In the face of a global pandemic and a financial meltdown, Founders are confronted with a new reality. If you are running a startup today, this will likely be one of the most challenging climates you’ll ever face. Launched in July 2012, Bizzabo is a SaaS All-in-One event success platform. They help organizers create successful events by empowering them to build amazing websites, sell tickets, grow communities, go mobile and maximize event experiences - using a beautiful, user-friendly platform. Despite Covid canceling all conferences and in-person events, Bizzabo was able to complete a funding round of $138 million. NFX Partner Gigi Levy-Weiss talks with Bizzabo Co-Founder & CEO Eran Ben-Shusham about their strategy during COVID including customer acquisition, fundraising, and overall growth during the downturn. Eran shares his mindset as a company leader and how he and his team navigated the crisis to come out the other side ahead in hypergrowth mode. Read the NFX article here - https://www.nfx.com/post/bizzabo
Gigi Levy-Weiss:
So, Eran, thanks for joining us today. You're probably the best example of founders who could have said, "COVID killed our company." But instead you seize the moment for a speedy pivot that really, really turned out well. And despite COVID basically, canceling all conferences and in person events, you were able to complete a monster 138 million funding round, which is amazing. Through speed and amazing execution, from my perspective, you grew the company a ton. So proud of you. And I wanted to have you basically help me teach startup founders, how to think and act the same way you do in such cases.
What we'll try to do today is to deconstruct how such decisions are made and the value of speed and determination. So, why don't we start with, tell me a bit about the company before COVID. So, you were an event planning platform, that was a great market. What was the business model and how was it going at the end of 2019, the beginning of 2020?
Eran Ben-Shushan:
The company is a SaaS company. It wasn't always the case. We started by doing originally something pretty niche, an app that was supposed to help connect people in events. Think about the mobile LinkedIn for events. Then two years after we had our first pivot, then we became an all in one software.
Initially, we took the GMV model and we wanted to take a fee of tickets sold at events. And then we realized this is not the right business case for a platform like ours, that is much more similar to a Marketo for your organization or a Salesforce for your organization, just for the world of events. And there's a reason I mentioned those two companies because we are very well embedded into the marketing and sales stack in the organizations we sell to. And with that understanding, we realized that a SaaS business model is the right business model for us. We're pretty religious about that. We barely have any services and it's really a platform approach. And it's a subscription business model, usually annual or multi-year contracts.
And before COVID, at the end of 2019, we were growing as a top tier company, but not something that I would say would be counted as ballistic growth, but definitely top tier, but nothing exceptional beyond top tier.
Gigi Levy-Weiss:
What does that mean top tier, for people listening, what would you call top tier growth?
Eran Ben-Shushan:
So, doubling your revenue more or less year over year.
Gigi Levy-Weiss:
Yeah. It's funny because I almost forgot about it. I mean, we did start working together when the company was very, very young, but I almost forgot that the company essentially had maybe two pivots before that major pivot that we're talking about. From that tiny app thing that, I'm proud of myself for seeing that you guys were so awesome, even with it bizarre idea. And then from tickets basically to SaaS, right? So, that is essentially two pivots before the pandemic.
Eran Ben-Shushan:
It is indeed. And the second one is also, it's a combination between a product pivot and then around a year later, a business model or a go to market pivot. So, I consider it as three pivots, the first one from
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the mobile app to the platform that was a product and strategy pivot. The second one was a go to market business pivot. And I consider it as a pivot by all means, because it has so much change management that you have to go through, and going up market to more mid market enterprise customers has so many implications. And the third one is obviously COVID where we pivoted, I guess, together with the entire world.
Gigi Levy-Weiss:
Yeah. And so, we're talking about the beginning of 2020. I remember us having conversation just before that, and we're saying finally the company is on track. We had tough years. It took a long time, but through determination, finally, the company is on track.
And then suddenly the pandemic happens. When did you know that the pandemic was really going to hurt the company? What did you see early on? Was there any KPIs that started dropping, any, oh, no, moment?
Eran Ben-Shushan:
Yeah, it started gradually, and then suddenly, I guess. I think that's the best description. Early March we're talking about or really mid February, we started having our first board conversation. I remember about this where nobody actually thought about it, yet in North America or the Western World, and we had some indications on events shutting down, coming from Far East and basically realizing that something is happening, but not yet taking action, just starting to learn about it a little bit more.
So, we had a decent headstart. Then because we are also originally an Israeli company, we have a big team in Israel as well. And Israel was the preview, I guess, two, three weeks earlier than what you would see happening here in North America. So, we had that kind of preview to the trailer, if you want to call it this way, and realizing what quarantine and shutting down, and social distancing implications look like. And at that point we started realizing that something serious is happening.
And it was pretty bizarre because originally most of the events that were taking place throughout March and April, the participants said that they are on track and taking place as planned, even on March 5th or March 8th. And then around March 10th to 15th, it started really collapsing. And I'm using this word because you see the first ones that are canceling, and then very quickly, very suddenly everyone else is canceling. And at that moment in time, it was official that the event business is going through a tremendous shift. And I do believe that the headstart that we had before that was very, very beneficial for us.
Gigi Levy-Weiss:
Interesting. So, what could you tell people to learn from it in terms of knowing your market? I mean, it does seem to me that just knowing, and we'll talk about what happened later, that probably had you been like a month or two slower, we would not be having this conversation right now, because later on came so many other platforms and you guys had the head start. What can people learn from that?
Eran Ben-Shushan:
Yeah. I don't know if speed was the only criteria that made such a big difference. It definitely did, but I do think that the execution at the end of the day and most likely a month or two, wouldn't make such a difference in my view. Although I do think that what the team was able to do in our case is absolutely remarkable, within a matter of weeks, within three weeks of COVID starting, we already launched the
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initial product. It was very naive, but we already had a direction in a way. And it definitely made an
impact because I think that from a morale standpoint, that's what really matters.
I think that if you were late to the game, what can happen, is that you can lose faith and get into a place where you're struggling for too long. And that's maybe the most important understanding or take away from this situation, is that you need to keep always pushing forward, doing it in a smart way, in a structured way. And maybe we'll have an opportunity to talk about how we put structure into this chaos. But I do think that speed matters more from a morale perspective and a mindset perspective, than actual time to market necessarily.
Gigi Levy-Weiss:
Interesting. I do agree that many times just the getting the team to work in speed, just gets your organization to work so much better. So, rather than being in this limbo of not knowing what's happening, you give them a direction. And the fact that you're giving the direction is as meaningful as actually what you're building.
Eran Ben-Shushan: Exactly.
Gigi Levy-Weiss:
Interesting. Something that you said strikes me, that you said that in three weeks you had a product. We will go back to this in a second. But how do you get yourself from, and I know many other companies that were in the same situation and didn't do that, how do you get away from, "Well, let's see what happens." Why do we need to pivot so fast? It's only a few weeks, why don't we wait and see if maybe it's all coming back, maybe this COVID thing is going to disappear? How do you get out of your comfort zone and start looking at it, where tons of other companies are playing, "Okay. It's probably going to be okay."
Eran Ben-Shushan:
It's a great question. I'll tell you that my personal tendency is to be extremely optimistic. And I think in general, founders, entrepreneurs, they have to have that mindset. So, it's counterintuitive to actually saying that at some point you stop being optimistic and you treat something with a very rigid or a deterministic mindset, and not just for your own rosy future outlook or wishful thinking, I should say.
And so, having said that, that it's not typical to me personally, or to entrepreneurs probably in general, I think the answer to your question is the culture system, the value system that you build as an organization. I think that at the end of the day, and we went through those three pivots, I think that time and time again, what made it possible is the culture and the values. I think about it as the operating system of the organization. And I don't think it's an overstatement. I think that at the end of the day, when we pivoted, we have eight core values, and I always emphasize two of them when we think about pivots, it's the combination between we are humble and we there.
So, to answer directly to your question, I think that the fact that you are first listening to what's going on and not just listening to your own wishful thinking or your own brain speaking to you, you're actually leaning in and reading things in an open mind.
And what I did personally, I can tell you at that time is I looked for as many investors, entrepreneurs, advisors that went through major chaotic situations or big crisis. And time and time again, in those discussions, and I'm talking to you, all of this is happening in this super chaotic time
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where everything is going on and we're finding a time, it's not just me, it's also others to lean on advice from other people. Because we're saying, I was never a founder CEO in a financial crisis, in a global pandemic, in a health crisis.
I actually remember one incredible post that NFX posted at the time of how to deal with crisis. And I share that also with the executive team. It was another data point, but it was super beneficial. One of the things that I remember so vividly from that post is, to make tough decisions and make them one and not go out the problem, tranche by tranche, by tranche. So, if you have to, for example, downsize the company, do it once. It's painful. It's extremely painful by the way. And we had to do it, unfortunately, but I do think that it helped us in many ways also move faster.
So, it's a combination of basically listening to people that are smarter than you, or have more experience than you, keeping your mind open. And the second aspect of it is the we there, which means it's not just about talking the talk. It's actually about walking the walk.
And I explain what I mean, in our case, we never ran virtual events. Our customers never ran virtual events. And to be honest, before this pandemic, virtual events were never a thing. And I'm not speaking about webinars or just big video conference meetings, all hands, I'm talking about real conferences, convention, summits, there were never a thing. So, there was very little knowledge on how to run those events. And once you realize that and you say, "Hey, I'm actually one of the most knowledgeable players in this market. And I have all the resources to actually go and try it out myself."
So, we there piece was, A, being there for our customers as trusted advisors and just pivoting alongside and together with them. And second is to run our own events. And already on May 5th, we had our first event. We never did a virtual event prior to that. And we learned so much from actually walking the walk and experiencing what it means to be our customers, but doing it ourselves and using our own tools and platforms.
So, I think that that combination between humility and actually daring, which is being biased to action, even if you get it wrong and you fall on your face, I think that combination between those two values is what helps us be so agile and nimble and just move on.
Gigi Levy-Weiss:
Yeah. I love that. And I know how true it is. And one of my favorite quotes is a quote by Andy Grove, the legendary CEO of Intel, who said that, asked about how you need to plan for startup when the startup environment changes all the time. He said, there's something that I really love, he said you need to plan the way a fire department plans. It cannot anticipate where the next fire will be. So, it has to shape an energetic and efficient team that is capable of responding to the unanticipated, as well to any other ordinary event. And I think that that's exactly what you're saying. It's this combination of a culture that basically treats uncertainty as the main thing that it needs to get ready to.
Eran Ben-Shushan:
Exactly. And there's another one that is fantastic, I think in that context, which is culture eats strategy for breakfast. And I think that's so true. And that's exactly what you're talking about. Absolutely.
Gigi Levy-Weiss:
In this point you understand that your old businesses probably dead, are dead for awhile. What is the aha moment where you decide where you want to go? What is it that got you to think, "Well, the world's going to change, but it's probably going to change in the direction of virtual events rather than in
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the direction of no event?" Or when is it and how was it that you get to the thought that this is where
you want to pivot to?
Eran Ben-Shushan:
I think the best way to probably describe that is, the imposter syndrome that you think you don't know and everybody else knows, but then at some point there's an aha moment where you realize, actually I know more than average people or people trying to pivot in this situation out there. And I should just feel confident enough to go with what I believe is right, give it a shot and then see how our customer base or other people in the industry react with it.
So, I think that aha moment was specifically after getting enough critical mass of customers that are telling us how challenging the situation is for them and realizing that they don't actually know how to manage the situation. But we understand also, that there is an opportunity to come with a clear statement what is a virtual event?
In the beginning, we were in this process of trying to figure out what is a virtual event? A silly question to ask, but we were, I think bold enough to say to ourselves, what is a virtual event? How do you even define it? And once we started creating clarity around that and realizing that our platform actually provides you 90% of what you need in order to run a virtual event, then yes, we are missing some components, but we can compensate for it with some partnerships and some quick wins, and then we're going to make it more robust. And that's to answer your question about how come that in a matter of weeks, you already have a product, is because we basically started with the customer and we tried to understand what are the problems and challenges and needs that they're facing. Going back to the basics of finding product market fit.
And after you go through enough discovery process with those customers and you understand their challenges, and you go like, "Hey, I can actually solve that." And then flipping from defense to offense, that's even verbatim how we said it in the company. There was this one, all-hands company in May and board meeting, where we said, we are transitioning from playing defense to playing offense, because we built enough conviction that there is an opportunity for a problem that is unsolved. And that was predominantly based on listening to our customers and understanding their needs and challenges.
Gigi Levy-Weiss:
Great. So, I want to dive down into that very specific process of determining product market fit and deciding that you have it. We are generally in your case, I think it was an interesting one because you basically had to find in a way two product market fits. You had to find initially product market fit that gets you to be able to sell to your customers, who are organizers. And then they had to find product market fit in making for the first time, virtual events actually means something, right?
So, basically it's a tricky one because you're selling them something, they can't find their product market fit before they have your system. You need to convince them not only that your system is the best one, but also that there is product market fit for them if they use your system. So, how do you do that? What does it mean talking to your customers? Who do you call? Did you call CEOs? Do you call customers? Did you come with a straw man? Did you come with a presentation? Did you ask them, "What do you think?" What was the initial process? And then what was the process of working with the customers to actually make sure that you have product market fit?
Eran Ben-Shushan:
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That's a great question. And I think that you have to distinguish between trying to do that when you are not at scale versus when you are at scale. So, we were already operating at scale, which means that also in terms of the number of employees that we had, which was around a 150, so it's not enormous, but it's already scaling the sense that there are more people than just yourself, the founding theme, and maybe the first initial people on the team that are listening with their ear to the grounds, to the market.
And you need to actually build a system to ladder up information and trickle down information very efficiently in times that are also very chaotic with other layers of complexity, like people being isolated, people being scared, and to keep ourselves highly functional in this situation and build that system was one challenge. And I think is very different, so from a situation that you are not operating at scale, right? And also the number of not just employees, but the number of customers and different types of customers and use cases that we had.
And essentially, what we did is we built a pretty structured framework of a task force that was multi-disciplinary with the right people that we mapped as potential change agents that have the ability. So, you take one person from sales and the other person from customer success, and product and support, and engineering. And we had a cross-functional task force with someone that we knew that is the right person to lead such a task force, that had the capacity to focus only on that. We created a lot of clarity in the organization. What is the task force? Because it's actually the first time that we had a task force.
But we realized that you need to have a dedicated and a highly laser focused team that their task at that moment is stop doing only their day job, and actually gathering that level of information from the market to help you make smart decisions and do it in a timely fashion. So, that's what worked really well for us when we had to collect the information and decide what product market fits look like.
And then for the second part of your question, that's exactly the point about the imposter syndrome. How do you know that what you think is right is right? The beauty about COVID and it took us a while to actually realize that, but the beauty about that is that we're in a situation where honestly, nobody knew. So, if you took a stand and you started with something and you tried it out, but you kept nimble and agile. And to be honest, even to date, we are still in this journey of redefining product market fit. So, it's not like we pivoted and then it ended. Actually, as we speak, we're still in the midst of this pivot that I believe is going to take for, anywhere between 12 to 36 more months in our industry because human experiences and social experiences at events are being completely redefined, and that's not stopping anytime soon. And that realization and that kind of mindset and approach of constantly ever evolving, I think, is what helped us really stay in the forefront of having the right solutions for our customers.
Gigi Levy-Weiss:
Interesting. And so, how many customers did you talk to before deciding what the solution include, for example? Or how many events did you run before going to talk to customers? What came first?
Eran Ben-Shushan:
So, first came talking to customers, and they ran the first events because some of them had already events booked on the calendar, and they just had to do a transition from a live physical event to a virtual one. That was just the reality that we were facing. So, and that's what I'm alluding to what I'm saying, you're operating at scale. So, you're building the airplane while airborne or while flying, that's what we were tasked to do.
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So, we started by talking to customers. Our event took place on May 5th, which is relatively quick, and it was a high-scale event. And again, without running any virtual events before that. So, it turned out to be an event of 6,500 registrants and 3,500 registrants or participants participating in real time. The system was stretched thin, the things that we tried there were really first-time trying it. And a lot of things were stitched with a Band-Aid approach, but we learned a lot from it.
But definitely first and foremost, it was learning through the customers. And how did we do it? Is we try to use the scale of the company as a force multiplier. And again, if you have 50 people touching customers on a daily basis, we tried to collect all of those pieces of information. I remember myself and other executives, and also sharing that with the board, listening to actual recordings of conversations with customers, jumping on calls ourselves as much as possible, and trying to also participate in events to see it.
So, we had a lab or a beta site of understanding how those virtual experiences should look like. And again, laddering up this information and trickling it down back to everybody in the organization, to make smart and quick decisions about what are the products that we need to build, or what are the services? Because the layer of services also was added as part of the AV production or virtual events, and so forth. But without getting too deep into that, that was the system that we used. And in our event that we did, we also obviously learned a tremendous amount. And then we kept doing more and more events.
Gigi Levy-Weiss:
And so, help me understand something because what you said before about building the plane while flying it or being airborne, that's really makes life so much tougher, because at the end of the day, unlike a young company that comes up with a product and you can move fast and break things, and at the beginning, everybody forgives you because it's all new. You guys already had revenues and customers, and people that trusted you. And now you're basically trying to build in a few weeks, a product that is at the speed of a tiny company, but with the responsibility and the requests from customers that are of a large company. How do you balance this? Do you tell them that this is a strange situation and they need to be more patient? How do you basically make this work?
Eran Ben-Shushan:
From a customer standpoint or an employee standpoint?
Gigi Levy-Weiss:
What kind of expectations do you set for your employees as what's expected? Is it about moving fast and breaking things? Or is it about building something that's mature and strong, because that's what the customers expect?
Eran Ben-Shushan:
Yeah. So, the approach that we took was putting the customer in the center and making it about them and not about us. And I think that made a huge difference. I remember another term that we use verbatim in the meetings that we had as a company, it was that we are putting a blanket of love on our customer. And what that means is realizing very quickly. And I actually had the chance to be on site, seeing an event that got canceled five hours before the actual event in the really early days of beginning of March. And I was there physically seeing it in my eyes, how people are unpacking everything and deconstructing the event. And I'm talking about a big scale event that was hundreds of thousands of
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dollars, maybe millions of dollars were invested, months of work. And you start seeing everybody
picking the event down.
And those little moments, but also with the preliminary culture of being a super customer- centric company, realizing that the focal point of the stories, actually our customers, they're going through hell for a lack of a better term. Everything in their world shifted upside down and was turned on its head when they had to cancel all of their events, that they were working nights, days, months, sometimes years towards producing these events.
So, making it all about our customers and putting them in the center and making that our mission to be there for them, I think solved both topics that you are alluding to, the approach that we took with our customers, and also the approach or how we managed the tough situation with our employees that needed to really go above and beyond. And everybody worked 24/7. And not just as a phrase. There was a time where the company got so stretched thin in terms of the lack of resources versus the demand that we had. And people really worked hard at this, and it was all about being there for our customers.
And then when we had to manage the pivot, and sometimes not meeting the expectations of the customers, and there were several meaningful mess ups, I would say that the platform didn't really meet the expectations in terms of scale and stability, and features that were missing. And remember, when you have 5,000 people trying to dial in or join a virtual event, and something isn't working, that's a lot of anxiety on the other end, right?
So, but I think that the fact that they felt from us in a very authentic, genuine manner, and we were very transparent about it saying, "Hey, there are things we don't know, but we're willing to go with you together, hand by hand in this journey. And we promise that we are committed to you first and foremost." I think that built trust and allowed us to really pivot gracefully, together with our customers. And they accepted sometimes the flaws or the deficiencies that we had in the product or other services that we provided to them.
Gigi Levy-Weiss:
Great. So, we now have the pandemic. You're seeing events are basically being canceled. You talk to customers, you understand that virtual events is where you need to go. You start moving fast. Let's talk for a second about the state of mind, before we talk about the employee.
So, I mean, describe to me how it feels to be a founder where the core of what your company aims to do disappears from the world, and how do you start shifting your mindset from seeing problems to seeing opportunities? How can other founders think about these situations and make sure that they're not dragged down by pessimist negative thoughts, and to actually start continuously look for the opportunities, and for where they can actually emerge out of this victorious rather than lose their company? How did you guys do that? What can other founders learn?
Eran Ben-Shushan:
I think that the way to do it is to have that kind of mindset prior to a crisis. And getting back to the quote that you shared earlier, I sincerely believe that it's not something that you can develop when it happens.
And I can give you an example that a big part of our culture we have, one of our values is we own it. Then as part of we own it, we say that the problem to solution ratio needs to be as a way of living for us as a company, it needs to be 20/80, meaning we want to surface problems. We don't want to shove anything under the rug, but it needs to be 20% of how we spend our time, while 80% needs to
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be in the solution world. And that's something that was built into the DNA of the company for many
years.
So, when a crisis happens, it just automatic mechanism of the organ that knows how to develop that kind of mindset or embrace that kind of mindset. And the second thing I think is a lot of positivity.
Another value that we have is we smile. And bit's not only about a physical smile. It's more about being positive thinkers and having a positive mindset when we approach problems and solutions. And in times like COVID where people were really scared and alone, and there was so much adversity, the connectivity between people, the positive approach, being there for each other, and really leaning in and caring about each other, made a whole difference.
So, I think that that problem, solution ratio, having that predefined and encrypted into your culture together with a lot of positivity is what makes it possible to actually not dwell too much on how bad life is and how we got screwed.
Gigi Levy-Weiss:
I love that. Actually, I never heard of it before, that we smile value, but actually knowing you guys, the founders and knowing the company, I think it is such a great value and it represents exactly how you guys work. This is something I'm going to adopt from your own words.
Eran Ben-Shushan: Thank you.
Gigi Levy-Weiss:
And let's move on to employees for a second. So, now you found theirs are in the right direction. There's two more constituencies. Your customers clearly are there, but there's the investors and the employees. Let's start with the employees. You're basically taking employees on a totally new journey. They had certainty. They knew what the product does. They've been working on their thing. Everything was in place. And now suddenly you're taking them on this crazy pivot, trying to invent something that never worked before. I mean, it's not that virtual events were in trial. They just didn't work before. You're trying to take them on this new direction. You need to pull them with you on this new strategy in this new world. How do you do that in a very tough time, in general? Any frameworks on how you basically managed to get the employees to stay committed, to basically bind to this new shift, to become as motivated as they were before and even more in this new direction?
Eran Ben-Shushan:
Yeah. There were several key elements. I think one is to be brutally transparent and honest. The second thing is to show a lot of care and a lot of commitment, which is, again, not something that you can do for the first time when something difficult happens. Because the foundations of trust within the organization need to be built. And the foundations of care and passion to success needs to be built over years, probably in order to successfully go through this. But I think it all boils down to trust and care.
There's this approach about being radical candor and some great literature and talks that have been said about radical candor. And I think it's the combination of the other side knowing you truly care, you're working and operating from a genuine place of, "Hey, we're in this together and we truly care about you." And we don't always get it right. And when we don't get it right, we're being also brutally honest about it. And we're trying to debrief and learn from it and go to postmortems and lesson learned. But we truly care about you, about our customers and we're doing our best.
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So, if that's the message that you convey, and also not just the message that you convey, but if you truly are operating with this mindset and level of commitment to your people, and then at the same time, listening a lot to them, I think is also important. So, being brutally transparent, caring, and being authentic about what you get right, and what you don't get right, and just speaking about that very openly, and then listening to them. I think that listening to is not just in order to get that feeling that they belong and that mutual commitment to each other, it's also because they simply have smart things to say.
And if you're working together on solving the problem and the employees feel that they are part of the solution, and it can actually make a difference, then everybody's behind it. And you're actually not managing this change top down. You're actually managing it bottom, up very organically because everybody feels that, again, getting back to we own it, that ownership on the problem, that ownership on the trajectory and the future success of the company. And when it's combined with this team comradery, that we know that if it's going to go south, the entire company and everybody's careers, and our customers, and everybody's going to suffer. So, you get that kind of comradery that really translates into a lot of care, a lot of passion and a lot of commitment, and a lot of driving force towards action and delivery of results or new product.
Gigi Levy-Weiss:
So, that's great. And let me put you on the spot for a second. So, I love everything you're saying. And I'm so proud of you guys for implementing all these things and knowing you, I know how true it is. But when you say brutally transparent, on one hand, in your mind as reasonable smart people, you know that there is a valid chance that virtual events are not going to catch, that basically we're heading toward a horrible period, and that potentially everybody can lose their job, because why? Because you're smart, you know that could potentially be. You don't believe it, but that's... What do you tell your employees or at least your managers at that point? How do you keep them motivated while being brutally honest?
Eran Ben-Shushan:
First, you tell them exactly all that. And you're not sugarcoating anything, because everybody, we're hiring smart people, and ideally smarter than us. Right? So, they know everything you just said. And if you're not talking about it, then if you're not putting it out there, it feels like you're trying to hide something or you're just delusional and about to make wrong decisions. So, recognizing all that is baseline. And then working together with them on finding the solutions and where you don't know what's the right solution, or you don't have a crystal goal, just be open about that as well and say, "I don't know."
And sometimes we get so stuck with not being able to say, I don't know. I think that saying, I don't know, many times is the best thing you can say. And when people understand it, they also feel that it's their obligation to come up with solutions. And I think that's at the end of the day, the motivating force behind everybody's ability to really stick together and stay motivated in order to find solutions.
Gigi Levy-Weiss:
Yeah, that's great. And I love that. So, if we move to the next entity, your investors. How did you talk to your investors at that time or the board members? I mean, again, there's very open conversations about the fact that maybe the company is not in the right direction, that you want to change it, that you're going to throw everything into a new direction. How do you do that? How do you recommend for founders to run these kinds of conversations?
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To over communicate. And that's, again, something that I would say is not necessarily the way we were running the show prior to COVID. We just adapted to a certain situation. So, prior to COVID, we came into COVID with a pretty big, relatively big board, as the derivative of the different pivots maybe that we went through and the capital that we raised over the years.
Now, we're in a different situation because after the last round, we actually were able to become even more nimble and agile, also on the board level, but we had a pretty big board. And typically, we would have board communications that were extremely professional and transparent with the board about the state of the business and so forth. We had our quarterly board meetings, and in between, catch-ups and so forth. So, pretty typical.
What we did pretty quickly, I think it was around two weeks after COVID hit, we moved to a complete different operational mode with the board and communication model. And we actually had a board meeting every two weeks. At the beginning it sounded completely insane to everybody around us, because we knew that the overhead of having board meetings every two weeks in times of, you actually need to take care of the business and the house is on fire. Does that make sense to have a board meeting every two weeks? And we made this decision because we said that they are partners of the business, and we believe that if they have lack of visibility, lack of connectivity, it will actually be more difficult for us to move quicker because they're not connected and they're making assumptions.
And you can also see on a board that you have different people with different approaches. So, there were people that were leaning towards finding solutions and being aggressive, and figuring out a way more than others. And there were others that were more conservatives. There was also a lot of behind the scenes management of understanding the different personas on the board and the different approaches.
And I do think that the over-communication guiding principle that we took at that time paid off big time, because when we decided to actually shift from defense to offense, they were already fully bought into the idea. And it made it very easy to make bold decisions in times of adversity.
Gigi Levy-Weiss:
I love the concept of over-communicating the crisis, both upwards and downwards, both of the investors and the team as a way to create more speed and reduce friction. I truly believe in that.
But let's move for a second to the point of moving from defense to offense, which is a concept I really love. I think I even wrote a blog that was called, Now It's Time to Go On Offense in the Midst of the Pandemic. And when I wrote it, I actually thought about you guys, and knowing what's happening in the company, I really love the way you moved from defense to offense. But what was the framework to decide that we have, as you said before, enough critical mass, where at the right time, that it's time to move from defense to offense? And how did that display itself in the way you run the company?
Eran Ben-Shushan:
The way we realized that is because pretty early on, we also built another cross-functional team. We called it, Go To Market Taskforce that was in charge of looking at data. And we had our own way prior to COVID of looking at data. And we understood within a matter of weeks that that needs to change as well. Meaning that the KPIs that we're tracking are no longer relevant because the use cases of events, the types of events, the business model, for example, although we are not part of the revenue chain of ticket sales, it is definitely something that we're tracking.
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And virtual events automatically flipped to being almost a hundred percent free, at least at the beginning. And we had to start understanding how this new beast of virtual events and how it's intertwined with the business and our KPIs. And we came with a different set of KPIs that we're measuring pretty religiously on a daily basis and on a weekly basis in the right forum to look at those numbers.
And that's where we looked at all the information of especially leading indicators, because we knew that we don't have time for the lagging indicators because we were running fast. And we kept tracking those. And after around two months of seeing consistency and growth on those new KPIs that we started measuring, and also understanding that the pace of growth ahead by looking at the pipeline, by looking at behavior, or for example, some of the biggest enterprise organizations, and realizing how suddenly they are making decisions 10 times faster than what they were used to do in normal days before COVID, or for example, implications on our platform.
The platform and technology saw around 150X growth in terms of the traffic and the need to scale because suddenly everything related to an event happened virtually on our digital platform. And that was something that the platform was not originally designed to do. And gathering all this information and seeing enough consistency, which means probably four to six weeks at times of pivot, I think is enough.
And also having some visibility to the future, you realize that this is the moment to actually shift gears from defense to offense. And originally from a situation where we had to downsize the company, going back to rehiring people. And initially we tried to rehire everybody that we had to furlough or let go. And those that were available was something I'm very proud of is that everyone that was available chose actually to come back to visible. And then we also started hiring more people beyond that and having that growth build mindset back again.
Gigi Levy-Weiss:
Yep. That is great. One of the things that occurs to me is that in a way, one of the reasons that it was maybe slightly easier for you guys, is that your why, as in the why behind the company, what you wanted to do for your customers, actually never changed despite the pivot and the product change. How do you feel about that? Is this a true statement?
Eran Ben-Shushan:
It is very much our mission as a company. The reason we exist as an organization, the why behind the company is to unleash the power of professional events, to create impactful and rewarding experience. And at a time where we basically evaluated everything about the business and we're open to change everything from the mission to the vision, to the strategy, to even the values, we realized that two things were stronger than ever before.
One was the values system that we have and the culture that helped us tremendously. And we talked about that. And the second one is the mission statement of the company. It stands true at times like COVID to unleash the power of events, using technology to create those impactful and rewarding experiences, is really something that I agree with you, made it easy for us, because at our core and the essence never really changed.
Gigi Levy-Weiss:
Yeah. But it just makes it so clear how important it is to have a clear core, a clear why, because if you didn't have a clear why, then the fact that it didn't change wouldn't have helped too much.
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Couldn't agree more.
Gigi Levy-Weiss:
So, you guys showed crazy determination over the years. I mean, when did you start the company? How many years ago?
Eran Ben-Shushan:
It's got to be some 10 years ago.
Gigi Levy-Weiss:
So, 10 years ago, three major pivots. Do you think it's possible to cultivate or learn determination, and founders in your team? Or is it something that you either have, or don't have?
Eran Ben-Shushan:
I think it's probably something you need to have, that concept of grit. It's something also that we talk a lot about grit in the company. I think that it's something that you need to have, but it's definitely something that can be amplified and enhanced over the years.
Gigi Levy-Weiss:
Yeah, definitely. Interesting, just a funny question. From a startup point of view, clearly not from the human tragedy perspective, do you think you're in a better place now post pandemic as a company?
Eran Ben-Shushan: We are.
Gigi Levy-Weiss:
Yep. Definitely agree with that. So, just one last question from me. In this last year, this crazy, crazy, crazy year, is there one critical learning that you think you're going to take with you for the coming few years, as you continue running the company that other founders can take as well, that's going to make their lives easier?
Eran Ben-Shushan:
I think the learning is mostly about, and it's not necessarily related to COVID, but it relates to the crazy scale-up and hyper-growth that we're going through right now, that was part of COVID hitting and the world just experiencing extreme digital acceleration, which is the reason that I answered your previous question. We are in a better shade because the world went through digital acceleration and we are just in the midst of this extreme revolution.
But as part of the scale-up that we're experiencing now, I think that the biggest takeaway for me is making decisions for the longterm is really important as a startup and as an entrepreneur, even when times don't necessarily tell you that you need to think about the long-term, and you might better off think about the short-term. I think that it's constantly a balance, and maybe a healthy tension between long-term and short-term. But what I mean by that, and I think maybe the most famous one is [inaudible 00:41:39] with day one and that long-term approach to building companies.
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I think that if you really want to build something fundamental or something that can really make a difference, you have to really cherish the long-term decisions that you make or that long-term mindset. And I can tell you that today, for example, part of what we need to do is go back and fix some of the decisions that were a little bit more short-term at the time, but now we have the privilege of taking those decisions long-term. I just believe that it's not a privilege that necessarily needs to belong to companies that maybe raised a lot of capital and so forth.
One thing that probably I would do better next time is to have that long-term mindset, even when maybe the means or the pure indications that you can think long-term are not there. This is our role as founders to really embrace that long-term thinking when we're building our products, when we're building our culture, when we're building our business models and so forth.
Gigi Levy-Weiss:
Eran, thank you so much. This was super insightful and inspirational. And I'm so proud of you guys and what you've achieved, and so happy to be part of your journey, and looking forward to talking to you again, when you guys, I don't know, go public or something, or take over the world even more. Thank you so much.
Eran Ben-Shushan:
Thank you, Gigi. And it is my pleasure. Thank you for hosting me. And definitely my pleasure having you part of the journey. Thank you.