Hopin

“Today, Hopin is mainly virtual events, but I've always had a multi-product approach to things. I expect next year, Hopin wouldn't have just one product. We'd be moving into a, quite a few different markets based on what we've already built, and markets that ma…”

“The initial people that we hired, we did spend a lot more time hiring them and making sure the quality bar was met, and we asked them to do referrals to the three best people we'd met, and we were very aggressive on this”

“Hopin was purely intuition. There was no data from someone, or else someone from the webinar industry probably would have built Hopin, because they would have been able to realize that people were after more networking.”

“When we were nine people, our customers didn't care how slowly we hired. So I was like, we need to bring good people in very quickly, as good as possible. So really, the speed thing was more important. Quality needed to be there, but it was not of total import…”

“Now well, what my opinion is from intuition and some of the data we have is that these big physical events, the ones that need a fire breeze are there to get you to pay 600 dollars, and that's the revenue thing. They're probably going to move back to physical …”

“I don't think it would have been possible two to three years ago, and if we were not a remote business.”

“I spoke to Jules and Alex at IVP before, and they said, we've invested a lot of money into Hopin, never met Johnny.”

“Hopin doesn't have a clear, direct competitor today in terms of one that I'm much more closely monitoring”

“Hopin operates in a way for recruitment. We operate it with, like, almost like a set of APIs that pin off when someone joins. It's like, okay, the line manager. It becomes super clear who it is because they get connected via Slack, and we do a few other things…”

“So the buddy system is essentially what we do is we connect one person with two buddies in the company. One of them is usually in their team, and one of them is on a completely different area that we think it's relevant that they need to work with.”

“So for me, I think data should always be to 10 to 40% of every decision we make happen.”

“For me, it was important that, hey, you can call me at any time, especially after midnight when there's less things going on, but I don't want you bothering the team, essentially, or having the rights to do that.”

“It became very, very viral from day one, from the first event we had.”

“In just 13 months, Johnny's raised over a hundred and seventy four million dollars for Hopin, from the likes of Excel, IVP, Slack, North Zone, Co-Two, Salesforce, and of course, TwentyVC fund disclaimer.”

“And with the funding, again, in just 13 months, Johnny's grown the team from 10 people to over 210 people across 37 countries”

“I believe Hopin was probably the fastest growing company that year.”

“With Hoppin at the seed, I think it was one of the most, quote unquote, expensive seeds in Europe at the time.”

“As an investor in Clubhouse and Hopin, I have felt momentum go the other way, my friend.”

“The hop in story is abusive. I'll take a hundred and forty million out for myself. F you VCs. That's Writer. I know a lot of folks think that's a hero story. I think it's abusive.”

“If I had done reserves, I would have put money into Hopin, Clubhouse, and be real. That would not have been a good set of events.”

“Is Hopin, does Hopin have product market fit or product COVID fit? It clearly had product COVID fit. It was, you know, no one was excited to do events online. They were forced to do events online.”

“And so Johnny took two hundred million off.”

“My biggest mistakes in the last few years, honestly, Kevin, were be real, hop in, a clubhouse. I could have sold in all of them, and I didn't.”

“Truth be told, honestly, Nick, I've been in some rockets that then turned out to not be rockets. Your clubhouse to your hop in to your be real. And they are portfolios with assets in, whether you like it or not in terms of naming. And I should have been much m…”

“I do not do reserves, and I don't because I was in Hopin, I was in Clubhouse, I was in Be Real, all lost money, and then I've got a load of companies which were much slower In enterprise and a phenomenal investments.”

“With my first fund, after 18 months, I predicted my top five fund returners, and you had your hop-ins, you had your B-reels, you had your clubhouse, and none of the five outperformers ended up being the outperformers, and the five outperformers I always had in…”

“My fun one could have been, which you're an Alpean, and I'm very grateful to you for supporting me when I was 1819 but it could have been at one point the Hopin Fund, it could have been the Clubhouse Fund and it turns out that it will most likely be the Linear…”