20VC: Hopin, The Breakout Startup of 2020 on Scaling from 10 to 230 People and $174M in Funding in just 13 Months, The 3 Phases of Startup Scaling, How To Lead Remote Teams Effectively, The Future of Events Post-COVID and more

Johnny Boufarhat is the Founder & CEO @ Hopin, one of the fastest-growing companies on the planet, providing an online events platform where you can create engaging virtual events that connect people around the globe. In the last 13 months, Johnny has raised over $174M for Hopin from the likes of Accel, IVP, Slack, Northzone, Coatue, Salesforce and of course, 20VC Fund. With the funding, again in just 13 months, Johnny has grown the team from 10 people to over 210 people in 37 countries. In October of this year, Semil Shah awarded Hopin the label, "The Breakout Tech Startup Of 2020". In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Johnny made his way into the world of startups and how severe health challenges led to his realisation and founding of Hopin? 2.) What have been Johnny's biggest lessons scaling the team from 10 to 235 in just 12 months? What starts to break and when? What does Johnny believe are the 3 stages of startup growth? What have been Johnny's learnings on what it takes to acquire the very best talent? 3.) Why does Johnny believe that remote has so fundamentally changed the game? How does remote culture differ from physical culture? What advice does Johnny have for those shifting from physical to remote? Where does Johnny see so many make mistakes with the remote model? 4.) Why does Johnny believe fundraising is a game of leverage? How does Johnny advise founders to structure their raise? Should they shop their term sheets around? Should founders always be raising? How should they think through a pre-emptive round? How does COVID change the world of fundraising? 5.) What does the world of virtual events look like in a post COVID world? What events will remain virtual? What will not? How does Hopin expand beyond purely events into the much wider "connection" space? How does that look both from M&A and product expansion? Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode Johnny’s Favourite Book: Nineteen Eighty-Four As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Welcome to the 20 minute VC in my world. What a special show today. So a little backstory for you here. I first met this guest in October last year and transparently, I thought he was one of the most special founders I'd ever met, period. Since we've become great friends and this show was one that I wanted to do all year. And so with that, I'm very, very excited to welcome one of the fastest growing companies on the planet, Hopin and their founder and CEO, Johnny Boothert. For all those that have been living under a rock, Hopin is an online events platform where you can create engaging virtual events that connect people around the globe. In the last 13 months, Johnny's raised over $174 million for Hopin from the likes of Excel, IVP, Slack, North Zone, Co2, Salesforce, and of course, 20 VC Fund disclaimer.

• 0:41Harry Stebbings?

  And with the funding, again, in just 13 months, Johnny's grown the team from 10 people to over 210 people across 37 countries. And in October this year, Semel Shah awarded Hopin the label, the breakout tech startup of 2020. I'd also want to say a huge thank you to Chris at Co2, Julia at Excel, Alex at Salesforce for some amazing question suggestions today. I really did so appreciate that. But before we move into the show today, I'm sure you've heard about it on the show before, but my word, I love the product that is Carter. Carter simplifies how startups and investors manage equity, track cap tables and get valuations. Go to Carter.com/20VC to get 10% off. More than 800,000 employees and shareholders use Carter to manage hundreds of billions of dollars in equity.

• 1:24Harry Stebbings?

  And Carter now offers fund administration, so you can see real time data in the Carter platform and work with Carter's team of experienced fund accountants. Go to Carter.com/20VC to get 10% off. And speaking of products like Carter that fundamentally change the game, you have to check out Letter. The beautifully designed banking experience made exclusively for high net worth individuals. They're building a new private banking platform. Beyond just banking though, you can get access to exclusive investment and financial opportunities through their marketplace. They always go the extra mile, providing more than you expect. Their digital office, a modern and automated approach to the traditional family office, gives you the same strategies previously only available to the $100 million plus net worth class.

• 2:06Harry Stebbings?

  So to experience the future of banking, go to letter.co/20VC. That's letter.co/20VC and reserve your spot before they launch. I'm now so excited to hand over though, to Johnny Boothert, founder and CEO at Hopin.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:30Harry Stebbings?

  Jonny, my friend, it is so great to have you on the show. I've wanted to do this one for a long time. So thank you so much for joining me today.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Thank you, Harry. Happy to be here.

• 2:36Harry Stebbings?

  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 Hopping, let's start with a little bit on you and the founding story. So how did you come to Found Hopping through the health challenges? And what was that founding moment?

• 2:48Speaker 02

  So 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 it causes 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, 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 group, so I was part of Slack communities.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  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 groups were for content feeds, and then there's webinars, and those aren't really events online. And so my thought was, Harry, if you're interested in VC, you may attend some VC events. Or if you're interested in software development, maybe in React, you're going to attend a React Con. And so that's where you make connections, make some friends, maybe get a job, whatever it is, that's your community. And getting to know proper people there is very common, but you can't do that online. There was no way to do that online. And so I realized that I needed to at least build something. And it started off with the idea of events are essentially concurrency and subject. The subject could be something like React, and concurrency is everyone being there at the same time.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  And bringing that online, you needed a video aspect to it. So I was like, great, chat roulette will work. Let's bring all these people into a chat roulette, all these people that are interested in the subject and can be there at the same time. And there you get the networking aspect of it. Obviously, events are much more complicated, but that's where it started. And over about a year of being at home ill, I kind of built out the rest of the platform from a stage, because you need to talk about your sponsors perhaps, or maybe you want to give out a message. Other features I realized that were key and core to an event, and it became very, very viral from day one. From the first event we had, people wanted to host, even when it was just a chat roulette for events essentially online.

• 4:43Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, what an incredible year it's been. 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 it. It's like, what've been some of your biggest lessons in terms of scaling the team as fast as you have done?

• 5:00Speaker 02

  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 say, 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 notorious known for high prices. In London, there's a notice period of three months in most companies. So we couldn't even attract the 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.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:51Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, I totally agree with you there. The thing that I do think though is like, onboarding in person feels easier. You can introduce them to the team, do the team meetings in person, build that 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?

• 6:10Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  And because it's so remote empowered, 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 on boarded. It's not like someone from GTM is getting on boarded. Maybe there's slight differences. But for the company onboarding, it's not different based on which location you're in, which city in that company location you're in or anything else. So it's actually been a great experience, I'd say.

• 7:11Harry Stebbings?

  Two things from this. Could you have A transition to remote from an 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 happen?

• 7:27Speaker 02

  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 gonna lose a lot of your team. I think you'll lose twenty to thirty percent of your team. If they don't have the initial outset that this is gonna 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 asks 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 sixteen times a day and 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.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:18Harry Stebbings?

  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 you see others make mistakes when it comes to company onboarding?

• 8:32Speaker 02

  I mean, that's a great question. I don't see, I mean, I'm super focused on Hotpint, 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 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 month. And we didn't have that initially. And if we did, I think a lot of more people would have been productive from day one or day fifteen.

• 9:16Harry Stebbings?

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

• 9:19Speaker 02

  So the buddy system is essentially what we do. 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 on boarded gives to the two buddies and the two buddies give to the on boarder 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.

• 10:02Harry Stebbings?

  I do have to ask, you know, when you look at the scaling of the team and the pace of it, we've chatted before about the importance of pace. 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?

• 10:22Speaker 02

  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 want to onboard, want it 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.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  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 were very aggressive on this. So if someone didn't, we'd kind of ask them. It wasn't like a big deal, but it was more like, hey, do you not know that many great people? Or do people not like you? Sort of joke like that, something like. In order to get people to bring.

• 11:32Harry Stebbings?

  I totally agree with you in terms of that 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?

• 11:48Speaker 02

  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 dot 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

• 12:30Speaker 02

  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 essentially like, 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. Well, opinions may matter, but the sourcing or the value of their opinion and how correct they are. I was very clear that you're going to tell me all these things and I'm going to go review in the background and think about it and I'm going to come back and see how it results. And essentially, I think that's been a big thing because if you expected a typical founder, probably my age, who scaled up very quickly, especially from an engineering background, they tend to be quite reclusive. They don't want to push as fast. Or if they do want to push as fast, they still want to maintain control of every single part of everything. And I had a different mindset. I'm hoping, and

• 13:15Speaker 02

  that's from the reactions that I've gotten and comments that I've gotten about it or feedback, that's been the main thing that's interesting.

• 13:20Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, you mentioned the trust there. One thing that I always struggle with in scaling 20 VC and businesses that I've had before is 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?

• 13:37Speaker 02

  I think there's like three or four phases. So for me, it was zero to 20 people. I was 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 fifty people, I was only aware of those one layer under me. So it was about eight people. And then to a hundred and fifty, 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, hire, all these sort of things, 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.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  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 Hoppin. 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 needs to be done in part two or part three, let's do it now. If it's not going to cause any problems from a sequential angle. So it's the same thing. You wouldn't be able to do these things other than sequentially unless you started to delegate as quick as possible. So it really depends on how fast you want to scale and how fast you want to move. And that's the only way to scale essentially.

• 14:47Harry Stebbings?

  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?

• 14:59Speaker 02

  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 hundred twenty, 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.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  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 from a historical perspective. So for me, I think data should always be to ten to forty percent of every decision we make at Hopin.

• 15:57Harry Stebbings?

  Got it. I love it. And no, I clearly you're not a VC because we tend to take other people's opinions and then rephrase them as our own. And that's a brilliant thing to do. It's a great strategy. It's worked very well for me, Jonny. Welcome to my content marketing strategy. I do want to ask that you mentioned earlier the element of kind of being remote and kind of remote first of the company. I spoke to Jules and Alex at IVP before and they said, we've invested a lot of money into Hopin, never met Jonny. Obviously, we spent a ton of time with him, but it'd be fascinating to hear Jonny talk about remote fundraising, how he thought about it. And especially kind of advising founders today entering this world, what the key to successful remote fundraising looks like.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  The one thing about remote meetings are people can't get the same gist of you. And like I said, you're getting a perfect model of people when you're doing remote in most cases. Cause you spend about one to two hours of Zoom calling with someone where you don't see their legs shaking. You don't see their hands trembling. They're in their comfort zone, which is another thing. I mean, if you want to see what someone's really like, bring them out of their comfort zone and you can't. So I can imagine for VCs, it can be quite difficult because you're unable to bring someone out of their comfort zone and see what they're truly like. If someone is faking, it's a bit harder to read. And so probably you need to go on data a bit more. But what I would say to founders is psychology is is great because I think the more honest and open you are. I think that's what VCs are looking for. I think most VCs are getting pitched and can read through bullshit. I think especially if they're good and they know when you're covering something, when you're hiding something, when you're making your business look good. So for me, it's always being being as honest as possible. I tend to swear. I tend to over stress about small things.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  I'm very open. I think Jules and Alex will attest to hearing every positive and negative about the business at all times. And I think that makes them more aware when they're making decisions on, do we want to continue to follow on? Or do we want to even invest in the first place? Because they're like, it's an open book, but he's thinking about absolutely everything. And that is, I think, a good strategy to have if you're fundraising is being absolutely honest. If a VC says, I don't think this is going to work for because of X, then tell them your thoughts on X. Don't just cover it up. And a lot of people will get extremely defensive. If you say, yeah, I think you're right, X usually wouldn't work. But I think this is the way that I've kind of solved this, or I think is going to solve it. It has a 10 to 20% chance of working. I think they'll find that quite useful and probably more likely to give you money than if you just said, we're obviously pitching essentially.

• 17:54Harry Stebbings?

  No, listen, I totally get you in terms of that real trust and transparency that's built through the openness. I guess 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 that 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?

• 18:13Speaker 02

  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 odds. 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.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  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 obviously they're seeing something that you're not. And so you probably need to take that offer and shop it around. Maybe some VCs wouldn't be happy here. But take that offer, shop it around and really figure out why you're raising and what is it actually doing for you other than this is money that's available now?

• 19:19Harry Stebbings?

  Is price the most important thing, honestly, Johnny?

• 19:21Speaker 02

  No, but 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. It makes them more excited. I think the terms are as important as the price itself.

• 19:32Harry Stebbings?

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

• 19:38Speaker 02

  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 of 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.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  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 COVID is one that's very difficult to predict. But I think in most cases where it's not a big shock and most people can predict where their business will be in four to six months.

• 20:37Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, no, I get you 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 aggressively monitor what they do? What's the right approach?

• 20:55Speaker 02

  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, 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?

• 21:34Speaker 02

  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.

• 21:44Harry Stebbings?

  Totally get you there in terms of being kind of one signal for the data noise. I do want to ask kind of with a forward-looking eye. There's kind of 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?

• 22:07Speaker 02

  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 unpack. 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 1 trillion in size. It's gigantic. But you can split it out. There is concerts, there's conferences, there's a wedding. Those are all events essentially. And each of those are hosted at different frequencies, at different values to Hopin at least. And so big conferences, let's call the business market, which is probably under 500 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,

• 22:52Speaker 02

  but to build revenue in their products 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, talking about Slack, talking about all these sort of things. Now, well, my opinion is from intuition and some of the data we have is that these big physical events, the ones that need a firebreezer there to get you to pay $600 and that's the revenue thing. They're probably going to move back to physical without light hybrid approach. But all the rest, the ones who are now getting more leads at their events now that they've moved virtually. They're getting more engagement from their customers. They're getting 10, 20 times cheaper to host. It's a lot easier to organize those sort of things. We think all of those companies are going to stay online.

• 23:25Harry Stebbings?

  Can I just add on that one also? You get fundamentally better guests because they remove friction from travel.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So in tons of different ways, it's significantly better. And that point that you just made, Harry, is the same reason why the first bucket, those ones who are like the mega events, the web summits cannot compete if they stayed online. Because now the speakers are kind of like equalized to everybody. Anyone can bring in, like I've seen, who's that famous inspirational speaker? I forgot his name, but he's been at like 400 online conferences and usually does like five physical once a year. So I've seen him shopped around quite a bit. But the point is you see online events kind of ruin it. But specifically when it comes to the second bucket and in terms of customer engagement, community events, et cetera, where that's not their prime revenue, but it's a big use case for them to either build revenue or something else, community. We think it'll stay online and it'll definitely grow. And concerts and all that is not in Hopin's scope. But if you're asking me, which second part is where's Hopin going? From a perspective of how do we get in front?

• 24:12Speaker 02

  Well, today, Hopin is mainly virtual events, but I've always had a multi-product approach to things. 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 make sense for them to be either online or even hybrid or physical. So it's no secret that we're building a hybrid mobile app, et cetera.

• 24:29Harry Stebbings?

  Of course, I mean, talk to me a little bit, final one before the quick fire. I was speaking to growth investors before about hopping. They're like, hey, I see the $10 billion events play. I totally get that. How does it be $100 billion or $50 billion? 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?

• 24:48Speaker 02

  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 10 billion. But even if they didn't believe in the market, you're asking me essentially to give a pitch. Investors, which is lame, but I'll tell you, Hopin itself as a product, I'm pursuing more of an Atlassian or Salesforce model and 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 either the person's a lunatic like myself or a visionary, you'll hear two people say the same thing, right?

• 25:33Speaker 02

  Say different things, but essentially I don't plan on only staying in virtual events, but I plan on leading virtual events for sure.

• 25:38Harry Stebbings?

  Totally get you and I apologize, Johnny, for the ultimately shit question, but I do want to move into my favorite, which is a quick fire. So I say a short statement, you hit me with your immediate thoughts. So you ready to rock and roll?

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Rock and rolling.

• 25:48Harry Stebbings?

  So you know that I'm not quite as intellectual in terms of reading taste as you, so help me out here, Johnny. What's the favorite book and why?

• 25:54Speaker 02

  I honestly don't have a favorite book, but if I had to put a favorite book, it's gonna be lame, but it's 1984 by George Orwell. It tells us where we could go, it tells us the impact of technology, both positive and negative. It was the book that made the biggest impact on me when I read it when I was like 18, so.

• 26:07Harry Stebbings?

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

• 26:09Speaker 02

  I think the London tax 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.

• 26:41Harry Stebbings?

  You mentioned being a visionary and a lunatic, I would totally agree. Now I'm joking.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  It sounds bad for me to quote myself as a visionary, I'm saying what possibly.

• 26:49Harry Stebbings?

  No, I'm saying it, so I'm allowed to say it, it's my show, Johnny, it's cool. What would you say your biggest strength and your biggest weakness is?

• 26:55Speaker 02

  Biggest weakness, incredibly impatient, for sure. And then I can have anxiety. Well, for me, it's a really negative trait because it makes you focus on something that maybe you shouldn't be focusing on as much, especially around business sometimes. So in positive trait is, I think sometimes I can look at the big picture quite easily. I can pull myself out of the moment and that probably came from my illness. I was a very different person before my illness.

• 27:13Harry Stebbings?

  What fundamentally keeps you up at night today, Johnny?

• 27:16Speaker 02

  The discussion we were talking about before, just about what does next year look like? That's only the biggest one.

• 27:20Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, you spend a ton of time around diet, around food optimization. What are like biggest pieces of advice for beginners that you give? What would you say to them? Be it cut out carbs, be it only steak, be it whatever, whatever? What would you say is like, this has been a big learning for me?

• 27:33Speaker 02

  Okay, I'll say this. 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 dose of gluten are not good for you. And obviously cornstarch and vegetable oils, et cetera. I think if you just remove those things from your diet, even if you're a well functioning human being, you will optimize yourself by at least 10 to 20%.

• 27:53Harry Stebbings?

  Got it. I actually, I'm pretty good on my gluten intake, so that's a good one for me. I also love fasting. Have you ever fasted, Johnny?

• 27:59Speaker 02

  Intermittent fasting, I always do it and I've tried water fast a few times as well.

• 28:03Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, totally with you. Tell me, final one. What do the next five years hold for you and for Hopin? How do you think about that kind of big picture vision?

• 28:09Speaker 02

  Well, hopefully Hopin is a product that really spans across quite a few different markets, specifically around connecting people. That's the broader vision of the company is to connect people. So whatever the best way to do that, or the best products that we need to build to enable that to happen is where we're going to be. And so in five years, hopefully we have a big company that is really doing well and is connected lots of people around the globe. For me, I'll definitely be hopefully staying at Hoppin unless I've been kicked out, which is why terms are important, as we previously discussed when you're taking investment.

• 28:36Harry Stebbings?

  Listen, I love it, Johnny. As I said, I wanted to see this one for a long time. You're an absolute star and I really appreciate you putting up with my mundane questions.

• 28:43Speaker 02

  I really appreciate you bringing me on and it's been a pleasure.

• 28:48Harry Stebbings?

  I have to say, I really couldn't be more excited for Johnny and for Hop and such an exciting roadmap ahead. And if you'd like to see more from us behind the scenes, you can on Instagram at H Stubbings 1996 with two Bs. I always love to see you there. But before we leave you today, I'm sure you've heard about it on the show before, but my word, I love the product that is Carter. Carter simplifies how startups and investors manage equity, track cap tables and get valuations. Go to Carter.com/20vc to get 10% off. More than 800,000 employees and shareholders use Carter to manage hundreds of billions of dollars in equity and Carter now offers fund administration. So you can see real time data in the Carter platform and work with Carter's team of experienced fund accountants.

• 29:27Harry Stebbings?

  Go to Carter.com/20vc to get 10% off. And speaking of products like Carter that fundamentally change the game, you have to check out Letter, the beautifully designed banking experience made exclusively for high net worth individuals. They're building a new private banking platform. Beyond just banking though, you can get access to exclusive investment and financial opportunities through their marketplace. They always go the extra mile, providing more than you expect. Their digital office, a modern and automated approach to the traditional family office, gives you the same strategies previously only available to the $100 million plus net worth class. So to experience the future of banking, go to letter.co/20vc, that's letter.co/20vc and reserve your spot before they launch.

• 30:12Harry Stebbings?

  As always, I so appreciate all your support and I can't wait to bring you another set of incredible episodes next week.