Lessons In Pivoting: The Live Events Company That Became a Tech Company Overnight
The story of One Day University, an online education platform that learned something about its own ability to survive during the pandemic.
Say what you will about the last two years, but it’s fascinating how quickly the future caught up with our immediate needs.
We had to rebuild entire infrastructures, entire businesses, in the blink of an eye, and some were more successful at riding this unusual economic wave than others. (I repeatedly think how this never would have been possible even 10, 15 years earlier.) We haven’t really stepped back, as a society, and given these success stories their due. So, let’s do that.
During the holiday break, I found myself chatting over Zoom with a founder of a company that three years ago was barely even digital in the sense that you might think of it—its approach was structured almost entirely around groups of people being in the same room. And in a matter of literal weeks, his company had to move the whole show onto webcams and chat rooms, and figure out a way to make it work.
Somehow, they did—so well, in fact, that the business was acquired last year by a company that has always been digital. And I…