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[EO San Francisco] Navigating Crisis, Pivoting Business, and Building Resilience With Anna Rembold

[EO San Francisco] Navigating Crisis, Pivoting Business, and Building Resilience With Anna Rembold

Anna RemboldAnna Rembold is the Founder and CEO of Metavent, a company that specializes in comprehensive corporate event operations and strategy, helping clients execute everything from intimate gatherings to large-scale events for up to 5,000 attendees. Under Anna’s leadership, Metavent experienced rapid growth, reaching $4 million in annual revenue and earning a place as #403 on the Inc. 5000 list in 2019.

 

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Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

  • [03:49] How Anna Rembold’s youth group leadership training shaped her leadership style
  • [05:11] The influence of a family legacy of entrepreneurship on Anna’s ambition and long-term vision
  • [14:14] Why Anna left operations and private equity to start her events company
  • [18:36] What it’s like when the pandemic wipes out 90% of a company’s revenue overnight
  • [21:54] How pivoting to technology became a survival strategy during the pandemic
  • [24:44] The mental health impact on a founder handling prolonged uncertainty, isolation, and nonstop pressure
  • [37:39] Anna’s advice for founders navigating crisis, uncertainty, and major business pivots

In this episode…

When everything you’ve built suddenly disappears, what keeps you moving forward? For founders and leaders, a crisis isn’t just a strategic test — it exposes habits, assumptions, and the inner resilience that reveals itself when survival becomes the only goal.

According to Anna Rembold, a seasoned entrepreneur shaped by both rapid growth and abrupt loss, the answer is grounded realism paired with adaptability. She believes that surviving a crisis starts with staying calm, taking decisive action, and being willing to let go of rigid plans in favor of what the moment demands. Her experience navigating a near-total revenue collapse during the pandemic reinforced that resilience isn’t about avoiding hardship, but about building systems, support, and perspective that allow you to endure it and emerge stronger.

In this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, John Corcoran is joined by Anna Rembold, Founder and CEO of Metavent, to discuss navigating crises and pivoting business models during extreme uncertainty. They explore how the events industry was forced to reinvent itself during the pandemic, the realities of shifting from services to software, and the mental toll of prolonged instability. Anna also shares advice on protecting mental health, leaning on community, and rebuilding stronger after disruption.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Quotable Moments

  • “Events are the perfect trifecta of business strategy, solutions, people, and humans, which I love.”
  • “I realized I was totally lying on the applications, and I didn’t care about what I had written.”
  • “There is nothing quite like being in a room and having those chance encounters.”
  • “We lost 90% of revenue essentially overnight.”
  • “I didn’t pay myself a salary for almost five years.”

Action Steps

  1. Build a strong personal support system: Having trusted people who will take your call can help you survive the darkest moments of entrepreneurship.
  2. Take decisive action early in a crisis: Moving quickly to cut costs or pivot strategy can preserve optionality and prevent irreversible losses.
  3. Stay flexible with your business model: Being open to changing direction allows you to adapt as markets, technology, and customer needs shift.
  4. Prioritize mental and physical health: Sustained performance during long periods of uncertainty depends on caring for yourself, not just the business.
  5. Lean into your core strengths: Using what you naturally do well can create stability and momentum when everything else feels uncertain.

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Episode Transcript:

Intro: 00:02

Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.

John Corcoran: 00:12

All right. Welcome everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the host of this show. And you know, if you’ve listened before that every week we feature smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies.

We’ve had Netflix and Grubhub, Redfin, Gusto, Kinkos, YPO, AEO, Activision Blizzard, lots of great episodes. So check out the archives and you can listen to those. And before we get into this episode, this interview is brought to you by Rise25, our company where we help businesses to give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping companies to run their podcasts with their easy button.

For any company to launch and run a podcast, we do three things: strategy, accountability, and full execution, and even invented our platform, Podcast Copilot, which is being called the Wix of B2B podcasting. So if you want to learn more, go to our website, rise25.com or you can email our team at support@rise25.com. All right. I’m so excited to have our guest here today, someone I’ve known for a long time Anna Marie.

She’s the Founder and CEO of Metavent is a one stop shop for executing the entire spectrum of large corporate events, from small groups to up to 5000 people, and she is a seasoned veteran in the events industry. She has an amazing story to tell because I knew her back before Covid, and I haven’t even heard the whole story about how Covid hit her company and hit her personally. But no industry was more hard hit by Covid than the events industry know a number of event industry company owners, and they were just they just had to pivot. And, you know, like a boxer cornered in the corner of a ring, had to do whatever they could to survive. So and I’m really excited to that.

You’re here to tell us your story. But, you know, first of all, like every good entrepreneur, you’re beginnings were very humble. And they started at Burger King. And I love this story about you. You’re 13 years old and you’re like, damn it, I want to go to work.

And you had to do some kind of petition or something like that to get to work at Burger King at 13 years old. Tell us that.

Anna Rembold: 02:11

Yeah, exactly. So I actually started babysitting much earlier than that, and we figured out that it was not paying enough. And so we wanted to make more money and we.

John Corcoran: 02:20

And Burger King was it?

Anna Rembold: 02:21

Well, shockingly, yes, it was, but it was more that there were more study hours at Burger King so we could have the regular Burger King income and the and the side hustle of babysitting.

John Corcoran: 02:30

People are buying burgers and fries all the time. They just want babysitters on Saturday night.

Anna Rembold: 02:34

Yeah, yeah, let’s face it, they need help, right? Yeah. So. So yeah, we had to petition this the this the state essentially to get approval to let us work before the legal limited age of 14. And somehow we managed to do it.

My sister and I were like, we want to work here. And we made it work.

John Corcoran: 02:53

Wow. That’s amazing. And crazy story full circle. The the woman or the person? The family that owned the Burger King comes into your life years later.

Anna Rembold: 03:04

Yeah. So I was chatting with this gal who, funny enough, was the woman who introduced me to EO, where we met. Yeah. And is responsible for all kinds of amazing connections in my life over the last nine, ten years. Her family owned the Burger King, and by some random conversation, we figured out that she was technically the employer.

My first ever paid employer.

John Corcoran: 03:26

Wow. That is crazy to meet someone like that. That is so funny. So let’s talk about some of your other initiatives. So you I know you’re really involved.

You grew up in a family that was very religious, involved in the Episcopal Church and, and that involvement in a youth group was like a leadership training. And that kind of started you down the path of entrepreneurship.

Anna Rembold: 03:49

Well, sort of it was more about leadership, actually. Yeah, I’d say we were light religious. It was more about setting a good moral code. And if anyone knows the Episcopal Church, we call ourselves Catholic lite. So it’s half the guilt with a lot more fun.

That’s what the Episcopalians say. But we I got really lucky with these amazing youth ministers in California, Mark Spalding and Lisa Kimball, that had a very different approach. And they actually put us through pretty rigorous leadership training. And one of the things that we did is everybody took the Myers-Briggs, and we figured out what our personality traits were so we could understand how to interact with each other and bring the best out of each other. And that sort of set this lifelong path of actually having a love of leadership.

And also I sort of always just naturally end up in leadership roles, not intentionally, but it just always seems to evolve that way because, of course, the Myers-Briggs Personality. I am that 3% personality type.

John Corcoran: 04:56

So you and actually another interesting thing is you actually, you had this grandfather or great grandfather who was a really successful entrepreneur involved in rubber in World War two. Tell me, tell us a little bit about that. So it kind of ran in the family.

Anna Rembold: 05:11

Exactly. So my my grandmother, my grandmother’s father was had a rubber business. I am a little embarrassed to say I don’t know exactly exactly what the business was, but they were providing rubber goods throughout the war. And so you can imagine that was quite lucrative.

John Corcoran: 05:30

Need for rubber. Yeah. Yeah.

Anna Rembold: 05:32

So but she always told these really kind of romantic stories about, you know, what they did. And they were early travelers to Hawaii and they were he was number eight in the Pan Am Clipper Club. They had a placard that had his Pan Am Clipper Club number. And I just thought, you know, what a what a lifestyle, but more importantly, what an impact to make on the world. And I just always thought that was really amazing that he had left a legacy in that regard.

John Corcoran: 05:59

The Pan Am clipper, so that those are those you see these like romantic, like maybe like from the 50s, like illustrations of like Hawaii and like this seaplane landing. Is that what the Pan Am clipper was?

Anna Rembold: 06:14

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It was like. Like your loyalty card.

John Corcoran: 06:18

Got it, got it. Yeah, yeah, a different boy, a totally different place back then. So let’s talk a little bit about you. It was kind of an interesting story. I’m learning so much about you.

You you were determined and. And one like you’re going to go to work at 13 and have to petition the state. But also, your parents didn’t have the money to send you to college. So you waited out until you got to the point where you were no longer you could fill out the Fafsa, which is the form to get financial aid without your parents income be included on that. So you waited until you were at an age long enough so that you could get financial aid and go to college.

Anna Rembold: 06:57

Yeah, exactly. So my sister had put herself partially. My parents gave a little bit, but then after the first year, they couldn’t support anymore because they’d been through a divorce and, you know, just had some. My dad was impacted. They were impacted by the crash in the 80s and the real estate crash.

So it was just challenging. We’d sort of been very high on the hog. We had our own private plane, we had a massive house. We had all my parents were both pilots. Like we went from this really, really incredible lifestyle to actually the family was on food stamps for a couple years.

We didn’t know it until many years later. Wow. We were just kids. And you don’t really notice necessarily. But yeah, so it was just sort of up and down.

Ever since the crash and.

John Corcoran: 07:39

The 87 crash, this is the Black Monday. I think it was called or something. Okay.

Anna Rembold: 07:44

Okay. Exactly. Yes, exactly. We so we moved to California and it just seemed like it was perpetually hard. And I said, I don’t want to do that to my parents.

And so I just worked.

John Corcoran: 07:55

Hold on a second. Let me let me pause on that, because, you know, I kind of had a similar experience with my father, lost his job three separate times when I was growing up, and each time we had to move to a new market, he was in television news. There were only three of his job in any one city, so each time he lost his job, it meant well, I guess we’re up and packing up and moving somewhere else, like gypsies or something. So what was that like for you having to move? Where were you living before and then moving to California?

What? What drove that? Was that your dad searching for work or something like that?

Anna Rembold: 08:26

Yeah. He. Exactly. That’s so funny. We have that in common.

It’s it’s interesting to look back on it as an adult, but. Yes. So he we lost everything. We lost the house, we lost the cars, we lost the plane, we lost everything. And so he came down to California from Oregon where we were.

Yeah. And looked for work for, oh, for two years. And he was doing whatever he could to survive. Lived with my aunt for a while, and I don’t know how my mom was surviving back in Oregon, probably with a lot of help from the family, and eventually found a job. And then my parents got divorced right after that.

So it was really devastating on like one hit after another. So my mom found herself with five girls, four of which were teenagers in a new state, in a new city with none of her best friends around. And so this was sort of my, you know, formative junior high and high school years of, wow, really just.

John Corcoran: 09:19

Well, that also kind of explains why you went to work, too, at 13. You know, you wanted to was it was it because you wanted to be able to buy things?

Anna Rembold: 09:27

I just wanted independence. I think I’ve always been super independent and we yeah, we wanted to be able to buy what we wanted. We paid for our own car. When we learned to drive, we bought our own car. We paid our own insurance and gas and.

Wow. Yeah, we just were very self-sufficient.

John Corcoran: 09:43

Wow. So you and your sister and your other sisters also. Oh, yeah.

Anna Rembold: 09:46

All five of us are really like that, actually.

John Corcoran: 09:48

Yeah, but what a. I mean, clearly you were shaped by that experience.

Anna Rembold: 09:53

Yeah. By many. Of course. Yes, yes. Yeah, I think I think it’s really interesting to be from a family that has such high highs and then such low lows, because when you have things, you really learn to appreciate them.

I mean, and I don’t have a sense of entitlement about it, which, you know, I’m very grateful for everything I earn and I like to earn what I have. So I would say that’s probably I’d say that’s probably the biggest impact on my thinking.

John Corcoran: 10:23

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s fascinating, you know, because it is partially my story. I mean, we didn’t have family planes or anything like that, but it during the roaring times it felt like, oh, you know, go out to eat and we’ll have cable channels up the wazoo and magazines and stuff like that, and then all of a sudden it’s like slash everything, you know, slash and burn, you know? Another a friend of mine, Ian Garlic, who had on this podcast, told this story of like when he was a kid, his dad was doing really well.

And he would like, would the dad would like, send him to grade school in a limo? The limo driver would drive him, drop him off, and then from that he went to like being basically homeless at one point, you know? So just huge swings, you know. So let’s, you know, if.

Anna Rembold: 11:06

You don’t if you don’t mind me saying one other thing, sorry to interrupt you, but I think the other thing that’s really interesting. My sister and I were just talking about the, the one that worked at Burger King with me, or that we fought to be hired at Burger King. We were just talking about how we don’t spend a huge amount. And like, I might look a little more dorky than some of my cooler girlfriends that are better shoppers and all this. But it’s because we realized in the back of our mind we’re like, never!

We don’t ever want to lose. Yeah. So we’re very frugal in our decision making.

John Corcoran: 11:35

I mean, that’s often the case, right? You know, I think of like my grandparents generation, my grandfather, when he was a kid, his mom was a single mother. Father wasn’t in the picture, and he sold doughnuts on the streets of Brooklyn during the Great Depression. And then he went from there was a World War Two pilot and then worked for the Air Force his entire life. You know, like, bought, like bonds and things like that.

That was like $100. Today, ten years later, you get 110, like the most stable stuff ever, the most predictable ever. Because he’d been so traumatized from that experience of going through the Great Depression. Yeah. Your grandmother also had a big impact on you and inspired the name for your company when you decided to go out on your own and start your company.

Before it was Metavent, it was Anna Marie event. Tell us that story.

Anna Rembold: 12:22

Yeah, so I didn’t mention this before, but I don’t think I’ve ever told you this before, but I’m actually adopted by my aunt and uncle. So my birth father sister adopted my sister and I. And so growing up, I always kind of felt like, yes, I had a mom that adopted me. My aunt adopted me, but my grandmother always felt like my mom because we were super close. We were like best friends, and I spent the summers essentially living with her every other summer in Hawaii.

So we really spent a lot of time together, and we’re kind of like two peas in a pod. So she she’d spent a lot of time telling me family stories and family history, and I started socializing this idea of leaving corporate and starting my own company. And she, without hesitation, said, honey, it’s in your genes. And let me tell you about your great grandfather. And she proceeded to tell me all about what he had done and how how he started his business in the middle of the Great Depression.

It was all odds were against him, and he went on to be very, very, very successful. So yeah, so I at the time, nobody I knew called me Anna Marie. And I knew obviously my grandmother would die at some point and I it was it always made me happy to be called that. And so I, I said, well, let’s just name the business, even though I was advised and in some ways wish I’d taken the advice not to name a business.

John Corcoran: 13:41

Put your name in it.

Anna Rembold: 13:42

Yeah.

John Corcoran: 13:43

Because of course, the challenge then is that I want to talk to Anna Marie, you know, or the people want to interact with Anna Marie to do everything right. And so it’s hard to build up the team and, you know, and empower them to, to be the ones who are responsible.

Anna Rembold: 13:55

Yeah. All of that is true.

John Corcoran: 13:57

Yeah, yeah. So talk about the early days of the business. Like what was you you’d done? I think you’ve done some events before when you’d worked you worked in private equity previously. Right.

So you’d done some events. But this is your first time having your own event business. Correct.

Anna Rembold: 14:14

Yeah. So I it’s very unusual. I would not say that I was an event person. I had maybe 5% of responsibility in any given job would have been events. I was always in these, you know, director of operations for a private equity firm was the last role that I had.

And I’d been chief of staff for the engineering department at NBC internet. We had 220 engineers, and I sort of ran all the back end operations and admin for the team. So I was really an internal, you know, business partner. So when I started Anna Marie, when I decided to start Anna Marie events, what was happening was that the private equity firm I was working for was going through some major transitions, and I it was time to for me to transition. I thought the only answer to success in life was to get an MBA.

And so I slapped dashed applications to get into Harvard and Yale and Berkeley and a couple other only top schools didn’t get in in my slapdash approach, which of course made sense. And in that amazing retrospection that they put you through in the essays, I realized I was totally lying on the applications and I didn’t care about what I had written about was totally bogus. I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and so I that’s when I started talking to my grandma and some other people really close to me and said, hey, I’m thinking about just starting a company. And that’s kind of what happened. So I just wanted to leave the banking world and do something more creative, because at the heart of who I am is really a creator.

John Corcoran: 15:51

Yeah. So why events?

Anna Rembold: 15:54

Events. So what happened was. Yeah. So what happened was I love people, actually, what happened was I took a sabbatical and I asked myself one question. What was I doing with my time?

I wasn’t picking up a paintbrush and drawing and painting. What I was doing was four, sometimes five times a week. I was gathering humans together to either do impactful things. Like I was joined a board of the Friends of Larkin Street, and we were doing fundraisers and activities and growing the Young Professionals Board. I had a variety of things that I was doing, or just socializing and getting different groups of people together that wouldn’t normally mix, and having them socialize and expand their horizons.

So I thought, oh, maybe this could be something interesting. But at the heart of it was the trifecta. Events are the perfect trifecta of business strategy, solutions, people and humans, which I love, and gathering humans and creative. So you’re basically an interior designer, a graphic designer, a video designer, a lighting designer all in one. So you get to touch on multiple layers of creativity that it’s just really invigorating.

John Corcoran: 17:03

And was it difficult to get your early clients in the early days?

Anna Rembold: 17:08

Well, funny enough, when I first started, I thought being an event professional was really flaky and it wasn’t serious enough. And so I actually had drafted a whole other business concept, which was more logistics focused, and it would be like, you know, supply chain management. And then I realized, what am I doing? I have no clue. And I modeled this thing out on on a spreadsheet, and it basically showed losing a very high risk of losing a lot of money.

And I’m like, maybe I’ll just do the event. It was sort of a panic moment of, I’ll just default to the idea that I really loved and had. And I threw a website together in five days, and I got a client the first day I launched.

John Corcoran: 17:52

Wow.

Anna Rembold: 17:53

So it was sort of meant to be and. Yeah.

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