Johnny Boufarhat
Founder & CEO, Hopin. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
Johnny Boufarhat is the Founder and CEO of Hopin, an online events platform. He has raised over $174 million for the company from investors such as Accel, IVP, Slack, and Salesforce.
2shows
2appearances
36statements
1resolved
1supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
29said about them ↓ Everything Johnny Boufarhat said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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 will likely be the fastest-growing company in the world
“Whereas with Hopin, I always said, we're probably going to be the fastest growing company in the world when we decide to push out, because we saw the viral effect.”
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: Hopin reached $1.8M ARR within three weeks of public access
“And you know, it's been hard to manage it, but in that time, in about three weeks, where I think we're at now, 1.8 million ARR from the car. I mean, I, when I filled in the form with you, it was one.”
Boufarhat: Hopin's pandemic-driven hypergrowth numbers are not sustainable
“None of the numbers that are happening right now in our product are sustainable.”
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 raised a $7M round from Accel
“We raised a five million pounds around seven million dollars.”
Boufarhat: Hopin's fundraise began in December 2019, before the pandemic
“No, there was nothing. There was, the virus hadn't hit yet. I mean, the process began in December.”
Boufarhat: Hopin hit nearly 180,000 waitlist signups and onboarded 2,000 users
“We have this waitlist now close to a 180,000 and we've probably onboarded about 2000 of it.”
The other half of the tape: Johnny Boufarhat's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 27 times in 15 episodes across the shows. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Nathan Latka 12Harry Stebbings 10Luciana Lixandru 3Jacob Lenski 2
Statements about Johnny Boufarhat, by other people (2)
Stebbings: Hopin founder Johnny Boufarhat cashed out $200M in secondary sales
“And so Johnny took two hundred million off.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Top Founders 14
20VC 13
2024 5 mentions in 1 episode
2023 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2022 9 mentions in 6 episodes 2 per episode
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- 20VC: Scaling to $2BN AUM in 3 years, Fundraising Lessons and Tactics from 2,500 LP Meetings & What it Takes to Build a Firm That Stands the Test of Time with Harley Miller, Co-Founder and Managing Partner @ Left Lane Capital
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- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 10 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
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- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2020 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Johnny's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Hopin | 1 | 20 | 100% 1/1 | full record on 20VC → |
| TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | 1 | 16 | — | full record on Top Founders → |