Speaker 2
So if we're focusing on this IRO energy, San Francisco, a lot of the spirit of 2020, what were the sorts of on deck founder experiences that maybe, like, we tried our best to replicate and slack and with virtual and with like city events, like, what are those stories from 2018, 2019, 2020 that you're just like looking forward back to when you're like, you're looking forward to as you're thinking of just like the hallways happening again. Yeah. Frankly,
Speaker 1
I have very fond memories of the experimentation we did in 2020, 2021 of trying to recreate the offline magic. We had, as an example, pre-pandemic, there was always a kickoff retreat. And to get to the kickoff retreat, people would carpool together and we'd organize carpools and we'd match people based on who we thought that'd be interested in meeting first. We wouldn't tell them that. We'd just say, hey, random assortment, here's a carpools. And they'd hop in and they'd drive together for two or three hours. We gave them a few prompts. We said, you know, make sure you, you know, you, you, like, you dig in to break the ice, to go under these directions. And then when they got to the destination, we'd like randomly call on some people and say, hey, you know, Marshall, introduce someone from your car. Why, why are they interesting? I put some on the spot, breaks the, the ice. So we tried to recreate that. There was carpools and we literally called them carpools, you know, for the virtual kickoff. We had stock footage of looking out the front window of a car driving through major cities around the world and five people were sitting on a zoom, you know, recreating that experience. The hallways are another one, you know, making sure that when you have a group coming together, let's say it's 30, 40, 50, 100 people having zoom rooms that you can create, you know, break the 20 minute, you know, conversation to drop out in the 10 minute breakout zoom rooms and back in again. So as I come back into this next phase, and it's worth sort of directly talking about this, we are returning to the kickoff retreat. So ODF 17 is kicking off with a, with a retreat in person in San Francisco. It's engineered in the same way to help you build relationships with, you know, ideally sort of a light touch relationship with 100 people and also like a deep relationship with five to 10 people who can be your nodes into that greater network. The second weekend and after that retreat, there's four weeks of in person and virtual programming. Like we heavily recommend people try to get there if they can if they can't. That's not a problem because, you know, everybody has their own life circumstances and requirements. And so, you know, a lot of stuff will be live streamed and there will still be a lot of like standalone virtual programming, but heavily recommend you will come. But it's a thoughtful menu of events. It's like, you know, co found a dating co working pitch feedback curated, you know, inviting a lot of our VC firm friends to come in and host a conversation and a dinner. You know, inviting many of our early alumni who've gone on to build successful companies to, you know, reflect on their journeys. A lot of opportunities, frankly, just to have the offline real talk that has been missing. So looking to, you know, balance those in order to do so. This is a really exciting update me in particular, we're opening up a community space. We're locking in a few different options and so hopefully be out of share specific soon, but optimizing towards sort of big warehouse style up, you know, remix the format. There's sort of a couple of small seating areas, a couple of long co working tables, a couple of like, how do you optimize towards creative collisions? How do you create the expectation that you come into the space with an open mind to meet people? You're not going to do deep work here. You're going to come in because you want to, you know, maximize the serendipity in your life. So I'm really excited to see more about that. We think about walking the line of, we're not going back to IRL only. We're trying to nail the mix in a way that people can come in, get the most out of their time in person, but also really easily transcend that or transition that back to being able to tap into a resource remotely virtually for the rest, you know, for the next five, ten years as they build these companies, how do they tap into this community hire? How do they tap into this community, you know, build momentum behind new product launches? Everything else that comes with it. So as on the Egg Always says, we're going to continue experimenting with and, you know, iterating on different experiments as we go, but really excited for the next couple of years of this chapter.