kind of elastic talent pool that you have?

Miro:

uh, right now we're about three to four, but the part-time, you know, there's another 10 underneath that that we go to and then we contract out again with partners. So, but it's a really core. It's a really small core team because a lot of what we do is really very strategic. It doesn't really take a lot of people to build the strategies, you just have to have the right people. It doesn't really take a lot of people to build the strategies, you just have to have the right people. So we have people to stay organized and stay on the track and in a workflow. We have three or four people who do that, including me on top of me, and then the other stuff is really basically farmed out. So if we make a, we have City Age Studio.

Miro:

If we decide we're going to make a commercial, or we're going to make a teaser reel, or sizzle reel, as we call them sometimes, or we're going to do a documentary, then we hire up for that and so those people are in a specific project. So, for example, we're probably going to do a documentary around space on the race to mars, and that'll be. That'll be a year-long project and that'll probably be another five to six people who will be on that. It might even be two years. The idea of that is we're going to watch Elon Musk try to get to make it the Mars window in 2026. And we're going to do it from the city. We're going to do it from outside of Starbase, looking in and get a whole other, different perspective, which is the way CityAge does stuff. So that's almost like a division that starts up and then we manage that with those three or four people.

Justin:

That's almost like a division that starts up and then we manage that with those three or four people. Yeah Well, that'll be a really interesting documentary, so I can't wait to see that when it comes out. I'm curious about one of the things that I talked to a lot of founders about is the challenge of delegation and decision-making. As you scale, and I would imagine with this kind of elastic or transient population that you're working with, that might make it a little more challenging because you've got to build trust to be able to do that delegation and decision-making. So I'm curious how you go about that or how much of that resonates. Well, we've tried.

Miro:

It's always a challenge, especially if you're doing a lot of things like we do. They actually are all connected under this one concept of the urban planet and how we invest in it and build it, but there's a lot of subjects in there that we tackle and we have a lot of. If you go on our website, you'll see we work with some of the biggest companies in the world and they'll come to us to do things and they're all very different and they're all very bespoke. That's part of, I think, why people like what we do. We've tried different structures to make that happen, having managers who take on special projects, but then you have the challenge, when you're remote as we are, that they they don't always get together and talk, like there's a silo. And even with slack, tools like slack are okay, but I don't think think they're perfect. So we've tried all these things, we've tried all these platforms that people are supposed to do that for you. We've never really found one that worked. So what we do now I'm not saying they don't work, but none has worked for us. So what we do is that we simplified it into basically a master dashboard with sub dashboards that are all connected into one, to one database and we really simplified it. It's going to sound so basic, but I'd really encourage people to try. It is we. We put everything into g drive. You could do the same with microsoft or word, but we found google. With the youtube and all the things we're doing in media, we found it. Google is really a great place to do this. And now with Gemini Gemini so this is where AI comes in is in the last year, gemini and ChatGPT as well with their projects, and even now Perplexity with the agentic browser really perform that function.

Miro:

If you have a unified tech stack and you put all your documentations there your lists, just virtually everything right, that's not. You have to unified tech stack and you put all your documentations there, your lists, just virtually everything right, that's not. You have to be careful on privacy, but we keep the privacy, private stuff off. But it means that with these new systems, we're finding that that is like having a manager right inside your office all the time. It's quite amazing and it's just getting better. So we're experimenting with that a lot now. So carefully designed master dashboard in Google and then we basically use the AIs like the way I would use managers in the past and that way our core team really knows what's going on, because we're all going to the same dashboard. I don't know if that makes sense, but it works for us and it's a very effective and also efficient but also quite inexpensive way to do it.

Justin:

Yeah, yeah, I love. You know I use AI for so many different things on a daily basis, and so it's great to see that evolution and I think it will make you know, delegation and tracking much easier as we continue to push in and find new ways to use it. It sounds like you've got some exciting projects that you're working on, like the you know, the Race to the Moon documentary. But, looking forward, you know what's your vision for the future of your organization and some of the things you've got coming up.

Miro:

Well, we're pivoting into a different model now, which is interesting Because I was a journalist. I would say CityAge really succeeded because of its neutrality and the fact we could really bring in interesting people with big ideas and novel ideas into a room. And we had a four quadrant approach, which was public sector, government, business and investment, R&D and technology I'd call it and then the other one was philanthropy, you know, and NGOs, that kind of thing. That's always been the base and it gave I think City HR events had a very sort of aspirational what's next phase to it, and what I've realized in my other side of my branding is that a lot of the people that we deal with, what they really want to do is connect into business. They want to find investors, investments and customers and decision makers are going to be on the cutting edge of what's coming next.

Miro:

So what we're doing now is we're going to be starting we haven't launched it yet, but it'll come soon something called City Age Investments, CityAge Investments, and that's going to be a carefully vetted platform that will look at companies and leaders and technologies that our network really should hear about, which is about 25,000 leaders, and we're going to do that, and then we can put these companies, and investors too, in front of the right people. So that's something we're going to be doing in the very near future, go into high gear and hopefully in 2026. And it really is interesting because what we did over the first 10 years is really built up that audience of who are those decision makers. So now that we bring the investor component in, we think it's going to be a really a way to really help people grow their companies and build better cities and better organizations.

Justin:

That's great. Well, it's an exciting, pivot and exciting future ahead. Miro, if folks want to get in touch with you, what is one of the best ways to do that?

Miro:

Well, the CityAge website's really accessible. It's cityage. com. That's a one. And then people I'm very open to people just emailing me, and that's just Miro M-I-R-O at CityAge dot com.

Justin:

Great Well, miro. Thank you so much for the time today. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Miro:

Yeah, me too. We'll have to get you on our podcast. Yeah, that would be great, Thank you so much Appreciate it, thank you.