Building a Multibillion-Dollar Company in 18 Months (with Hopin’s Johnny Boufarhat)

This week’s podcast guest Johnny Boufarhat founded one of the fastest-growing startups in history. He started virtual-events company Hopin in 2019 with just six employees. Today, it has more than 800 employees, and is valued at almost $8bn.

Listen to our conversation here

Read the transcript here

Of course, timing played a huge part in Hopin’s success. When I first spoke to Johnny at the start of 2020, the business was still in its infancy. Plenty of video-conferencing platforms were available, but none had really made the virtual events space their own. Hopin’s tiny team leapt into that gap.

The company’s enormous success since then is largely down to the strength of its product. The platform is richer and more immersive than a webinar, and less cheesy than a 3-D world. Attendees to Hopin events started to use it for their own organisations’ events, helping the company to scale rapidly.