Spark Plug #24: Conferences and Unicorns
Stuff worth sharing for research and learning technologists
🤷I haven’t been following the lockdown rules much these days, but walking in London gives the impression that everything is back to normal. Birds are chirping🐦, coffee is being spilt☕, queues are longer, sidewalks are busier, and conferences are starting to happen in person.
For the past two years, online conference tools have been having a blast📈. Hopin hit $7.8M in valuation; it incorporated in 2019. Now that’s what I call ‘great timing’ ⏳ for a startup! But last week, it had to cut 138 of its 1k employees (12%). The move, according to a statement from the CEO, was to realign the business for efficiencies. If that isn’t a signal that demand for online conferences is decreasing, I don’t know what is⁉️
📖I like the story behind Hopin. The founder wanted to network, but having been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, he could not get out of the house. In fact, if you’ve used Hopin, you can tell how easy it is to meet other people attending the same event, more intuitive than Whova or Swapcard imho. These two latter conference apps have been around since 2012-2013 and both of them have seen a similar increase in demand to Hopin.
The Paris-based Swapcard raised €4.5M (over two rounds), while the London-based Hopin got $1B over about 4 rounds (in 3 years!!!). All have strategies around supporting hybrid, and increasingly more the in-person conferences and events, as evident from their recent acquisitions.
📊💰 The trade shows and conference planning market size in the US is about $18B, and I would extrapolate it to $50B+ for the global one. Add corporate events, summits, and meetings to that, and estimates can easily go up to a hundred billion. The 📽️📞video conferencing market size was estimated at $4B in 2020 and expected to double by 2027. So really, the market for the likes of Hopin and Swapcard isn’t that big unless it’s global and unless it covers more than web conferencing. Still, there are plenty of challenges and inefficiencies in event management (online or in-person) that open many more opportunities beyond just fixing the networking bit.
📽️📞Other conferencing startups:
India-based Airmeet raised $35 million to scale its support for online events, summits, workshops globally. They are on a $20M revenue growth course in the next 18 months.
Morressier raised $18 million in 2021 ($24M to date), focusing on academic conferences.
Cassyni launched last year to bring academic seminars into the 21st century.
👩🏫CourseTech that matters:
GetSetup closed a $10M round just before the end of 2021. They offer courses for seniors. It’s really brilliant. And the approach the investors took, it’s genius! One of the partners asked her mother to sign up, and very soon the mother became infatuated with the courses. Not because she was necessarily looking to learn, but because she made friends with other ‘students’ and the teachers.
Framework, a super fresh 1-year-old female-founded startup raised $2M in November 2021 to build an on-demand business school. The courses are ideal for execs in high-growth companies.
Platzi got $62M before the end of 2021 to expand into Latin America 🙆.
Authoritive picked up $5M to expand their reach; the company supports creators and coaches to teach courses via messaging platforms like WhatsApp, MS Teams, Slack etc.
EduMe is in a similar space as Authoritive, with micro-learning and upskilling for desk-less workers via messaging services. It raised $20M last month 🎈. This might be really useful for universities trying to increase access.
Remember university partnerships with bootcamps and online course providers, well FourthRev just raised $8M to fix the digital skills gap together with universities launching its ‘Career Accelerators’.
🏛️Education and unicorns
📣Here’s an interesting fact I want to leave you with today: more founders have gone and graduated from university than you’d like to believe. Especially amongst the successfully growing startups, i.e. unicorns. Ilya Strebuleav, professor at Stanford, analysed 1.2k+ founders of 520+ companies that became unicorns between 1997 and 2019. And the data is telling: almost 90% went to university and graduated with at least a bachelors, and then went on to get masters, MBAs, and doctoral degrees. 🤯🤯🤯☝️I think the myth of the dropout has just been busted, my friends!
While only 75 of 1,345 founders were women, 93% of them went to university and they have a variety of degrees and educational backgrounds, from literature to nanotechnology 💪.
🎓 The lesson here is ‘continuous learning’. Yes, maybe online courses and degrees are too recent for us to see enough unicorn founders with alternative degrees, but the gist is there. The role of universities, extensive and continuous learning is fundamental.