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

John Corcoran: 17:57

Yeah. That’s great. So those are the early years, and there’s kind of these chapters to your life. And so I want to ask you about Covid because because at this point you’ve taken it to from 0 to 4 million a year in revenue. In 2019, you were number 403 in the Inc. 5000, which is insane.

That means crazy growth. And then Covid hits. So painful as it may be, traumatic as it may be. Take me back to what that was like in March of 2020. As things start to unfold, or maybe you saw it in Asia and kind of anticipated it.

What was it like for you?

Anna Rembold: 18:36

Well, yeah, I mean, I’ll say that coming into Covid, not only did we have Covid, which was difficult and as you mentioned, the hardest for our industry, but we also had been growing so fast that we had other growing pains that we had just discovered, like literally in December of 2019. And so we were like trying to get our heads around these growing pains that were a bit of a shock because we were moving so fast. And yeah, this is not uncommon in fast.

John Corcoran: 19:07

Yeah, totally. Yeah.

Anna Rembold: 19:08

So we were kind of, I say, coming into Covid on the back foot, which was very terrifying. And then Covid hit. We lost 90% of revenue essentially overnight.

John Corcoran: 19:17

Wow.

Anna Rembold: 19:18

So we went into I actually didn’t panic. It was you know, I’m a member of a group called EO Entrepreneurs Organization. The information and support flying around was like nothing I’ve ever seen.

John Corcoran: 19:31

Yeah. Real time. Yeah.

Anna Rembold: 19:32

Oh my gosh.

John Corcoran: 19:33

Like every day there was like text messages with there’s five, ten different calls on different topics. Yeah. And helping with the PGP and all that kind of stuff.

Anna Rembold: 19:40

Everything. I mean, it was beyond I, I literally don’t know what I would have done because I would have had no clue. Right. So the I felt like I had this incredible pathway and I was in triage mode. So I but I had could tap into all the answers.

So at first I was actually very calm and I built up all these support groups around me. So I have, you know, groups that I am a member of outside of work that are great for mental health and care. And I just tripled down on all of that. It wasn’t really until oh, and I should say that I have a really dear friend who is a PhD in economics from Stanford. She is brilliant.

And she said, let me tell you something. There are three paths ways this could evolve, and there’s three economic indicators. And then there’ll be potentially three different outcomes. One, everybody does what they’re supposed to do. We all lock down.

We do it for a short time. It’ll be over in two months. The second one is people will sort of do it. They won’t really follow it. We might see this last a year.

The third option is if everyone just sort of says, Fu, I’m going to do what I want and people don’t comply. We’re going to be in a five year tail. And I was like five years. No one would have conceived. And she was so brilliant.

Sure enough, here we were, five years, so I was already planning for a five year tail because I could see the indicators. So thank goodness I knew her and she had. She’s just a brilliant thinker, so I, I didn’t panic until we got to the end of 2020 and I was like, okay, we’ve built software. We pivoted immediately. We lost 90% of revenue.

We pivoted immediately, became a software company. We had a we had a prototype in six months. We had our first customer on the software in six months. It was insane. And it wasn’t just a landing page that linked out to zoom.

This was a fully integrated end to end virtual meeting platform. It was unlike anything that anyone was building. We built it on the Unreal Engine with really complex technology. I still can’t believe we built it. My team was amazing.

John Corcoran: 21:48

And did you have to hire quickly and let other people go that weren’t a fit for the new direction?

Anna Rembold: 21:54

Well, our team pivoted together, so some yes, some there was there was a lot of staffing changes that were going on. But we actually so so yes, but we had a core that that was just event. People know how to pivot.

John Corcoran: 22:11

Yeah. That’s impressive because I talked to other event businesses where, you know, their team switched from doing on the ground events to doing these virtual events, which meant that they were like behind their computer all day long, and the team just didn’t like it at all, you know? And that was a real challenge for some events companies.

Anna Rembold: 22:28

I think, because those people that we talked to, because we talked to a lot of those folks as well, obviously they were operating. We were creating something incredible. So all of us were fired up by this creative energy. And it really was it was amazing. But we got into 2021 and I had relocated to New Zealand.

I won’t my partner is from there and I live between New Zealand and San Francisco. So we found ourselves there because of the border closures and everything. That’s when I started to kind of lose it because I was isolated, I was away, I was working really weird time zones and I started, you know, it it became more and more expensive to build this thing. And the world was still closed and crazy. And that’s when I think everyone’s mental health also just sort of began to erode.

And so it just became a more difficult. It’s like the fun it’s like new relationship, right? Yeah. The pink cloud was gone. Yeah.

So yeah, that’s when it started to get tricky. But then at the end of 2021 I actually got into Techstars. The, the we got into Techstars.

John Corcoran: 23:37

Wow. Okay.

Anna Rembold: 23:38

And that was a boost, you know virtual. Yeah. For the software. So we’re a Techstars backed technology company.

John Corcoran: 23:47

Yeah, yeah. Brad Feld, a good EO member who’d been through EMP entrepreneurial master’s program, which I know you’ve been through, also known as Birthing of Giants. What was that experience like going through Techstars from having an event business a couple years earlier, fast growing event business to a software company.

Anna Rembold: 24:05

It’s literally a different way of operating. I mean, it was such an exciting and steep learning curve. It was surreal. But I cannot say enough about Techstars as an institution and organization, and Ryan Kuder personally selected us. He is one of the most incredible men I’ve ever met.

He his ethics and just support of entrepreneurs is incredible. I mean, the whole organization of Techstars. But I just have to give a big shout out to Ryan Kuder because he really is one of the most phenomenal people I’ve ever met.

John Corcoran: 24:40

What was the darkest time during this period of time?

Anna Rembold: 24:44

It was it was it was in the fall of 2021. I was getting up at two, three, four in the morning in New Zealand, working 12 hour days, working, you know, six days a week, seven days a week, just not taking care of myself and didn’t realize that there were a bunch of things going on, but didn’t realize that I was kind of slipping into a bad mental state and trying to just pushing my only Mo at that phase of life. All I’d ever done was pushed. That was always the answer. And so, you know, frankly, I guess maybe it was a little dark also coming that that was the worst.

That was definitely the worst.

John Corcoran: 25:25

Yeah. And this was also a time when there were all these, like kind of starts and stops where like, Covid kind of went down and then people started gathering in person more. So maybe there were some events, you know, and then and then there would be a flare up. And then it was like, oh, I guess this is still going on. I guess we have to deal with this still.

And that was especially hard for some of the, some of the event businesses I know.

Anna Rembold: 25:45

Yeah. It was such a whipsaw. Right. And so we were like barreling forward with this technology that was really amazing. And we were still having fun with it.

But yeah, got into Techstars and it put some wind like seriously put wind in our sails. But then the war started in 2022. So I was in Techstars. I was representing the company in Techstars from January through February through April of 2022, and the war started in the middle of it.

John Corcoran: 26:14

You’re talking about the war in Ukraine.

Anna Rembold: 26:16

The Ukraine war.

John Corcoran: 26:17

How did that affect you?

Anna Rembold: 26:19

Because it affected the investment climate. So the dream and the theory is that you come out of an accelerator like that and you position yourself to raise capital.

John Corcoran: 26:31

Okay.

Anna Rembold: 26:31

As a female founder, a solo female founder and a non-technical solo female founder.

John Corcoran: 26:36

Super. You have long odds to begin with.

Anna Rembold: 26:39

Yeah, I’m already in the minority. And then it was literally the most difficult fundraising climate. I think they said in over 20 years. So we had headwinds as just who I was as a founder and as a company. The the event industry, I don’t know if you remember a company called Hopin, but Hopin had I think they had achieved a $1 billion valuation and they basically were selling it for pennies on the dollar.

I don’t even think they sold it for 50 million. In the end.

John Corcoran: 27:09

It was that a similar type of software platform? Is that what you were modeling yourself after or.

Anna Rembold: 27:14

We weren’t modeling ourselves after them, but they were like the leader in the virtual meeting. Got a virtual event software.

John Corcoran: 27:22

So they go crashing. So then because of that, that harms your. It makes it even more difficult for you to raise money.

Anna Rembold: 27:27

Exactly. So there was not I mean, any investor I would talk to just they they would I mean, to be honest, like the conversations I would have with some of these VC gentlemen would just literally dismiss. They wouldn’t even have a conversation.

John Corcoran: 27:40

Because you’re a woman or because of Hoping or or all of it.

Anna Rembold: 27:43

Well, who knows, who knows. But I think it was the theory. I think they didn’t believe in the theory. And in particular, I will not name any names, but I was I remember vividly having a conversation with a young member of a VC team, and he just literally turned his head in the middle of the conversation and said, I recommend you reconsider your theory, and just turned and walked away. And I was like, oh, this is this is okay.

I, you know, at some point you realize, okay, I could I could take the attitude of, let me just show them.

John Corcoran: 28:13

Yeah.

Anna Rembold: 28:14

Or I could recognize that we are going up against some serious headwinds. And so with Agentic AI, with hop and crashing and other businesses like it crashing with the return to live events, all of this was happening at once, and it was happening very quickly and very kind of unstable.

John Corcoran: 28:31

So how did this change your strategy then? Did you pivot, decide not to raise money? Did you raise a smaller round? What did you do?

Anna Rembold: 28:38

We just I decided not to raise at all and to Self-sustain. And so a lot of our old clients were coming back and wanting support with live events. And we were able to actually within less than three years, get the, the, the the business back to back to where we are bigger and stronger than we were in 2019.

John Corcoran: 29:00

Oh, amazing. Wow. So did you have clients at this point? Did you have clients come to you and and was it like choose your own adventure? Like, do you want to do a virtual event?

We can do that. Do you want to do a live event? We can do that. Or did they come to you for one or the other, or are they different types of clients?

Anna Rembold: 29:15

We at that point no one was wanting to talk virtual. Everyone was over it. They were.

John Corcoran: 29:19

In 2020. Okay. Yeah.

Anna Rembold: 29:22

Yeah, we might have live streamed a part of it. And so there might have been a technology component for sure. There was a lot of, you know, capturing streaming either live or streaming later, but that was a component. It was.

John Corcoran: 29:35

Okay. And that’s changed since change. So. So how did it change? Do people want are people interested in virtual events now?

Anna Rembold: 29:42

Not really. I mean, they’re that’s not true. They’re happening. But our business model and what we’re selling right now is we’re not focused on that personally. Typically what we’re seeing is when you say virtual event, maybe I’ll just go to a definition for a moment.

When we think as men event of a virtual event, we’re thinking of an experience online that is actually experiential. And this was always our theory and always our challenge with how people were thinking of virtual events. The technology did not allow for a true experiential moment. So think about Dreamforce is one of the most awesome extreme examples of experiential gone wild and best of the best. You don’t really have that that in a in a in a seamless, smooth way in a virtual setting.

John Corcoran: 30:36

Okay. And Dreamforce is an annual event that Salesforce puts on in San Francisco. They kind of take over the city. I haven’t attended it before, but you say it’s it’s very interactive.

Anna Rembold: 30:47

Oh my gosh. It’s like nothing. I’ve, I actually had the great pleasure of being a part of the team that helped produce the actually the the launch, the product launch zone. I was the producer on the product launch for three years. It’s one of the best experiences of my entire event career.

I could go into that, but.

John Corcoran: 31:08

Yeah.

Anna Rembold: 31:08

It’s.

John Corcoran: 31:09

So, so. But what you found is that there isn’t anything like that online.

Anna Rembold: 31:13

No, it’s there are hints of it and there are some very cool things happening. I don’t want to say there’s nothing, but I’m just saying that it’s so early and it’s so clunky and we don’t have a seamless way to deliver something of that caliber online. And so, so in the absence of the tools and the absence of being able to really come close to recreating what you can do in person, people want to be back in person.

John Corcoran: 31:41

So where does that leave you with the, you know, the online, the virtual event, you know, component of the business.

Anna Rembold: 31:49

So we’ve put all of our technology endeavors into stealth. And I hate to be annoying, but we’re not talking about anything we’re doing on the technology front at this moment. We still believe that there are technology solutions that are needed in the event industry, and we’re super excited about it. But we’re just we’re in we’re in stealth mode.

John Corcoran: 32:08

It’s crazy because, you know, I feel like at some point we will overcome. We will get past the trauma of Covid because every other indicator in our lives has gone more towards digital, everything, you know, and we’re now at this point where we have like Starlink and stuff. So like parts of the globe that didn’t have access to the internet are getting access to it, and they’re going to be people who want to participate in things, but they can’t afford to get on a plane and fly to San Francisco or New York to go to a conference or something like that. So it seems to me that at some point we’re going to get over our shared collective trauma over bad zoom events in, you know, June of 2020, and people are going to want to, you know, collect, connect digitally, just like you and I are connecting digitally right now.

Anna Rembold: 32:57

Yeah, I think I’m of two minds here, which is kind of interesting. So 100% I agree with you. I think that there is absolutely a place, I think the weather events getting more extreme are going to drive people to make different decisions as well. The cost of travel is changing. If we have unstable environments like wars and whatever.

That all means that you have to connect in a different way. And I hate to say it, but we are in the age of pandemics. That’s not going to be the last pandemic of our lifetime. We will see another pandemic. And so we I believe this unfortunately, this is just how the world is, is with what’s changing in terms of weather patterns and the weather, the world heating.

It’s just that’s what’s happening. But also there is nothing like being in person. There is nothing and everybody knows it. There is nothing quite like being in a room and having those chance encounters and bumping into someone. There’s just and and the energy of being with another human being.

There’s something so special. And my theory is that what I’ll end up happening is we need those. We need to not be isolated. We need to not be alone in our homes. We need to have other human beings around us.

But I think that those will come at a premium, and we will treasure those experiences, and we will choose them very carefully. And I think we see people doing that a bit. Now. There’s a bit of like a maybe rush back to be around as many people as you can, but then you see people getting tired and and so then it’s back to that. Okay, let me choose and let me think really carefully about how I manage my time and energy and, you know, prioritize.

John Corcoran: 34:41

Yeah. Well, I was I was reflecting back on the experience you had as a kid. You said your parents going through the divorce, you had planes, you had cars, you had houses, you lost all that. In light of that, that must have been weighing heavily on you when you went through this retrenchment during Covid and you lost all of it through your your business. Well, can you reflect for me on that, like what that was like for you having having experienced that traumatic loss as a kid and then to go into it as an adult?

Anna Rembold: 35:15

I didn’t lose anything. That’s the miracle. I because I had I had savings. I was very, very quick to reduce income. I mean, reduce spending immediately.

And my partner was an amazing support. I couldn’t have done it without my partner. And then my dad stepped in and helped at a critical moment. I mean, it actually. Oh gosh, I’m getting emotional.

Almost brings me to tears to think I did not do it alone, but I didn’t lose a single thing. And actually I came out of it stronger. I mean, I went through a terrible depression, I went through, I can Talk about mental health stuff like I am not like. It was not easy. It was the darkest years.

John Corcoran: 36:00

Yeah.

Anna Rembold: 36:00

My life, it really was. But I, I had I put together a team of advisors for the software I had, I met every month with, you know, a senior managing partner of A.T. Kearney, a seven time tech founder who’s a really good friend. He gave me of his time there. I can list on and on the Techstars mentors and ecosystem people who have just helped. And then and then my partner, you know, financially.

And my dad, like I said, stepped in. But I kept my house. I, I didn’t lose my car, I didn’t lose, which is really amazing.

John Corcoran: 36:37

Yeah, yeah. And you took quick action to, you know, I, you know, who knows how much of that was informed by your experience as a child?

Anna Rembold: 36:46

Yeah. And I just want to say too, because this is one of those, like, really gnarly Realities. Since this is a, I think I’ll share for the entrepreneurs listening, I had to borrow money. I mean, it was awful. I I’ve never been so stressed in my life.

I’ve paid almost all of it back. I still have some little chunks that I need to, you know, deal with, but I will, I will not, I will pay every dime back.

John Corcoran: 37:13

Yeah.

Anna Rembold: 37:14

So most of it’s been paid back, which is really I can’t I still can’t believe we’ve done it. Yeah. It’s really amazing.

John Corcoran: 37:21

Yeah. Yeah. And for other entrepreneurs going through something where they have to pivot and they have to scrape and they have to humble themselves, any advice that you’d say to someone else who’s going through something like that? Now with all that, there’s disruption happening now with AI and different technologies.

Anna Rembold: 37:39

Don’t kill yourself. Literally, literally. I’m sorry, that sounds really because how many suicides were there? Yeah, I literally that’s the first thing that comes to mind. Please don’t kill yourself.

It is not worth it. And okay, so let’s start there. Survive. You’re going to survive. And you can get through it like every day.

Just tell yourself you can get through it. Pick one person. I had like probably five. That would take my call no matter what. I am so lucky, but have at least one person that will not get tired of listening to you because you need someone.

You need someone in your corner, and you need someone that it’s so dark. When you’re in a mode like that, you need someone who can just hear you, listen to you, understand the gravity of the the trauma of it all and boost you. You know, my partner would just say, I’m, you know, I’m going to I’m going to be your chief perspective officer today. And he would just turn everything around into a positive. And I can’t believe it.

He was just incredible. So someone you need someone like that and and just be open to be open to going where you need to go, right? Like, don’t get locked in one idea. Because you do have to be able to. I hate that.

John Corcoran: 38:56

Word.

Anna Rembold: 38:56

Because we’ve overused it. But you really do need to be flexible.

John Corcoran: 38:59

Yeah.

Anna Rembold: 39:00

Flexible?

John Corcoran: 39:00

Yeah. I’ll throw one back at you. Lean on your strengths. Because what I heard from you is that when it got really dark, you were still bringing people together. That you said that that’s one of my core superpowers.

And you were doing it in a different way. You brought together a board of advisors. You were bringing people to, you know, to just talk to you on the phone. You were talking to friends and stuff like that. So you were still doing that, and it seemed like that helped you get through that period.

Anna Rembold: 39:28

Yeah. I think the other thing I learned, maybe this would be one more thing, is you have to take care of yourself. And that was sort of like I was paying everybody. But my I didn’t pay myself a salary for almost five years.

John Corcoran: 39:40

Wow.

Anna Rembold: 39:41

I mean, I really am like, how did I even do that? But, you know, I’m not saying I should or shouldn’t have done that, I don’t know, I can analyze that separately, but I, I now I, I take, I, I exercise, I eat, I eat well like I’ve changed my whole I just put all that last before and, and I realized I cannot do that the rest of my life. I will never do that again.

John Corcoran: 40:07

Yeah, yeah. Well, and I want to wrap up on my gratitude question. So I’m a big fan of gratitude. You mentioned a few names already of people who’ve been who are helpful to you through this dark period. Who who out there would you want to shout out and just thank for being there in the journey with you, helping you through all the highs and lows.

Anna Rembold: 40:24

Yeah, well, I do have to call out my partner because he was literally my cheerleader. Like it? It’s the best relationship I’ve ever had. And so that that I’m really grateful because not everybody gets a partner like that. And he’s an entrepreneur and he’s been a 25 year member of EO, so he really got it.

But I think. Few people come to my recruiter for accepting us into Techstars at a very low moment, and just was so exciting. My, I had a, I had a cohort of Techstars founders that were just brilliant people that we checked in on a regular basis, less so now, but definitely at the time we were would take each others call no matter what. There were a group of five, excuse me, four other EO women, and we actually formed a little pod during 2021, and we had a call every single Sunday at 5 p.m. just to check each other’s mental health. We’re still best friends.

And we all got each other through a really difficult time. That’s Marissa Fong, Maria Johnson, Holly McCarville and Michelle Malcolm out of New Zealand. So my little posse down there and yeah, I think just the advisory board. Dave Sifry. Dana Hermanson.

Doug McKenzie. I mean. It just. Yeah, they were amazing. And Susan Kearney was a later Add, but she was amazing too.

They really pushed me to think differently. I could honestly I, I have a lot of gratitude so I could go on but I’ll maybe I’ll stop there.

John Corcoran: 42:05

That’s great. That’s great. And it has been great. Where can people go to learn more about you, connect with you and reach out? If they have any questions?

Anna Rembold: 42:13

We they can find me on LinkedIn. Anna Rembold, you can find me the website at I o and yeah, awesome email text. I’m happy to share those details.

John Corcoran: 42:26

Anna, thanks so much.

Outro: 42:28

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