Zoomsites

(Written by both my Bolster co-founder Cathy Hawley and me)

I’ve attended two remote conferences, which Cathy dubbed “Zoomsites” — one here at Bolster and the Foundry Group CEO Summit.  Both hold interesting lessons for how these kinds of events can work well.

We founded Bolster two months into the COVID-19 pandemic, and our founding team had not met in person after 6 months of working together. Now, luckily, we’ve all worked together for many years, so we have a lot of trust built up, and have a very strong operating system which includes full team daily standups. Still, nothing beats face-to-face interaction. If you’ve ever founded a startup, you know how impactful it can be to work side by side, bounce ideas off each other, and collaborate as you learn more about opportunities and challenges in your market. 

We also have a strong belief in the power of the team, and the need to work together to ensure that we are aligned on all aspects of the business. And, we had a successful launch, with more interest in our marketplace than we had anticipated, so we knew we needed to step back to have a planning and strategy session.

We’ve done many executive offsites, and couldn’t imagine having an impactful offsite remotely, and we all agreed that we would be comfortable meeting up in person. So we started planning a 2-day offsite together in New York. Unfortunately, it turned out visitors to NY from Colorado and Indiana, the two states we were traveling from, needed to quarantine for 10 days when they got to NY. While technically we could get around this because we weren’t staying for 10 days, we decided to follow the spirit of the rules, and cancel our travel.

Since we really needed to have the planning and strategy session, and we’d blocked the two full days on our calendars, we decided to test out a ‘zoomsite’ – an all-remote video call. We modified the agenda a little – some things good in person fall flat on video. We knew we wanted to have really engaging conversations, and keep the agenda moving along, so that all eight of us could fully participate and complete the necessary work. I’m happy to say that we came out of the offsite with a revised strategic plan, new six-month goals set, and owners for each of the different workstreams. And, we had fun. Success!

The Foundry Group CEO Summit has been a different animal — it’s wrapping up today, but there’s been enough of it so far this week to comment on.  Foundry took a regular annual event with a large group (50-75) and moved it online.  They did a great job of adapting to the medium, spreading the event out with a few hours a day over multiple days to avoid Zoom fatigue and optimize attendance; scheduling content in shorter bursts than usual; making good use of breakout room technology; and encouraging heavy use of Zoom’s chat feature during sessions to make it as interactive as possible.  Like the Bolster event, there were some elements missing — all the great “hallway conversations” you have at in-person conferences where people are staying in the same hotel and seeing each other at meals, in the gym, between sessions, etc.  But it has also been a big success with enough community elements to make it worthwhile. 

Want to have a Zoomsite? Here are some tips:

• Make sure you have the tools needed for each activity. When you are brainstorming in person, you may use sticky notes or flip charts to write on. Remotely, you can use Google Docs or Sheets or tools like Note.ly or Miro
• Prep the sheets or docs ahead of time, so that people can engage in the activities easily. At our Zoomsite, we modified our blue-sky brainstorm session so that we each answered a few questions in a Google Sheet. We had a separate section for each person, and the exercise was easy to understand and engage in, and people got straight to work.
• Schedule in more breaks, shorter sessions, or less than full-day meetings. We had a couple of hour-long breaks during the day, which helped people to focus.  Foundry did a great job of getting everyone’s attention for a few hours every day, for more days than a normal in-person conference
• Plan your technology. At the Bolster meeting, we learned this the hard way. We tested out the idea of doing a “walk and talk” session where we’d each walk in our neighborhoods, and have a couple of strategic conversations just on the phone. Unfortunately, the technology didn’t work for everyone, as they hadn’t all used Zoom on their phones before, it was windy in some locations, and cell service dropped people from time to time.  Probably not the best idea we had!
• Include a social component. We were a little skeptical about this at the Bolster Zoomsite, but we’d always incorporated social time into offsites, and we really value connecting as people, not just as professionals, so we gave it a try. On the second day of our Zoomsite, we took a 2 hour break at the end of the day, and came back for drinks and dinner together. We had personal conversations, including sharing our favorite tv shows. Eight people on video eating together might sound odd, and we weren’t sure if it would work, but we all agreed that it was fun, and we’d do it again.  I missed the Foundry “Virtual Fun” session, but they did a virtual game show run by our sister portfolio company, Two-Bit Circus (and also had investigated Jack Box Games as another option for virtual games via Zoom screen share plus real-time voting and other engagement via phone).  I heard that session was great and engaging from people who attended

We all hope life returns to some kind of normal in 2021, though it’s unclear when that will be.  And there’s definitely value to doing meetings like this in person, but at least we now know that we can have a successful remote offsite or larger conference event.  As with everything, it will be interesting to see how the world is changed by COVID.  Maybe events like this will figure out how to mix remote and in-person participation, or alternate between event formats to keep travel costs down.