The Exchanges

Q Well, I do want to kick off today, and for those that may be living under a rock for the last year and haven't seen the breakout that is Hopin, let's start with a little bit on you and the founding story. So how did you come to found Hopin through the health challenges, and what was that founding moment?

A So, uh, around four years ago, I had went traveling, I went to Asia, returned back Into London after getting food poisoning, and the food poisoning kind of wouldn't go away. Took a bunch of antibiotics. I don't know how much anyone is into the microbiome these days, but the cause of a lot of our autoimmune diseases and such, and so I came back. I started getting weird responses, such as anytime I would eat something inflammatory like gluten or dairy, I would get such a severe reaction that I couldn't leave my house for like 14 days due to the reaction, and it got worse and worse over time, and then it got me pretty bed bound for about two years. I spent those two years, like, trying to recover, still trying to network with people, trying to survive. Luckily for me, I had a little bit of money saved, And I was doing contracting on the side of just software programming. And then what had happened was I was trying to connect with people, trying to attend events. I was part of a Facebook groups. I was part of Slack communities. I was even doing LinkedIn reach outs. And I realized a cold LinkedIn reach out is not really a way to build a relationship with someone, even if you think you'll be interested in very similar things. Same thing with Slack communities. It's good for content streaming. Slack communities felt a little bit closer, but Slack wasn't built for that. And Facebook gr…

AI assessment note: “it got me pretty bed bound for about two years... trying to connect with people”

Q Help me out. The buddy system, how's it structured and how do you process that?

A 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 if you're in go to market, and you're in account management, perhaps you're working with product, and the other one is someone in your account management. So you're getting one step out and one step in, and basically these buddies are literally for everything. So you attend their meetings in two different areas. There's a score at the end of the month, basically, that everybody gives. So the person who's getting onboarded gives to the two buddies, and the two buddies give to the onboarder. Essentially, on how many questions do they ask? How quickly do you think they fit in with the team? So it's something that we've done quite proactively, and there's a ton of other smaller things involved as well, just from what we send out to them. How even that they interact with Slack? How many interactions did they make basically on channels? Like, it's really, really deep, and that's really what we optimize for.

AI assessment note: “we connect one person with two buddies in the company. One of them is usually”

Q I do want to start, though, on the pretty unprecedented scaling of the team. We chatted before, and you said 235 people today, 10 people, what would have been 10 months or 11 months ago. So first, a broad question, but I'm too interested not to ask, and it's like, what have been some of your biggest lessons in terms of scaling the team as fast as you have done?

A One thing that is pretty interesting is remote has really changed the game, and I'll say that truly. I've looked back tons of times and said, how did we actually do this? And this is a question I get quite a bit. Without breaking culture, who knows, but without, you know, having a devastating impact moving that fast, Well, remotes made a huge impact because even the smaller challenges, if I went from 10 to 235 people over nine months, as we did, in a physical office, one, we would have been restrained on recruitment. How do you hire that many people in one place? San Francisco is notoriously known for high prices. In London, there's a notice period of three months in most companies, so we couldn't even have attracted people in time to scale with our customers. The amount of offices we would need to change, and the amount of thinking about once they're onboarded, how do they sit next to their team, or whatever it is, like all these complications just completely move out. It's about bringing people on as quick as possible, because you can recruit anywhere in the world, you can get the best talent, There's a lot more hacking and a lot less competing that you need to do. So in almost every aspect, it's allowed us to do it by being online. I don't think it would have been possible two to three years ago, and if we were not a remote business.

AI assessment note: “One thing that is pretty interesting is remote has really changed the game”

Q Fun fact, tapping your leg is a sign of sexual frustration. I'm speaking from personal experience. Anyway, I do have to ask, in terms of, like, mistakes, When you think about kind of what you've done right, and then also seeing what you've done wrong, why do you think, or do you see others make mistakes when it comes to company onboarding?

A I mean, that's a great question. I don't see, I mean, I'm super focused on Hoppin, so I'm not looking at other companies at the moment. However, we've made some obvious mistakes, but they're very intricate, essentially. So, for example, when we were onboarding people initially, we weren't very clear about how line management worked, what you can ask from a peer versus your manager, and it was kind of like quite loose. Essentially, it's like, here you are, here's the Wild Wild West, here's the docs that you need, this is how you Push code. Or if you're in GDM, this is the demo that you need to start selling to. These are two meetings that we have a week and just show up. I mean, nowadays we're a lot more clear with the buddy system. We're quite enforcing on it. It's like, how many meetings did you have this week with your buddy? Like people really need to feel that connection, feel like they can ask them anything. And we even start scoring it. So this is like a huge value that we get at the end of the months. And we didn't have that initially. And if we did, I think a lot more people would have been productive from day one or day 15.

AI assessment note: “when we were onboarding people initially, we weren't very clear about how line management worked”

Q two elements where if people maybe not question Hopin, but just have thoughts that may not be like totally killer. One is like the sustainability post-COVID, and some have suggested like amazing growth, but What does the world of virtual events look like in a world of real events? How do you directly answer this, and how do you think the future of virtual events looks in a post-COVID world?

A Absolutely. So I think there's quite a few different things here, because you're asking me the question that I'm supposed to be thinking about every day for the last year, and so there's tons to impact. So I'll start with what does virtual look like next year? What is a virtual event? So events itself is a gigantic market, over one trillion in size. It's gigantic, but you can split it out. There's concerts, there's conferences, there's a wedding. Those are all events, essentially. And each of those are hosted at different frequencies and different values to hop in at least. And so big conferences, let's call the business market, which probably under five hundred billion in terms of physical. Let's break that out. And then let's look at what's specific in there. We broke it out as two companies. So company A makes all their revenue from conferences, expos, trade fairs. It's an events company. It's a essential. It's a web summit, for example. And company B is a company or a community that runs events, not for direct revenue, but to build revenue in their product. Or in a organization. So maybe it's for customer engagement. Maybe it's for lead acquisition. More likely it's going to be a free event. Sometimes it's paid. So you're talking about Salesforce, Slack, talking about all these sort of things. Now well,, what my opinion is from intuition and some of the data we have is that…

AI assessment note: “They're probably going to move back to physical with a light hybrid approach, but all the rest”

Q Well, I do want to kick off today, and for those that may be living under a rock for the last year and haven't seen the breakout that is Hopin, let's start with a little bit on you and the founding story. So how did you come to found Hopin through the health challenges, and what was that founding moment?

A So, uh, around four years ago, I had went traveling, I went to Asia, returned back Into London after getting food poisoning, and the food poisoning kind of wouldn't go away. Took a bunch of antibiotics. I don't know how much anyone is into the microbiome these days, but the cause of a lot of our autoimmune diseases and such, and so I came back. I started getting weird responses, such as anytime I would eat something inflammatory like gluten or dairy, I would get such a severe reaction that I couldn't leave my house for like 14 days due to the reaction, and it got worse and worse over time, and then it got me pretty bed bound for about two years. I spent those two years, like, trying to recover, still trying to network with people, trying to survive. Luckily for me, I had a little bit of money saved, And I was doing contracting on the side of just software programming. And then what had happened was I was trying to connect with people, trying to attend events. I was part of a Facebook groups. I was part of Slack communities. I was even doing LinkedIn reach outs. And I realized a cold LinkedIn reach out is not really a way to build a relationship with someone, even if you think you'll be interested in very similar things. Same thing with Slack communities. It's good for content streaming. Slack communities felt a little bit closer, but Slack wasn't built for that. And Facebook gr…

AI assessment note: “it got me pretty bed bound for about two years. I spent those two years”

Q totally. You mentioned kind of the competition element there. Before we move into, like, looking at the future and the quickfire, I do have to ask, we're both pretty aggressive, ambitious guys. How do you think about competition? Like, do you row your own race, heads down, fuck everyone else? Do you openly keep an eye on the competition and, like, aggressively monitor what they do? What's the right approach?

A I use, remember, I was talking about 10 to 40% data. The competition just becomes data for me. Essentially, it's, you know, you're using your intuition, but you're mainly, you use them as part of data. How's their product doing? What worked for them? How could we do this differently? And Et cetera. That's how I see competition. I mean, Hopin doesn't have a clear, direct competitor today in terms of one that I'm much more closely monitoring, which is always bad because it's always good to have a rival. We, at the moment, we're competing against ourselves, competing against time. That's from an internal culture perspective. It's, are we going to be Facebook or MySpace or, you know, that's the sort of thing that we sort of pitch out. But in terms of how I see competitors, it's really as data points, what's worked for them. And it's not only the same industry, it's every industry that relates to Hopin. So Hopin has a slight community angle. So is there anything in community product that worked over there that's maybe not a direct competitor, but could somehow work with Hopin, even if it's only 10% of their product is a feature that worked. So community, anything in video, anything in collaboration, anything around it that could work for events.

AI assessment note: “The competition just becomes data for me.”

Q I do want to start, though, on the pretty unprecedented scaling of the team. We chatted before, and you said 235 people today, 10 people, what would have been 10 months or 11 months ago. So first, a broad question, but I'm too interested not to ask, and it's like, what have been some of your biggest lessons in terms of scaling the team as fast as you have done?

A One thing that is pretty interesting is remote has really changed the game, and I'll say that truly. I've looked back tons of times and said, how did we actually do this? And this is a question I get quite a bit. Without breaking culture, who knows, but without, you know, having a devastating impact moving that fast, Well, remotes made a huge impact because even the smaller challenges, if I went from 10 to 235 people over nine months, as we did, in a physical office, one, we would have been restrained on recruitment. How do you hire that many people in one place? San Francisco is notoriously known for high prices. In London, there's a notice period of three months in most companies, so we couldn't even have attracted people in time to scale with our customers. The amount of offices we would need to change, and the amount of thinking about once they're onboarded, how do they sit next to their team, or whatever it is, like all these complications just completely move out. It's about bringing people on as quick as possible, because you can recruit anywhere in the world, you can get the best talent, There's a lot more hacking and a lot less competing that you need to do. So in almost every aspect, it's allowed us to do it by being online. I don't think it would have been possible two to three years ago, and if we were not a remote business.

AI assessment note: “in almost every aspect, it's allowed us to do it by being online.”

Q Fun fact, tapping your leg is a sign of sexual frustration. I'm speaking from personal experience. Anyway, I do have to ask, in terms of, like, mistakes, When you think about kind of what you've done right, and then also seeing what you've done wrong, why do you think, or do you see others make mistakes when it comes to company onboarding?

A I mean, that's a great question. I don't see, I mean, I'm super focused on Hoppin, so I'm not looking at other companies at the moment. However, we've made some obvious mistakes, but they're very intricate, essentially. So, for example, when we were onboarding people initially, we weren't very clear about how line management worked, what you can ask from a peer versus your manager, and it was kind of like quite loose. Essentially, it's like, here you are, here's the Wild Wild West, here's the docs that you need, this is how you Push code. Or if you're in GDM, this is the demo that you need to start selling to. These are two meetings that we have a week and just show up. I mean, nowadays we're a lot more clear with the buddy system. We're quite enforcing on it. It's like, how many meetings did you have this week with your buddy? Like people really need to feel that connection, feel like they can ask them anything. And we even start scoring it. So this is like a huge value that we get at the end of the months. And we didn't have that initially. And if we did, I think a lot more people would have been productive from day one or day 15.

AI assessment note: “when we were onboarding people initially, we weren't very clear about how line management worked”

Q Help me out. The buddy system, how's it structured and how do you process that?

A 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 if you're in go to market, and you're in account management, perhaps you're working with product, and the other one is someone in your account management. So you're getting one step out and one step in, and basically these buddies are literally for everything. So you attend their meetings in two different areas. There's a score at the end of the month, basically, that everybody gives. So the person who's getting onboarded gives to the two buddies, and the two buddies give to the onboarder. Essentially, on how many questions do they ask? How quickly do you think they fit in with the team? So it's something that we've done quite proactively, and there's a ton of other smaller things involved as well, just from what we send out to them. How even that they interact with Slack? How many interactions did they make basically on channels? Like, it's really, really deep, and that's really what we optimize for.

AI assessment note: “connect one person with two buddies in the company”

Q two elements where if people maybe not question Hopin, but just have thoughts that may not be like totally killer. One is like the sustainability post-COVID, and some have suggested like amazing growth, but What does the world of virtual events look like in a world of real events? How do you directly answer this, and how do you think the future of virtual events looks in a post-COVID world?

A Absolutely. So I think there's quite a few different things here, because you're asking me the question that I'm supposed to be thinking about every day for the last year, and so there's tons to impact. So I'll start with what does virtual look like next year? What is a virtual event? So events itself is a gigantic market, over one trillion in size. It's gigantic, but you can split it out. There's concerts, there's conferences, there's a wedding. Those are all events, essentially. And each of those are hosted at different frequencies and different values to hop in at least. And so big conferences, let's call the business market, which probably under five hundred billion in terms of physical. Let's break that out. And then let's look at what's specific in there. We broke it out as two companies. So company A makes all their revenue from conferences, expos, trade fairs. It's an events company. It's a essential. It's a web summit, for example. And company B is a company or a community that runs events, not for direct revenue, but to build revenue in their product. Or in a organization. So maybe it's for customer engagement. Maybe it's for lead acquisition. More likely it's going to be a free event. Sometimes it's paid. So you're talking about Salesforce, Slack, talking about all these sort of things. Now well,, what my opinion is from intuition and some of the data we have is that…

AI assessment note: “They're probably going to move back to physical with a light hybrid approach”

Q I mean, I totally agree with you there. The thing that I do think there is like onboarding in person feels easier. You can introduce them to the team, do the team meetings in person, build down interactions and relationships. When it's remote, I'm going, how the fuck do you do onboarding so efficiently remotely? So how do you think about starting and optimizing that onboarding process at scale?

A Yeah, so we do it in an interesting way, but I will respond to that in terms of onboarding is something interesting. And in the culture, I mean, it's what is a remote culture versus a physical culture? Well, if you're onboarding someone in person, yes, there is a little bit more of a personal aspect to it, but it's also, you skip a lot of the intricacies because you expect people will pick it up just because you're around it. You can tap someone on the shoulder. Online, you need to be a lot more specific to make sure everything's written out, everything's very clear, but you can also do the same thing of calling someone immediately on a channel. It's very clear who their line managers are. 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 to make it really clear. They get all their onboarding docs. This is what you need to read. This is what you need to do, and this is how you add yourself. And because it's so remote in power, it's perfect because every single team or as a company, we've had to basically perfect this because this is how everyone's being onboarded. It's not like someone from GTM is getting onboard. I mean, there's slight differences, but For the company o…

AI assessment note: “Online, you need to be a lot more specific to make sure everything's written out”

Q that I always struggle with in scaling 20 VC and businesses that I've had before, it's like just honestly delegating, and I always think that no one can do my job as well as me, and so it should be me. What would you advise me, and what would you advise other founders who fundamentally struggle in terms of trust and delegating those core roles out in the early days?

A I think there's like three or four phases. So for me, it was zero to 20 people. I was managing absolutely everything. I knew every line of code someone pushed, and every sales line that someone had in a call, I was aware of what they said. And to 50 people, I was only aware of those one layer under me, so it was about eight people. And then to a 150, it was about four people. And so that shrinks, and you have to build trust. I don't think you can scale an organization doing it all yourself, and I think that's the biggest blocker for growth, are founders themselves. In most of these cases, I think vision setter, in an ideal case, vision setter, if your vision is correct, or else leave it to someone else. But in most cases, cheerleader, hirer, all these sort of things is what a founder or someone needs to do who's running their company. And I don't think you can actually scale anywhere. Like, you can build a great bootstrap business or a Great. Twenty million ARR probably business, but after trying to move up to a corporate or to, I'm not at IPO level, so it's crazy for me to talk about it, but in terms of going to an IPO level, I couldn't see how it's possible. I mean, I talk about it all the time at Hopin. Anything that doesn't need to be done sequentially should be done ASAP, and so let's set up a new team and just build this. So let's hire as quick as we can. If we know it ne…

AI assessment note: “I don't think you can scale an organization doing it all yourself”

Q another question for me is, like, when you look at the cadence of rounds, the newer round was quite quick after the last round. How do you think about it always be raising? Often founders ask the question of, like, if money is on the table, do I take it? And then should founders always be raising? How do you think about and approach this question when founders ask you?

A I think it's a game of leverage as well. I think VC itself is a negotiation game. I think it's a strategic game. And I think you need to be playing the same way that you would play internal culture. You need to have your own storylines. You need to be thinking about what are you going to need to do to compete with other companies in the space? What is next year going to look like? And what's two years from now going to look like? And what would I take? And what wouldn't I take? So I was completely aware this year of in November. I mean, if you speak with the previous round, which is nice, you'll say Johnny already was talking about a November round, but in October, you would have heard me say, I'm not looking to raise because I knew what the business is looking like in November. I knew what it should look like. I had best thoughts. I said, if it didn't, where would we be? Et cetera. I wouldn't take money just for the point of it. A few founders have asked me for advice on this. Where they've gotten preempted. If you got preempted, and you weren't aware you were going to get preempted, then you shouldn't take the money. If you were preempted aware that you were going to get preempted, and you built the preemption strategy, then, you know, it's a consideration. But if you're sitting there saying, oh, I just got this random offer because of my business, well, it means that obvious…

AI assessment note: “I wouldn't take money just for the point of it.”

Q and the pace of it, we've chatted before about the importance of pace. It brings to mind for me, like, how do you think about scaling quality with pace? And I guess, how important is pace? Because a lot of people are like, I could fill the seat today, or I could really spend cycles and cycles and cycles getting the perfect candidate. How do you think about that today?

A Well, today, I'll give you an answer. So today would have been different than three, four months ago. And that's my perspective as a founder is flexibility is the number one thing and being adaptable. And so I originally wanted to be a slow hire. I looked at the notions and, you know, some of the companies who I feel have really perfected a lot of the product and how they went on board, wanted to be similar, very thoughtful, et cetera. 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 importance. It was definitely something that we were considering all across the board, but let's say the lever wasn't all the way to the right, it was right in the middle. And now, as we've dealt with that, now quality has become more and more important. The clear thing is that it was actually very well addressed, Inside the company. We had continually mentioned all along that, hey, at the moment we need to hire as quickly as possible, really good people, and so usually what we do is ask for referrals, so 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 wer…

AI assessment note: “really, the speed thing was more important. Quality needed to be there”

Q Two things from this. Could you have, A, transitioned to remote from and in person? So there's a lot of people right now who've had physical locations, and they're now transferring all of their workflows, onboarding, recruitment to remote. Could you have done this transition-wise, or does it help so much that you're remote first from the ground up and always happens?

A Well, we were remote from the ground up. And so my thoughts on being able to do this in person, switching from in person to remote would be very difficult. You'd probably have to break a lot of things that existed before. And also we get a lot of problems that people create these like informed connections. And also the talent you think that you're bringing on, it's too big of an impact. You're going to lose a lot of your team. I think you'll lose 20 to 30% of your team if they don't have the initial outset that this is going to be a remote company. I think a lot of the things that make people comfortable or uncomfortable working with them, we always talk about this online. I always joke around because everyone else in the company, they're like, why is the culture so good? I'm like, well, I don't have to be sitting next to someone who's clicking their pen constantly, and it's too awkward for me to mention it. Or if they're shaking their leg, or if someone's getting water 16 times a day, and, you know, you're looking at their screen, and it seems like they're not working, or whatever it is. We don't know, we don't care, and we just focus on efficiency and impact. So there's a ton of stuff that just breaks, I think, when it moves online, and it wasn't already online. So I don't think it would be possible.

AI assessment note: “switching from in person to remote would be very difficult.”

Q and the pace of it, we've chatted before about the importance of pace. It brings to mind for me, like, how do you think about scaling quality with pace? And I guess, how important is pace? Because a lot of people are like, I could fill the seat today, or I could really spend cycles and cycles and cycles getting the perfect candidate. How do you think about that today?

A Well, today, I'll give you an answer. So today would have been different than three, four months ago. And that's my perspective as a founder is flexibility is the number one thing and being adaptable. And so I originally wanted to be a slow hire. I looked at the notions and, you know, some of the companies who I feel have really perfected a lot of the product and how they went on board, wanted to be similar, very thoughtful, et cetera. 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 importance. It was definitely something that we were considering all across the board, but let's say the lever wasn't all the way to the right, it was right in the middle. And now, as we've dealt with that, now quality has become more and more important. The clear thing is that it was actually very well addressed, Inside the company. We had continually mentioned all along that, hey, at the moment we need to hire as quickly as possible, really good people, and so usually what we do is ask for referrals, so 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 wer…

AI assessment note: “speed thing was more important. Quality needed to be there”

Q totally. You mentioned kind of the competition element there. Before we move into, like, looking at the future and the quickfire, I do have to ask, we're both pretty aggressive, ambitious guys. How do you think about competition? Like, do you row your own race, heads down, fuck everyone else? Do you openly keep an eye on the competition and, like, aggressively monitor what they do? What's the right approach?

A I use, remember, I was talking about 10 to 40% data. The competition just becomes data for me. Essentially, it's, you know, you're using your intuition, but you're mainly, you use them as part of data. How's their product doing? What worked for them? How could we do this differently? And Et cetera. That's how I see competition. I mean, Hopin doesn't have a clear, direct competitor today in terms of one that I'm much more closely monitoring, which is always bad because it's always good to have a rival. We, at the moment, we're competing against ourselves, competing against time. That's from an internal culture perspective. It's, are we going to be Facebook or MySpace or, you know, that's the sort of thing that we sort of pitch out. But in terms of how I see competitors, it's really as data points, what's worked for them. And it's not only the same industry, it's every industry that relates to Hopin. So Hopin has a slight community angle. So is there anything in community product that worked over there that's maybe not a direct competitor, but could somehow work with Hopin, even if it's only 10% of their product is a feature that worked. So community, anything in video, anything in collaboration, anything around it that could work for events.

AI assessment note: “The competition just becomes data for me.”

Q Two things from this. Could you have, A, transitioned to remote from and in person? So there's a lot of people right now who've had physical locations, and they're now transferring all of their workflows, onboarding, recruitment to remote. Could you have done this transition-wise, or does it help so much that you're remote first from the ground up and always happens?

A Well, we were remote from the ground up. And so my thoughts on being able to do this in person, switching from in person to remote would be very difficult. You'd probably have to break a lot of things that existed before. And also we get a lot of problems that people create these like informed connections. And also the talent you think that you're bringing on, it's too big of an impact. You're going to lose a lot of your team. I think you'll lose 20 to 30% of your team if they don't have the initial outset that this is going to be a remote company. I think a lot of the things that make people comfortable or uncomfortable working with them, we always talk about this online. I always joke around because everyone else in the company, they're like, why is the culture so good? I'm like, well, I don't have to be sitting next to someone who's clicking their pen constantly, and it's too awkward for me to mention it. Or if they're shaking their leg, or if someone's getting water 16 times a day, and, you know, you're looking at their screen, and it seems like they're not working, or whatever it is. We don't know, we don't care, and we just focus on efficiency and impact. So there's a ton of stuff that just breaks, I think, when it moves online, and it wasn't already online. So I don't think it would be possible.

AI assessment note: “switching from in person to remote would be very difficult.”

Q Can I ask, how do you get comfortable making decisions so fast with imperfect data? Because when you make decisions as fast as you do, you naturally have imperfect data. How do you get comfortable doing that in such kind of ever-changing times?

A I believe in data-driven decisions. However, I think they're quite limited. Looking from a product perspective, you can use data to optimize product. A lot of the time you can't use data to create a new product. 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. But no, that was more intuition. And I think the same specific goes to almost every angle of the company. If we're optimizing, I think data is fantastic. If we're the first ones going remote from six to two under 20, there's very little data to take from other companies. And the data I had taken from other companies scared me. So when I had looked at what other companies who were remote, how long it took them to scale, how complex their systems were, I was like, holy shit, this is Never going to work, and so a lot of this, I think it naturally has to come from intuition. I have the same perspective on books. I try not to read one or two or three books if I get into a space. I try and read as many as I can so that the perspective is there, and it's always my opinion, so it's my opinion on top of whatever's written there, and so I'm not just reverberating what someone else has missed, essentially, because most books are missing something, especially from a…

AI assessment note: “a lot of this, I think it naturally has to come from intuition.”

Q I mean, I totally agree with you there. The thing that I do think there is like onboarding in person feels easier. You can introduce them to the team, do the team meetings in person, build down interactions and relationships. When it's remote, I'm going, how the fuck do you do onboarding so efficiently remotely? So how do you think about starting and optimizing that onboarding process at scale?

A Yeah, so we do it in an interesting way, but I will respond to that in terms of onboarding is something interesting. And in the culture, I mean, it's what is a remote culture versus a physical culture? Well, if you're onboarding someone in person, yes, there is a little bit more of a personal aspect to it, but it's also, you skip a lot of the intricacies because you expect people will pick it up just because you're around it. You can tap someone on the shoulder. Online, you need to be a lot more specific to make sure everything's written out, everything's very clear, but you can also do the same thing of calling someone immediately on a channel. It's very clear who their line managers are. 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 to make it really clear. They get all their onboarding docs. This is what you need to read. This is what you need to do, and this is how you add yourself. And because it's so remote in power, it's perfect because every single team or as a company, we've had to basically perfect this because this is how everyone's being onboarded. It's not like someone from GTM is getting onboard. I mean, there's slight differences, but For the company o…

AI assessment note: “They get all their onboarding docs. This is what you need to read.”

Q another question for me is, like, when you look at the cadence of rounds, the newer round was quite quick after the last round. How do you think about it always be raising? Often founders ask the question of, like, if money is on the table, do I take it? And then should founders always be raising? How do you think about and approach this question when founders ask you?

A I think it's a game of leverage as well. I think VC itself is a negotiation game. I think it's a strategic game. And I think you need to be playing the same way that you would play internal culture. You need to have your own storylines. You need to be thinking about what are you going to need to do to compete with other companies in the space? What is next year going to look like? And what's two years from now going to look like? And what would I take? And what wouldn't I take? So I was completely aware this year of in November. I mean, if you speak with the previous round, which is nice, you'll say Johnny already was talking about a November round, but in October, you would have heard me say, I'm not looking to raise because I knew what the business is looking like in November. I knew what it should look like. I had best thoughts. I said, if it didn't, where would we be? Et cetera. I wouldn't take money just for the point of it. A few founders have asked me for advice on this. Where they've gotten preempted. If you got preempted, and you weren't aware you were going to get preempted, then you shouldn't take the money. If you were preempted aware that you were going to get preempted, and you built the preemption strategy, then, you know, it's a consideration. But if you're sitting there saying, oh, I just got this random offer because of my business, well, it means that obvious…

AI assessment note: “I wouldn't take money just for the point of it.”

Q Can I ask, how do you get comfortable making decisions so fast with imperfect data? Because when you make decisions as fast as you do, you naturally have imperfect data. How do you get comfortable doing that in such kind of ever-changing times?

A I believe in data-driven decisions. However, I think they're quite limited. Looking from a product perspective, you can use data to optimize product. A lot of the time you can't use data to create a new product. 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. But no, that was more intuition. And I think the same specific goes to almost every angle of the company. If we're optimizing, I think data is fantastic. If we're the first ones going remote from six to two under 20, there's very little data to take from other companies. And the data I had taken from other companies scared me. So when I had looked at what other companies who were remote, how long it took them to scale, how complex their systems were, I was like, holy shit, this is Never going to work, and so a lot of this, I think it naturally has to come from intuition. I have the same perspective on books. I try not to read one or two or three books if I get into a space. I try and read as many as I can so that the perspective is there, and it's always my opinion, so it's my opinion on top of whatever's written there, and so I'm not just reverberating what someone else has missed, essentially, because most books are missing something, especially from a…

AI assessment note: “a lot of this, I think it naturally has to come from intuition.”

Q that I always struggle with in scaling 20 VC and businesses that I've had before, it's like just honestly delegating, and I always think that no one can do my job as well as me, and so it should be me. What would you advise me, and what would you advise other founders who fundamentally struggle in terms of trust and delegating those core roles out in the early days?

A I think there's like three or four phases. So for me, it was zero to 20 people. I was managing absolutely everything. I knew every line of code someone pushed, and every sales line that someone had in a call, I was aware of what they said. And to 50 people, I was only aware of those one layer under me, so it was about eight people. And then to a 150, it was about four people. And so that shrinks, and you have to build trust. I don't think you can scale an organization doing it all yourself, and I think that's the biggest blocker for growth, are founders themselves. In most of these cases, I think vision setter, in an ideal case, vision setter, if your vision is correct, or else leave it to someone else. But in most cases, cheerleader, hirer, all these sort of things is what a founder or someone needs to do who's running their company. And I don't think you can actually scale anywhere. Like, you can build a great bootstrap business or a Great. Twenty million ARR probably business, but after trying to move up to a corporate or to, I'm not at IPO level, so it's crazy for me to talk about it, but in terms of going to an IPO level, I couldn't see how it's possible. I mean, I talk about it all the time at Hopin. Anything that doesn't need to be done sequentially should be done ASAP, and so let's set up a new team and just build this. So let's hire as quick as we can. If we know it ne…

AI assessment note: “I don't think you can scale an organization doing it all yourself”

Q What terms do you think are important when you advise other founders? We know term sheets, both of us. What terms are you like? Ah, don't like that.

A There's a ton of terms that I don't like, but some of them are good. It depends on the founder, so for me, I'm super open, and honestly, being like that, I want a VC relationship with Trust. If I think we're going to do shit next year, you're going to hear from me that I think we're going to do shit next year, and this is what I'm going to try and do, and you'll hear about it six months before. That's the perspective I want, but at the same time, I don't want you overlooking, over-controlling, being able to ask for information whenever you wanted, bothering our VP of finance who is, like, busy with an acquisition and three other things while we're scaling at super fast speed, so 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. And so those are super important to me, as well as I want the right people to be on the board. So if there's someone I want on the board, I can choose that person if there's someone I don't want. And again, I've been afforded a little bit of a luxury with that, because sometimes your startup isn't doing as well. But I also think if you chose to raise when your startup wasn't doing as well, that's a decision to make, because I think you can turn around things unless you've been hit by a, like CO…

AI assessment note: “I don't want you overlooking, over-controlling, being able to ask for information whenever you wanted”

Q referral mechanism. Speaking of the quality there, you know, I spoke to so many of your investors before the show, and they mentioned, obviously, the quality of the team that you have around you today, from Armando to Rosie, and some of the incredible talent that you've acquired. What have been some of the biggest lessons for you in really fundamentally acquiring the best talent in market, and what's worked?

A I always point out things about the founders. This is most of the feedback I get from teams and from people, is that people tend to join a company because of a founder. It's really not where, like, Yes, you can be in a lot of different papers or be considered a hot company, etc. But that's what gets you in the door. But really, they're on a five-year, eight-year pitch or three-year pitch as well. Like, where are you going to be in three to five years? If everyone's looking at where everyone is on a dotted graph at this present, then they wouldn't be making the right decisions, essentially. So for me, it's always been flexible. I think even when we were interviewing those sort of people or even trying to pitch them in, I was very clear about, hey, I don't know how to scale a 230 person business, but here's where we are today. We are. And I don't know what I'm doing in a lot of cases. But I'm trying to hire the best people, and there's going to be a lot of trust, and you're going to be quite independent with what you need to do, and you're only going to be reviewed on basic impact, etc., and I'm going to be learning a lot from you. And I think that's something clear, because being someone who's a bit younger, and it's clear that I'm nowhere near as experienced as Armando or Rosie or Phenomenal and a lot of others on the team. What they don't want is someone who thinks they're ess…

AI assessment note: “I was very clear about, hey, I don't know how to scale”

Q a little bit, final one before the quick flight. I've spoken to growth investors before about Hopin, they're like, hey, I see the ten billion dollar events play, I totally get that. How does it be a hundred billion dollars or fifty billion dollars? How do we compete in the realms of Zoom in terms of market cap and move away from a pure events, either hybrid or non-hybrid model?

A Well, I mean, that's a really loaded question. So let's say they don't believe in the market. My opinion would be the market's bigger than ten billion. But even if they didn't believe in the market, you're asking me essentially to give a pitch to investors, which is lame, but I'll tell you, Hoffman itself, as a product, I'm pursuing more of an Atlassian or Salesforce model on the type of products that we have. So we have adjacencies from community, we have Adjacencies that are workshops that we haven't started building internal events, et cetera. So there's a ton of different products. Essentially, I think next year you'll see two products from Hopin that are equally as big in space where there's an acquisition happening now, which I'm not going to mention anything. That's another space that people would probably be surprised that we're moving into, but it's very adjacent. So I would say that it really depends on the company. And maybe if I came in and I guess why VCs are hard because you're investing in a person and neither the person's a lunatic like myself or a visionary. You'll hear two people say the same thing, right? Say different things. But essentially, I don't plan on only staying in virtual events, but I plan on leading virtual events for sure.

AI assessment note: “I'm pursuing more of an Atlassian or Salesforce model on the type of products”

Q What would you most like to change about the London tech scene?

A I think the London tech scene's evolved. I think that it's significantly different than it was, but again, I'm new to it, but from five years ago, it's significantly different. I'm sure for someone who's been in it for 10 to 15 years, it's gigantic, but I would say that the big difference is it's not considered a third or fourth option to San Francisco, and what I mean is that I think San Francisco was the holy grail for where you need to set up your business if you're going to be successful. I think London has now become a Clear option that you could run a very successful business from London, but I think that's happened most other places in the world that I think that probably San Francisco is not where you need to be anymore, and actually it may be more of a negative, in my opinion, to set up a business over there.

AI assessment note: “I think the London tech scene's evolved. I think that it's significantly different”