The Ledger
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Boufarhat: Transitioning in-person companies to remote causes 20-30% employee churn
“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.”
Boufarhat: Corporate events will stay online post-COVID while mega-conferences return in-person
“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 …”
Boufarhat: Setting up a startup in San Francisco may be a net negative
“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…”
Boufarhat: Hopin Could Not Have Scaled Rapidly Without Being Fully Remote
“I don't think it would have been possible two to three years ago, and if we were not a remote business.”
Boufarhat: Hopin prioritized early hiring speed over maximum quality
“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…”
Boufarhat: Founders fail beyond 40 employees by refusing to delegate control
“You get a lot of founders who do fantastically early on, and they don't know how to scale past, like, 40 people. They still want to be overlord. They still think their opinions matter more than everyone else.”
Boufarhat: Data Optimizes Existing Products but Rarely Creates New Ones
“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.”
Boufarhat: Data Should Only Inform 10% to 40% of Startup Decisions
“So for me, I think data should always be to 10 to 40% of every decision we make happen.”
Boufarhat: Founders should not accept unexpected preemptive term sheets
“If you got preempted, and you weren't aware you were going to get preempted, then you shouldn't take the money.”
Boufarhat: Shopping term sheets increases leverage even with preferred VCs
“Even shopping around gets you more leverage with the VC, so it's not only about the price, even if it's the VC that you're interested in. It makes them more hungry for it makes them more excited.”
Boufarhat: Hopin will expand to multiple non-virtual products and a hybrid mobile app in 2021
“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…”
Boufarhat: In-person onboarding causes companies to omit detailed documentation
“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.”
Boufarhat: Hopin aggressively required initial hires to refer top candidates
“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”
Boufarhat: Hopin Was Built Purely on Intuition, Not Industry Data
“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.”
Boufarhat restricted VCs from contacting Hopin's executive team directly
“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.”
Boufarhat: Hopin lacks a clear direct competitor to monitor
“Hopin doesn't have a clear, direct competitor today in terms of one that I'm much more closely monitoring”
Boufarhat: Cutting dairy, gluten, and seed oils boosts performance 10-20%
“If you're not someone from Northern Europe originally, I would say, in general, dairy, modern gluten, so non-sourdough, if it's very high doses of gluten, are not good for you, and obviously cornstarch and vegetable oils, etc. I think if you just remove those …”
Boufarhat: Hopin achieved virality starting from its first event
“It became very, very viral from day one, from the first event we had.”
Hopin uses automated Slack API triggers for remote employee onboarding
“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…”
Boufarhat: Hopin Assigns Every New Hire Two Onboarding Buddies
“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.”