The NFX podcast is about seeing what others do not. And getting at the true mechanisms behind people and companies, then door change in the world. If you enjoyed this episode, let us know by leaving a rating a review and by sharing with friends you think should listen You can also discover more content, like other episodes, transcripts, essays, and videos by following us on Twitter at n f x and visiting nfx.com. And now on to the show. So, Iran, thanks for joining us today.
You're probably the best example of founders who could have said COVID killed our company, but instead, you kinda is the moment for a speedy pivot that really, really turned out well. And despite COVID basically, you know, canceling all conferences and in person events, you're able to complete a monster 138,000,000 funding round, which is amazing. Through speed and amazing execution for my perspective. You grew the company.
I'm so proud of you, and I wanna have you basically help me teach startup founders how to think and act the same way you do in such cases. What we 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, you know, tell me a bit about the company for COVID. So, you know, you were an event planning platform. That was a great market. What was the business model?
And how was it going kind of the end of 2019, the beginning of 2020? 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 2 years after we had first pivot, and 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 your organization just for the world of events. And there's a reason I mentioned those 2 companies because we are very well embedded into the marketing and sales staff in the organizations we sell to. And with that understanding, we realize that a SAS 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, you know, would be counted as ballistic growth, but definitely top tier, but nothing exceptional beyond top tier. What does that mean top tier? Like, you know, for people listening, what would you call top tier growth?
So, you know, doubling your revenue more or less year over year? Yep. It it's funny because I kind of 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, like, maybe 2 pivots before that major pivot that we're talking about from that funny app thing that, you know, I proud of myself for seeing that you guys were so awesome even with a bizarre idea. And then from tickets, basically, to SAS.
Right? So that is essentially 2 pivots before the pandemic. 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 3 pivots. The first one from 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, you know, 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. Yeah. And so, you know, we're talking about the beginning of 2020. I remember us having conversation just before that, and, you know, we're saying finally, the company's on track.
We had tough years. It took a long time, but through determinations, finally, the company's on track. And then suddenly, the pandemic happens. When did you know that the pandemic really going to hurt the company. What did you see early on? Was there, like, any KPIs that started dropping any oh, no moment? Yeah. It started gradually and then suddenly, I guess. I think that's the best description. You know, 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 court or the western world, and we had some indications of events shutting down, you know, coming from Far East and basically realizing that something is happening, but not yet taking action. Starting to learn about it a little bit more. So we had a decent head start then because we are also originally in Israel. Company.
We have a big team in Israel as Beller, and Israel was kind of the preview, I guess, 2, 3 weeks earlier than what you would see happening here in North America. So we had that kind of preview to the trailer if you wanna call it this way and realizing, you know, 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 April of the participants said that they are on track and taking place as planned even at, you know, on March 5th or March 8. And then around March 10 to 15, it started really collapsing. And I'm using this word because, you know, you see the first ones that are canceling, and then very quickly, very suddenly everyone else is sling.
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 head start that we had for that was very, very beneficial for us. Interesting. So what could you tell people to learn from it in terms of kind of knowing your market?
I mean, it does seem to me that, you know, just knowing and we'll talk about what happened later that probably had you been like a month or 2 slower, we would not be having this conversation right now because Beller on came so many other platforms and you guys had the head start. What can people learn from that? 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 2 wouldn't, make such a difference in my view, although I do think that what team was able to do in our case is absolutely remarkable within a matter of weeks. Within 3 weeks of COVID starting, we already launched the initial product, it was very naive, but we already had the direction in a way, and it definitely made an impact because I think that from a Morgan standpoint, point.
That's what really matters. I think that if you're late to the game, what can happen is that you can lose faith and get into a place where you're struggling for too Morgan, and that's maybe the most important kind of understanding or takeaway from this situation is that you need to keep always pushing forward, doing it in a smart way, in structured way, and maybe we'll have an opportunity to talk about, you know, how we put structure into this chaos, but I do think that
speed matters more from a morale perspective and a mindset effective than actual time to market necessarily. Interesting. I do agree that many James, just, getting the team to work in speed just gets Morgan to work so much better. So, you know, rather than being in this kinda, you know, 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 exactly what you're building. Exactly. Interesting.
Something that you said kinda, you know, trucks me that you said that in 3 weeks you had a product, we'll go back to this in a second. But how do you get yourself from and I know many other company that Pete in same situation and didn't do that. How do you get away from well, you know, let's see what happens. You know, why do we need to pivot so fast? It's only a few weeks. Why don't we wait and Pete. Maybe it's all coming back. Maybe this COVID thing is gonna disappear.
How do you get out of your comfort zone and start looking at it? Where tons of other companies are kind of playing, okay, it's probably gonna be okay. It's a great question. And 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 kind of counterintuitive to actually saying that at some point, you stop being optimistic and you treat something with kind of a very rigid or, deterministic mindset and not just your own rosy, you know, future kind of outlook or, wishful thinking, I should say. And so having said, you know, 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 an organization.
I think that at the end of the day, and we went through those 3 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 Morgan, and I don't think it's an overstatement that at the end of the day, when we pivot it, we have 8 core values. And I always emphasize 2 of them when we think about pivots, it's the combination between we are humble and we dare.
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, you know, reading things in an open mind. And what I did personally, I can tell you at that time is I look 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 at, like, all of this is happening in this super chaotic time where everything is going on and we're finding time. It's not just me. It's also others to lean on advice from other Pete. 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 shared it 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 1 and not go out the problem you know, 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 on Morgan, 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 smarter than you or have more experience than you, keeping your mind open. And the second aspect of it is the weed 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, you know, big video conference meetings or all hands. I'm talking about real conferences, conventions, summits, they were never a thing. So there was very little knowledge on how to run those. If I once you realize that and you say, Hey, I'm actually one of the most knowledgeable players in this Morgan, and I have all the resources to actually go and try it out myself.
So the we, their 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 it.
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 2 values is what helps us be so agile and nimble and just move on. Yeah. I love that. And I know how it is.
And one of my favorite quotes is a quote by Andy Grove, the legendary CEO of Intel who said, you know, 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. 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, you know, that's exactly what you're saying. It's like this combination, a culture that basically treats uncertainty as the main thing that it needs to get ready to. Exactly. And there's another one that is fantastic. In that context, which is culture eats strategy for breakfast. And, you know, I think that's so true, and that's exactly what you're talking about. Absolutely. In this point, you understand that your old business is probably dead or dead for a while.
What is the moment where you decide where you wanna go. What is it that got you to think? Well, you know, the world's gonna change, but it's probably gonna change in the direction of virtual events rather than in the direction of no event, or when is it, and how is it that you get to the thought that this is where you wanna pivot to? I think the best way to probably describe that is, you know, the imposter syndrome that you think you don't know, and everybody else knows.
But then at some point, there's an moment where you realize actually, I know more than average, you know, 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 other people in the industry react to it.
So I think that 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 virtual event. Like, in the beginning, we were in this process of trying to figure out what is a virtual event. It's 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 percent of what you need in order to run a virtual event. And yes, we are missing some components, but we can compensate for it with some part memberships and some, you know, quick wins, and then we're gonna make it more robust.
And that's to answer your question about how come that in a matter of weeks, you already had a product is because we basically started with the customer, and we try to understand what are the problems and challenges and needs that they're facing, kind of going back to the basic 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 kind of defense to offense. That's even verbatim how we set it in the company.
There was this one all hand company in May where and board meeting where we said we are transitioning from, you know, 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. Great. So I wanna dive down into that very specific process of determining product market fit and deciding that you have it.
We're generally in your case, I think, it was an interesting one because you basically had to Flint, in a way, 2 product market fits. You had to find initially product market Flint that gets you to be able to sell to your customers who are Morgan, and then they had to find product market fit in making for the first time virtual events actually mean 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 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 our customers? Who do you call? Did you call CEOs? Do you 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 customer to actually make sure that you have product market Flint? Yeah, 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, is around 150.
So it's not enormous, but it's already scaling the sense that there are more people than just yourself the founding team and maybe the first initial people on the team that are listening with their ear to the grounds to the Morgan.
And you need to actually build assist them 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 ourself highly functional in this situation build that system was one challenge, and I think is very different. So from a situation that you're not operating at scale, right?
And also the number of not just employees, but the number customers and different types of customers and use cases that we had. And essentially what we did is we Beller pretty structured framework of a task force that was multidisciplinary 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 Morgan. What is a task force?
Cause 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 kind of collect the information and side what product market fits look like.
And then to the second part of your question, that's exactly the point about the impostor syndrome. You know, 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 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 Flint. 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 gonna take for, you know, anywhere between 12 to 36 more months in our industry because human experiences and social experiences and 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. Interesting. And so how many customers did you talk to before deciding what the solution includes, for example, or how many events did you run before going to talk to customers? What came first?
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, virtual 1. That was just the reality that we were facing. So and that's kind of what I'm alluding to when I'm saying you're operating at scale. So you're kind of building the airplane while airborne or, you know, while flying. That's kind of what we were tasked to do.
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, 6500 registrants and 35100 registrants or participants participating in real time. The system was stretched thin.
The things that we tried there were really kind of first time trying it and a lot of things Pete stitched with kind of a band aid approach, but we learned a lot from it. But definitely, 1st and foremost, it was learning through the servers. And how did we do it is we try to use the scale of the company as a force multiplier. And again, you know, if you have fifty people touching customers on a daily basis, we try 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 kinda had a lab or a beta side 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 a layer of services also was added as part of the AV production of virtual events and so forth, but without getting too deep into that, that was the system 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. 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 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 quest from customer that are of a large company. How do you balance this? Do you tell them that it's, you know, that this is a strange situation and they need to be more patient? How do you basically make this work? From a customer standpoint or employee standpoint?
What kind of expectation do you set for your employees? What's expected? Is it about moving fast and breaking thing, or is it about building something that's sure and strong because that's what the customers expect. 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 5 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 kind of deconstructing the I'm talking about a big scale event that was, you know, 100 of 1000 of dollars, maybe 1,000,000 of dollars were invested months of
work, and you start seeing everybody kind of picking the event down and those little moments, but also with the preliminary kind of culture of being a super customer centric company realizing that the focal point of the story is actually our customers.
They're going through hell, for a lack of a better term, you know, everything in their world kind of shifted upside down and was turned on its head when they had to cancel all of their events that they were working night days, month, 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 kind of topics that you are alluding to, the approach that we took with our customers, and also the approach or how we manage the tough situation with our employees that needed to really go above and beyond. And everybody worked 247 and not just as a phrase.
It, like, there was a time where the company got so stretched in in terms of the lack of resource versus the demand that we had, and people really worked hard at Visible, 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, you know, meaningful mess up I would say that, the platform didn't really meet the expectations in terms of scale and stability.
And features that we're missing. And remember, when you have 5000 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 Beller 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 to get our hand by hand in this journey, and we promise that we are committed to you 1st and foremost. I think that bill 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, you know, services that we provided to them. You're listening to the NFX podcast. If you're enjoying this episode, feel free to rate and review our channel and share this conversation with someone you think would benefit from these insights. Follow us on social at nfx and visit nfx.com for more content. And now back to the show.
So we now have, you know, the pandemic you're seeing events are basically being canceled. You talk to customers. You understand that virtual event is where you need to go. You start moving fast. Let's talk for a second, but state of mind before we talk about the employees. 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?
You know, how can other founders think about situation, then make sure that they're not dragged down by pessimative thoughts and actually start continuously, you know, look for the opportunities and for where they can actually merge out of this victorious rather than lose their company. How did you guys do that? What took another founders learn? 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, like, I can give you an example that a big part of our culture, we have one of our values is we own it. And 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 needs to be 2080. Meaning, we wanna surface problems.
We don't wanna shove anything under the rug, but it needs to be 20% of how we spend our time while 80% needs to 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 kind of 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 it'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 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. I love that. Actually, I never heard it before. The We Smile value, but actually, you know, knowing you guys, the founders, and knowing the company, I think it, you know, it is such a great value, and it represents how you guys work.
This is something I'm gonna adopt from here onwards. Thank you. And, you know, let's move on to employees for a second. So now you founders are in the right direct action. There's 2 more constituencies. You know, 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. You know, 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, you know, Pete pivot trying to invent something that never worked before. I mean, it's not that virtual events weren't tried. They just didn't work before. You're trying to take them on this new direction. You need 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 manage to get the employees to stay committed, to basically bind to this new shift, to become as motivated as they were before Morgan even more in this new direction. Yeah. There are 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 kind of go to post mortems and lesson learned, but we truly care about you, about our and we're doing our best. So if that's the message that you convey and also not just the message that you convey, 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, you know, what you get right and what you don't get right and just speaking about that very and then listening to them. I think that listening to them 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 damn 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 can actually make a difference than everybody's behind and you're actually not managing this change top down. You're actually managing it bottom up very organically because everybody feels 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 combined with this team camaraderie that we know that if it's gonna go south, the entire company, and everybody's Currier, and our customers, and everybody's gonna suffer, So you get that kind of camaraderie that really translates into a lot of care, a lot of passion, a lot of commitment, and a lot of driving force towards action and delivery of results or new products. So that's great. And let me put you on the spot for a second.
So I love everything you're saying, and, you know, I'm proud of you guys, you know, for implementing all these things and knowing you, I know how true it is. But when you say brutally transparent, so right, you know, on one hand, in your mind, as reasonable smart Pete, you know that there is a valley chance that virtual events are not gonna catch that they 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 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? First, you tell them exactly all that. And you're not sugar coating anything because everybody, like, 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 and 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 decision. 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 ball, just be open about that as well and say, I don't know.
And sometimes, you know, 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 the their obligation to come up with solutions. And I think that's, at the end of the day, the motivating force behind everybody's kind of, ability to really stick together and stay motivated in order to find solutions. Yeah. That's great. And I love that.
How did you talk to your investors at that time or board members? I mean, these are again, there's very open conversations about the fact that maybe the company is not in the right that you wanna change it that you're gonna throw everything into a new direction. How do you do that? How do you recommend for founders to run these kind of conversations 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, you know, as a derivative of kind of different pivots maybe that we went through and the capital that we raised over the years.
Now we're kind of in a different situation because after the 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 communication 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 you know, catch ups and so forth. So pretty typical.
What we did pretty quickly, I think it was around 2 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 2 weeks. You know, at the beginning, sounded completely insane to everybody around us because we knew that the overhead of having board meetings every 2 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 2 weeks? And we made this decision because we said that, you know, there 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 conservative. There was also a lot of behind the scenes management of under sending 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 peak 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. I love the concept of overcommunicating the crisis both upwards and downward both to 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've even wrote a blog that was called it now time to go on offense in the midst of the pandemic. And, you know, when I wrote it, I actually thought about you guys, and I've known knowing what's happening in the company. I, you know, I really love the way you moved from defense to office.
But what was the framework to decide that we have, as you said before, enough critical mass. We're at the right time that it's time to move from defense to offense. And how did that display Beller in the way you run the company. The way we realize that is because, pretty early on, we also Beller another cross functional team. We call that go to market Force 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 and virtual events automatically Flint to being almost a 100% 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're running fast. And we kept tracking those.
And after around 2 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 of, 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 plat the platform
and technology saw around a 150 x 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 of this information and seeing enough consistency, which means probably 4 to 6 weeks the 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 Pete.
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 the boat. And then we also started hiring more people beyond that and kind of having that growth build mindset back again. Yep. That is great.
You know, one of the thing 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 statement? It is very much.
Our mission as a company, the reason we exist as an organization, the while 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 2 things were stronger than ever before.
1 was the value 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 in our core and the essence never really changed.
Yeah. But it's just James 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 it didn't change wouldn't have helped too much. Couldn't agree more. So you guys showed crazy determination over the years. I mean, when did you start the company? How many years ago? It's gotta be soon 10 years ago. So 10 years ago, 3 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? I think it's probably something you need to have. You know, that concept of great 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. Yep. 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? We are. Yep. Definitely agree with that. And so, you know, just one last question for me. You know, in this last year, this was crazy, crazy, crazy year.
Is there one critical learning that you think you're gonna take with you for the coming few years as you continue running the that other founders can take as well that's gonna make their lives easier.
I think the learning is mostly about and it's not necessarily related to COVID, but it relates to the crazy scale up in 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 shape because the world went through digital acceleration, and we are just in the midst of this extreme revolution.
But and as part of the scale up that we're experiencing now, I think that the biggest takeaway for me is making decisions for the long term 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. 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 basis with, you know, day 1 and kind of that long term approach to building companies, I think that if you really wanna build something fundamental or some thing 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 probably I would do better next time is to have that long term mindset even when maybe the means or the, you know, 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 culture when we were building our business models and so forth. Iran, thank you so much.
This was super insightful and, you know, and inspirational, and I'm so proud of you guys what you 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. 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.
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