Our Investment in Offsyte
I first heard about Offsyte when co-founder and CEO Emma Guo reached out to me cold off of LinkedIn after reading my post announcing Hyphen Capital (and thankfully we were reconnected by our one of our LPs and amazing founder and investor Holly Liu). I saw her impressive background from her masters at Carnegie Mellon to being a software engineer at Cisco working on WebEx to MuleSoft and then becoming a rising star at Lyft. I would later find out that she was named one of the top engineering managers in the company. One of the reasons she was so beloved by her teams was her commitment to her team members having a great experience both inside and outside of the office. That meant planning the best offsite experiences possible for them. As a busy engineering manager, you have enough on your plate as it is. The last thing you want to worry about is event planning. Unfortunately, events aren’t going to plan themselves. Until now, because Offsyte is the marketplace for discovering and booking high-quality team events.
Managers or executive assistants planning team events are stuck with Googling ideas, coordinating multiple vendors and dealing with the aftermath of invoices and payments. No one wants to deal with all of the hassle, but someone has to do it. Emma tapped on her Lyft colleague and friend, Jonathan Como, to help her build out Offsyte to solve this headache for so many people.
The easiest and best investments are the ones that solve a problem you’ve experienced personally. I have had to plan countless team outings for my startup companies and teams over the years. At some point, you can only go bowling or to escape rooms so many times. Now Offsyte has created a marketplace where event planners and vendors are packaging compelling offerings to corporate teams so all of the work has been done and they’ve productized these events for corporate clients. In the midst of the pandemic, Offsyte was able to pivot quickly to focus on virtual team events which were new to a lot of companies and very challenging to plan and coordinate especially when you want to ship material to everyone before the event. Offsyte handled it all.
By the end of 2020, Offsyte had hosted more than 10,000 people from over 150 different organizations ranging from early stage startups to Fortune 500 companies to non-profits and universities. Including brand names you may have heard of such as Google, Uber, Facebook, Genentech, Blue Shield of California, and more. All without spending a single cent on marketing.
Once I talked to Emma about this idea, I knew it was a no-brainer to invest as it had all the key ingredients of a great marketplace business:
- Clear product market-fit for a problem faced by any company that cares deeply about employee retention and engagement.
- High AOV because most companies have expensive budgets for offsites and team events.
- Inherent virality because attendees of an event register via Offsyte which they will now use to plan their own future events. Very similar to the Eventbrite model of growth. This is why they’ve hosted 10,000 people and 150 organizations with no marketing.
- Relatively high frequency of transactions because most teams have quarterly or monthly event budgets that they have to use or lose.
- Strong retention because they’ve made such an elegant and beautiful product experience for both sides of the marketplace.
I’m not the only marketplace investor who recognized these attributes. I’m thrilled to be investing alongside my fellow marketplace geeks and gurus Lenny Rachitsky and Andrew Chen. Hyphen Capital has pulled together investments from the following amazing individuals to support Emma and Jonathan on their journey to building a monstrous business:
- Steve Chen (Co-founder of YouTube)
- George Ruan (Co-founder and CEO of Honey)
- Mike Lee and Albert Lee (Founders of MyFitnessPal)
- Mike Li (Co-founder of Kabam)
- Kun Gao (Co-founder of Crunchyroll)
- Ellen Chen (Co-founder of Mendocino Farms)
- Andrew Chau (Co-Founder CEO of Boba Guys)
- Claire Vo (Chief Product Officer at Color)
- Faye Iosotaluno (Chief Strategy Officer at Match Group)
- Katherine Liu (Executive VP at ViacomCBS)
- Vince Liang (former Head of Global Brand Marketing Strategy for Nike)
Having the backing of successful founders and executives who have seen first hand, that this is a service that we’ve all needed (and some had already used!), is immensely validating for Emma and her team. If you are planning a team event, check out Offsyte today. And if you want to join a team building a great marketplace, they’re hiring for marketing, operations and engineering!
