Next Life: How Maneesh Goyal Became P. Diddy’s Party Guy

With his master’s degree in public health from Yale, Maneesh Goyal seemed like the last guy P. Diddy would call about throwing his New Year’s party. Yet after spending two years at the nonprofit Dyson Foundation, where he built a national program to train pediatricians, Goyal was in the midst of an unusual career transition from policy work to event planning. “I had to find something,” he recalls, “that didn’t feel like a job.”

After leaving the foundation in 2001, he tried to learn his new business the hard way—by taking grunt work gigs at corporate events. At one such soiree, Diddy’s MTV Video Music Awards after-party, he so impressed the rap mogul with his attention to detail that he was offered a chance to throw his 2002 New Year’s bash. After pulling that off, Goyal launched his own event company, MKG, out of his Manhattan apartment.