Pedro Góes
InEvent
Pedro Góes, CEO of Snapdat and founder of InEvent, has built a Y Combinator-backed event technology platform that generates over $20M in enterprise sales for Fortune 500 clients. As AI reshapes team composition across tech, Pedro’s facing a counterintuitive hiring problem: he now needs three quality analysts for every full-stack developer, and traditional project manager roles are disappearing entirely.
In 2020, every event company on earth was hiring. The pandemic created a frenzy. Venture capital was flowing. Then it ended. Most companies that over-invested in virtual events got caught flat-footed when the market reversed.
Pedro saw it differently. He noticed early that virtual was a temporary solution, not a permanent shift. While competitors doubled down on Zoom-based events, InEvent stayed focused on in-person experiences. Today, 85% of InEvent’s business is in-person, and the company continues to grow.
The insight was simple: people want to get out of their homes. Hybrid work became normal. Remote jobs became normal. The value of in-person connection grew, not shrank. So did the demand for events that bring people together.
People are driven towards that experience. They want to get out of the office. Events are a way for you to achieve that.
Pedro Góes, InEvent
InEvent’s customers kept running into the same wall. They’d spend $40,000 to $50,000 on a booth at a trade show. They’d have hundreds of conversations. Then nothing would happen.
Sales reps wouldn’t follow up. Leads would get lost in the handoff. Two months would pass before anyone sent an email. By then, interest had evaporated.
That friction point became Snapdat. The app lets you scan a badge at an event and instantly send a follow-up email, book a meeting, and sync with your calendar. No manual data entry. No GDPR delays. No two-month wait. The entire backend work happens later. The lead gets touched within minutes.
You go to a trade show, you have 300 leads, and you lose 120 of them. Now you get 100% coverage. You’re going to get a follow-up on every single lead.
Pedro Góes, Snapdat
Over the last three to four months, Pedro made a major shift in how he allocates engineering budget. For every full-stack developer, he now hires three quality analysts.
The reason is AI-specific. Tools like Claude and GitHub Copilot can generate initial code at 99% correctness. They ship fast. The problem is that 1% of errors that no one can predict until it breaks in production. Testing AI-generated code isn’t a straightforward process. QA agents tried to automate it. They don’t catch bugs the way humans do.
So the investment shifted. Instead of hiring more developers, Pedro is hiring more testers. The developer becomes a bottleneck only for creative work. The tester becomes the guardrail. This is the opposite of what most tech companies assumed would happen post-AI.
AI is very good at developing the initial piece of work, but when it comes to testing, it’s very manual. Humans have to go test all the hypothesis and come up with the final word.
Pedro Góes, InEvent
The project manager role at InEvent is changing fast. Historically, a PM’s job was to push developers, set sprints, and manage timelines. AI is now delivering the work automatically. Sprints are being completed because the tooling makes them happen.
So Pedro eliminated the middleman. Customer success teams now talk directly to engineers. Feedback loops are instant. Problems get surfaced and solved without translation layers. It’s faster, and it creates better products because the person talking to the customer is the same person building the solution.
This isn’t unique to InEvent. Project manager roles are under pressure across tech, especially in companies using AI-native development. The human work that remains is relationship management, not task orchestration.
Five years ago, Pedro built an internship program. Every year, InEvent accepts 8 to 15 interns from anywhere in the world. They work remotely, learn the business, and some get promoted into manager-level roles.
The program gets 2,000 applications in the first week. That’s not hype. That’s because InEvent accepts people from Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. Most internship programs in tech only hire from the US. InEvent opened the door globally.
The payoff is extraordinary. Pedro pays interns $25,000 a year. They learn the system. They grow. Some hit $150,000 salaries within five years. Compare that to hiring a senior engineer cold for $200,000 who may not fit the culture or may leave after two years.
The internship program is a funnel. It’s also a bet. Pedro is betting that training someone from $25K up is better than hiring someone at $150K and hoping they stick. The data backs him up. Several interns have become managers.
If you’re paying them $25,000 a year and they don’t know anything, then one day they become really great and you start paying them $150,000. That’s better than paying someone $100,000 a year who’s not delivering what you want.
Pedro Góes, InEvent
Most founders think they need to hire an events person before they throw an event. That’s wrong. Pedro’s advice: start with dinners and don’t hire anyone new.
Pull your CRM. Look at where your customers live. Find the cities where you have the highest concentration. Invite 50 people to dinner in each location. Mix customers and prospects 50/50. Expect a 5% to 10% RSVP conversion rate unless you have a concentrated local audience, which might hit 33% to 40%.
Have a marketer or junior team member run the dinners. Prove the playbook works. If it does, hire someone dedicated. If it doesn’t, iterate before you spend.
Food matters. People show up for free food and a conversation. It’s cheaper than a booth at a trade show and more effective. Pedro once spent $5,000 on Argentina jerseys from the FIFA World Cup and mailed them to customers who met with his team. He got thank you letters back. That’s the kind of creative, low-cost activation that drives real loyalty.
Start really small. Events with five people are a great way to start. You don’t need tons of expensive resources.
Pedro Góes, InEvent
Pedro’s interview process is deliberately unglamorous. He gives candidates boring technical tests. They have to do detailed work on the platform. They have to record presentations. They have to show knowledge, not energy.
This filters out the hype candidates. Someone who gets excited about “crazy events” but can’t do the work gets rejected. The people who stay are the ones who understand that event delivery is mostly long hours doing tedious admin work. That’s the real work. The glamorous moment is just a day.
InEvent promotes from within. People see that growth is real and based on performance, not politics. That’s what keeps people. Not the highlight of one big event, but the day-to-day recognition and advancement.
This approach to hiring is working. InEvent has 150 full-time staff and 200 to 300 people working daily across the globe, with very low turnover. When companies are laying off people for AI, InEvent is hiring and retaining talent because people know the work is real and the path forward is clear.
What's another role that you're looking at hiring in the next year that 3 years ago you would have never thought about?
We have seen a really great uptick towards project managers but for it's what we call internally it's mostly a customer success person.
Yeah,
we are seeing a really huge uptick for those positions just because customers are now needing a lot of handholding when it comes to navigating this whole AI thing where it was really straightforward. I need an event, I hire those things and it's get done. Now they need to be like what are these new products coming out? how do I use how do I implement them? So they need a lot of attention, a lot of hours to do that. So there's a lot of demand for new account managers within our company that we need to hire.
What about on the other end of product managers and designers? How are those evolving for your teams and the age of AI?
I think the fear of the project managers it's becoming a little bit a role that's changed because in the past you used to be that the project manager would be the one pushing the developers to do the work and setting the sprints and everything. We now have shifted towards having more the customer success team being direct interaction with the engineers so they can get feedback instantly. Are there any other roles that you see that will get replaced in the events industry? Um this is who we hire the podcast about how the best technology companies build their teams. My name is Luis Scent, your host. And today I'm with Pedro Gois, the founder of Inovvent and Snap Data. In event, he took through Y Combinator, uh, one of the first 10 Latin founders to go through this batch. And in 2019, he built it into a global events platform through the wildest boom the events industry has ever seen. He's now the CEO of Snapdata, uh, building an AI native this time around. Uh, Pedro, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Luis. It's great to be here and uh, you know, to have this discussion, see how it's um, the world is shaping, right?
Yeah. So, talk, take me back to 2020 and every events company on earth is hiring like the boom is never going to end. Hop in, raised a billion dollars, staffed up to thousands. You watched that go boom and bust. Um, what did you see that they didn't? Uh I think the the the spirit there was like early adapt as soon as possible. So uh companies were really looking forward to a solution where they could run events immediately and we shifted from our inerson uh thing there back to virtual but I think virtual has faded away. I think it was just a limited thing from the pandemic. Right now uh we really focus on how to use AI for inerson events. uh we have been using person events for most the whole company uh history like for the last 12 years uh but we are mostly focused now how to get AI to even uh drive more value for the in-person meetings that we facilitate. Yeah,
I love that. So before there were humans presumably doing this part of the job. So you post an event. The purpose of the event you want to get folks to uh you want to get your ICP there, right? I've been invited to claw restaurant in in Miami and there's company that their whole business is you know we we'll put a go to market strategy inviting your prospects put together a lunch for them but then that followup dies is that so this is where snap data is born because that that that human element of that follow-up postevent never was really successful.
Yeah. So when it comes to Snapdat, we started Snap that out of the frustration that some customers of ours had with like we put a huge event together and then some of our sales reps, they don't even follow up with our customers. So we thought why don't we create an app that's fully solely focused on getting like from communication up to email follow-up. So we created the app to be super simple. Uh that's something that you download on the app store. You get Snapchat for free. You don't have to pay anything. And then you use that app to scan any leads, can be on badge, can be on business cards, can be anywhere. And we get that data and we're able to send emails automatically to them. Booking a meeting, setting up a followup, and just syncing with your calendar. So you can see when you can meet with the client again. So all of that is automated and out of the box. Yeah.
So combining the physical with the AI, that's amazing. But they remain two separate companies right now. So in event and then uh snap data remains separate. They're you're hiring separate teams building separate on purpose.
Yeah. So snap that it's part of in event. So it's one company in the end but two separate products. So customers of invent they don't got snap that uh snap that's going to be available for it's a new license for customers that are looking to add that and I think the feature sets also different right uh in event we grew doing these very large scale events you know we did pre events for US presidents we did we did events for the United Nations
wait US presidents
yes we had um as part of our platform in various occasions so this has been really one of highlights of our of our careers. But as part of this um it requires a lot of preparation, right? It requires a lot of resources uh to put those events together. Some people think it's just a website is way more than that. Security plans, a lot of different companies that you have to coordinate, a lot of different systems that you have to put together.
You had to deal with the secret service. It's uh
one one case like for example an events where you have such a high level person you they're not even in contact with them right you work for an organization that this organization has a contract with others and then there are another government contractor and they they are the ones you know actually talking to the guests so you're like in a chain of five companies like just doing a little bit of the work. Yeah.
The but how exciting. So when you were building this company and you're hosting inerson events so it's who are some of the first hires that you made and how did they impact the company?
Yeah. So first hires you know just focusing on getting that customer success right you know we opened the the very first role for our company was on sales and then right after for customer success and we have been hiring uh mostly people to run those events for our clients. It's an industry where the inerson meeting takes a a tool on how much work you can put in um and how to manage that resource. So it's it's really laboring intensive industry. So it's not something that you see disrupted by AI. Uh if you take a look on other tech uh players right now like Microsoft and Google and everyone else, they actually firing uh some of their staff. But you don't see that the same thing happening with event tech companies uh just because we're more labor intensive. able to retain most of our people because that's where clients are really looking forward to get their work done and get their attention to the matter. Yeah, we just had a a guest on Sam Malikerjan and he he was at HubSpot Labs and we were talking about all these layoffs in AI and he said look all these companies are going to have a rude awakening about 18 months because everybody's going to have the same AI tools and the only differentiator is going to be the people that you have and that that blew my mind where I was like that is I haven't thought about it like that and that is exactly what's going to happen um if you're firing just based on hey I need you know I'm looking at the P&L um and I'm going to get rid of the the arguably my most valuable asset which are my people. Uh so your your team is fully distributed all all over the world right?
Yes we have people everywhere. Uh really proud of this you know allows us to hire the best talent wherever you are. So and then people can just travel and do whatever it's the business they had to at the client's location sometimes or just you know do remotely uh if if that's the best path. But right now, I think we're going through a revolution where AI has created a lot of of disruption on how people trust each other a little bit. Used to be that you did some work remotely, and that's fine. But right now, you want to validate their reviews. You want to make sure they're there in person. Sometimes you want to have the extra spense to have them appear in person. And if you have looked in the last few years, like all the travel has increased in price uh significantly, right? So you see hotels are way more expensive. Even like the short-term stay platforms like Verbbo and Airbnb they are more expensive and the flights I can even talk about them you know everything is double triple the price. So uh people are not um getting just behind their screens and stay there because AI can automate those things actually using more travel to be more in person than ever.
Yeah 100%. the So when in person came back, did you stop investing in in the the virtual event space or what? It it seems like you didn't overinvest in it, which some companies did. So like what what did you exactly see to say, hey, like this is just going to be a short-term thing. This is not the future. In person is always going to be something that people crave. I think uh that's why we go to concerts and festivals and I think people are driven towards that experience that they want to have and get out of the office. I think hybrid work became a thing in the past 20 years and people already stay home most of the days you know especially if you have a remote a job at a tech company or something you probably have uh sometimes working from home is one of the benefits. So you're home all day. You're home all day with your family. You're home all day for your, you know, leisure activities and everything. So whenever you have a chance, you want to get out of home these days, right? You want to go and experience that in person. Events are a way for you to achieve that. So uh we see a really great uptick right after the pandemic as soon as the events were open. Um today 85% of our business is just in person. So
85%
85% plus
mo and most events are in the US. You mentioned one in Puerto Rico. That that was a fun one. Uh
it was a good one. Yeah. But um most of the events are in the US. 78% plus are for this year events are have been in the US and 22% globally. Uh Europe being the the other big area. We have about 14% of our events in Europe this year. And then the remaining ones 8% or so uh they're all over like Australia. um Dubai and other parts of the world. Yeah.
Which one are you most excited about this year?
Uh this year we had some really good ones. Um we did a really good great collaboration for the FIFA World Cup uh with some activations. You know, these brands, they book these booths outside the the stadiums, right? So sometimes you go there for an activation to see a card, to see some type of uh of gadget. So we we've run a few of those and has been really successful. Uh so it's really nice to be involved with the World Cup and you know and be part of playing soccer at least where I came from like soccer was a big thing. So uh it's it's great to be involved in it. Yeah.
So in event your engineering team uh a lot of Brazilian and Latim talent. Uh we were talking before we're both from from Brazil. Outside of the cost, how is the talent in Latin America? Um what what what have you seen differently? And you know, you mentioned you're able to hire the the best people anywhere in the world. Now, talk to me about Latin America specifically and and why you keep investing in engineering talent there.
Yeah, I think engineering is something that um the the big hubs uh they're able to easily uh provide some great talent and once you get to be implemented in the country, then you can offer the right benefits and the right type of talent to you really start to see referrals come in and and more. I also think that developing uh the local language really helps. So if you want to get for example in Latin America and you and you allow the team to be able to communicate in Portuguese or Spanish, that drives their their ability to develop software much quicker, right? Instead of having to because sometimes you hire remotely but they have to communicate only in English. Like
yeah,
it slows downs uh the whole thing. So creating that culture is really important for them to be adapted and everything and they still work for an American company but they feel that's local and they can get all the benefits that uh would be like the great benefits that any other company would offer. We tell people these days like for every developer that we hire every full stack developer we need to have three quality analysts you know just to test the software because the AI is really good today at developing the initial piece of work they we do that very very uh quickly but when it comes to testing it's very manual like AI are not really great at testing properly the software like humans do so that's why most of our capital investments going right now into engineering yeah
so this is a change you've implemented recently Right. Because
Yeah. He last three or four months. That's what
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
And that's because it the engineer is using cloud codec sending out 10x code and doesn't have time to QA it.
They don't have and and the output that we give that we have we we have tried you know QA agents you know to do the work but they just don't catch the bugs you know so it's something that's not as straightforward and the initial code development is really good. Right. So with the initial code development we just give to codeex and codeax able to come up with 99% correct of the code. The thing is that 1% we never know what they missed right and no I can figure it out. So that's why a human has to go there and test all the hypothesis and come up with the the final word that you know
and what about on the other end of product managers and designers how are those evolving for for your teams in in the age of AI? I think the fear of the project manager is becoming even um it's becoming a little bit a role that's changed because in the past you used to be that the project manager would be the one pushing the developers to do the work and setting the sprints and everything but now with AI already developing most of the things the project managers like this already done like all the the sprints are are being delivered so we now have shifted towards like having more like the customer success team being direct interaction with the the the engineers uh so they can get feedback instantly. Uh
I love that.
So yeah, project managers, I don't know. It's it's a role that AI might kill. I don't know.
In some companies, right, in some in some companies right now at at Snap Data, it's like the AI is doing the work that humans were were doing in the past. Um so that like are are there any other roles that you see that that will get replaced in the event industry? I I don't think the event industry itself is going to lose any any positions out of um the AI revolution specifically. You know, I think the other industries will be less deficient when it comes to radiologists. You know, people tell the CEO of Nvidia tells people every time they're going to lose their jobs tomorrow. Uh but when it comes to events, I don't think that's the case. uh most of the positions on the event industry are driven towards uh labor and you know the capacity to deliver physical things uh so you cannot replace those like these people uh the staff that the staff members that we have our client works cannot be done by someone else so it's I think we're pretty resilient when it comes to AI that's my point
yeah for sure right the the physical uh presence and and it's just been overstated. I think the the most roles are not going to go away. A lot a lot of net new roles are being created no matter industry, but people are going to have to upskill. They're going to have to to learn to like if you're an engineer, you can't code without AI anymore. At least our clients aren't going to hire you. We're not going to hire you. You probably are not going to not going to hire them if they're no, I want to handw write code. Um but at but at snap data h how before snap data how did folks solve the problem that they have in following up with people?
I think in Snap that the goal is really further to
snap that I apologize the thing with Snapchat is I had a really good insight the other day. It's like previously if you talk to a company right you need a sales rep to actually communicate with you and have a proper conversation right so the snap ad revolution comes with AI as well is now that every client can have a proper tailored experience right no conversations go uh lost unless you actually talk to them and they say oh we are not a good fit or we don't have the budget or something else right so what we actually creating is telling people look you can now have 100% coverage over your pipeline automatically done after trade show, right? Because today you go to a trade show and there's always loss, right? There is always the attrition rate. So even with VPs of marketing and VPs of, you know, sales, they always estimating, oh, I'm going to go to a trade show. I'm going to have 300 leads and out of these 300 leads attrition and I'm going to have a loss of like 120 leads and never going to be followed up because we're going to lose them on the day integration or you're just going to go to this room. We're not going to proper do a followup. all those things get lost. So, right now, we're telling them, look, we have 100% coverage. You're going to go to an event and 100% of the leads that you speak with, they're going to get a follow-up. And for them, this is like, oh, that's that's incredible. Like, because uh we we have never had that, you know, that's like a brand new frontier for them. Also, something that's really different from Snap that we're hearing is the processing time, right? So customers they go to these large trade shows and you wait two months to get a follow-up because these companies they have to export the leads do their GDPR agreements you know process each duplication send to the right country manager and then they follow up with you. With Snapad we want to do that in seconds. You got to follow up instantly right after the call and we do all the backend work and flows later. So as soon as um to automate and not lose any conversations. Yeah, I could have used this at Saster earlier this year for sure.
Yeah. And you invest what SAS like $40,000, $50,000, you know, just to have a booth and you don't get to follow up on every lead. So that's the dichotomy sometimes is like how you spend so much money but you don't follow up with every lead. Like that should change. Yeah,
100%. And all you have to do is take a photo of the badge. That's the
Yes. um take a photo or scan that or if you are like in the higher enterprise client just uh we have a data connection as well that you can scan true code here.
Yeah, y'all were doing some really creative things as well. Uh I saw in the signature of Annie the Argentina jerseys and that she she told me she's like wow I was really surprised at at how receptive this has been. So it sounds like you do like getting creative in some ways uh especially with the FIFA activations. Tell me a little bit more about that and how how that's been working for you.
Yeah, I think we we did various activations over the years like we have this pentane on the team to do things and I was on link and I saw a post I think from someone I think at at Clay and they were saying we went we had an idea we decided to go to an event and buy all the jerseys all the the swag that they were here and try to mail that to our clients. So I said that's a good idea maybe we should try that for the pro cupup. Uh so we did that like one of our people went to the FIFA jersey store like we put like $5,000 worth of stuff and we start sending uh the emails to clients saying like would you like to get one of those and people that applied the people they had a call with we just started sending and people really proud like we had customers actually mailing us letters saying thank you so much I love to have the call with you and just taking photos and sharing the photos with us with their families wearing the jersey. So, it's something that's made meaningful to people. So, that we like that. Yeah.
I love it. Yeah. You could have gone to the game, but you you decided to treat your customers instead. So, uh with the 5K, that's amazing.
Sorry. And that's some something that I I needed to figure out, right? Sometimes you go like going back to Sasser, like you go to Sasser, you spend 30, 40, $50,000 on a trade show on a booth, right? And what the does the customer get out of it, right? They get to have a conversation with you. Maybe you should get to
they get a t-shirt.
Yeah. Give them a 500 jersey that's gonna be what like 100 jerseys right at 50,000 and you have 100 proper conversations where people are going to be really thankful and you don't add sometimes even 100 conversations on trade shows. So I think the investment ratio can be adjusted sometimes. I like that point. That's a great great point and a good way to look at it. So when you're looking at the future, what you mentioned those three supporting roles for your dev to QA, what what's another role that you're looking at hiring in the next year that 3 years ago you would have never thought about?
Uh we have seen a really great uptick towards project managers, but for it's what we call internally it's mostly a customer success person.
Yeah.
Not really a developer role. It's um the project managers that work on the accounts. So an account manager will be the typical role. Uh we are seeing really huge uptake for those um positions just because customers are now uh need needing a lot of handholding when it comes to navigating this whole AI thing.
Yeah. Before it was really straightforward like I need an event I hire those things and it's get done like now they need to like to be like what are these all these new products coming out? How do I use how do I implement them right? So they need a lot of attention a lot of hours to do that. So risking a lot of demand for new account managers within our company that we need to hire.
And this is at Snapdat specifically or an event.
So mostly in event. Uh Snap that the operation is quite small still like a startup like we have five six people on Snapdat today. Uh but in event we are hiring constantly because the company has 150 people full-time staffers but we have on daily basis 200 to 300 people. uh when it comes to the extra hires, people working on site and the freelancers. Yeah.
And with the event is it all is the goal always leads or no because you also you worked with presidents and is it mostly leads though companies looking to develop relationships and go to market?
I it really changes like it's I would say that lead generation is not really the typical thing. I would say that we do a lot of supporting events for clients that are really established in the market and just want to continue with those relationships, right? So, they want to create innovative experiences. Like I've we've done everything like we've done events where people book like entire islands and they want to take their own people there like uh gas and so on and people pay
Wait, so you rented an island?
Yeah, we did. We did.
We did batch go rent an island from
Yeah. like we never we did like live cast events like where we had to hire those um satellite network trucks just to stream out of nowhere because there was no Starlink back then and people wanted to do a live stream out of the random locations. Uh we did we did live events from ISS you know the international space station. Yeah.
Wow. That was a crazy broadcast because it had to go through a private network and then it goes down and then we got the link with all the delay and we had to broadcast through for a group and association in VC. So it's like really unique projects like every day in the event industry you see something new. I would say that lead generation is not really the top criteria. It's mostly keeping relationships of groups and communities that already exist is the top thing that we do.
Wow. it. So, but then Snapat was formed based on a need that the ones that did need the lead generation had and they they were experiencing that pain.
Exactly. I think it's a product where we wanted to branch out a little bit from like these highly complex events and and do something that was more lightweight uh somehow uh say look we had this company established, we had these really complex projects. Can we develop a super simple app and see if we have a product market fit as well based on our knowledge of the industry? So it's like an opposite to like complexity. We wanted to do simple and that that came out of this. Yeah.
And now you're looking to build new products as well.
We we have some ideas, you know, we we have some cool ideas coming up. Um next thing I can I can share I love share ideas. One that we wanted really to do was like you're going to events and you want to figure out where to host your event, right? So let's say you were a company that you want to sell your product and
I want I want to host an event. I want to host an event.
Yeah, I want to host I want to invite our customers and some prospects to come and surf. I don't know where I want to invite them.
Exactly. So, what you tell the AI is that I just want to figure out by 50 people list to sell them this product and everything. The AI would just come up with the emails. They would just RSVPs everybody and then they're going to get just the confirmed list in the end. So, an agent that invites people to your event. So that's something that we're thinking about how to implement this as well. We're going to call this snap that reach.
Love it. Yeah,
love it. Love it. Love it. So doing a lot of the the manual parts of events that before just weren't done as well or would take forever, but still having a a human on the end managing it and orchestrating it. It sounds like it was what a lot of these products are are going to help people do.
Exactly. Exactly. Getting the the pouring part of the event done so you can enjoy just the the good good parts of it. Yeah. I I presume that helps you recruit people and get people on the team and get them excited uh about your mission and and working with you. So, how what are some ways that you've been able to really sell the mission and where the company's going to attract this top talent that wants to be with you for this crazy ride or you're like, "Hey, I have this idea. We're going to do this. We're going to do these crazy events, right? It's um so so h how do you sell that mission and and vision?"
That's an interesting question. I think there are a lot of people that come to the industry already with the mindset of like I want to achieve those things. Your question is quite good because if they just want to have the party like the interesting stuff like they're never really a good fit for us. Uh because when it comes to launching those events at really hard locations like you you probably need to be very responsible to achieve those things, right? So a higher degree of responsibility commitment like you're probably working extra hours like we cannot give you a 9 to5 guarantee, right? uh sometimes going to be a problem if you're going to say like leave their the the the location. So the people there they most of the work of delivering these high scale events it's really boring right it's a lot of long hours doing a lot of boring admin work and that's how you deliver them to success. So we try to find people that like the the culture of innoving on the long term. We always promote from within and I think people really appreciate that and that's why they stay with us instead of just the craziness of one big event. You know I think for them we they may see this as a highlight but it's just for a thing for a day. what really makes them stay is going to be the consistent um day-to-day rewards and and recognition. Yeah.
So, do you sell that to them in in the interview if they're they come in all hot and super excited like, "Hey, you know, you know what this entails?" Or are you just finding people who've already done this before and it's not their first rodeo and they know exactly what they're getting into? We're usually very straightforward. Like, we don't create a fuzz about it. like if they're too excited about this, we may go with it, but we are not creating over expectations. We're just like, uh, can you do that? And we give them really boring tests as part of the of the recruiting process. So, it's not really fun. Like, we need them to do like detailed technical stuff on the platform, validate their knowledge.
So, if they're like all hype and not any technical knowledge, we're just like, "Thank you so much, but you're not a good fit." So they see that our vibe is really forward and professional when it comes to like the things that we need to assess and some people really uh they reassess where they are with their energies and and they become really good people over time.
Do you have a really structured interview process?
Oh yes the interview process is really uh something that we have developed case studies on how what they need to do how they need to present presentations they need to do technical work on the platform and record as well to send to us. So we have systems to validate that as well. Yeah.
How many human steps do you have in it? Are you using AI in the recruiting process at all?
So, I'm not really sure. I think the team might might be I I usually do the process like in the last few stages when it comes to interviews and so on. Uh but it's usually a combination of two technical exercises with you know it varies between one to three interviews. Uh that's usually what we go for and it's intercolated and so on. Yeah. But we get like people applying to positions every day. We just did um we have an annual uh intern internship program. We've been running that for 5 years. It's really successful to us. Uh we have hired managers out of the internship now.
Oh wow.
Yeah.
Congrats. That's amazing.
Yeah. People that got promoted like to managers in less than five years. So they they did really well. And and this program we get like crazy. We got maybe 2,000 people applying in the very first week we open every
Yeah. So
how did you do that? How did you get 2,000 people?
Uh, I think first the program gets recognized that you know like we open to basically any country in the world and like there is no limitations. People can work from home. So an internship that it's open to people everywhere like because you can get internships in America that's easy right but if you're in Africa nobody is hiring interns and even remotely impossible right that doesn't happen there. So that's one fact. So we're really like broad when it comes to that. We program it that has some recognition. And the third thing, we have a good following on LinkedIn. We have maybe like 22,000 followers on a specific recruitment page. So, we post there and people just start, you know, enrolling.
Yep.
That's incredible. Now, some have become managers uh
over the years. Yeah. Some some have. Yeah. That's good. Yeah.
I can I can tell that's one of the parts that's really exciting for you where uh you're able to see see folks grow. Is that something that you've set up intentionally? you've learned from other companies. How how did you create this path and and know that this is the right way to go?
Yeah, I think we were trying to find people that are ready to the market and and I speak with other business owners and they have the same challenges, right? Like, oh, nobody's ready to adopt my solutions, my way of doing business, right? Everybody has this challenge and and they realize, hey, for us to to have the people that we want, we need to invest in them. But invest in someone that you're paying hundred,000 a year and you're not delivering what you want, it's hard, right?
It's all right if you're paying them $25,000 a year uh and they don't know anything and then one day they become really great and you start paying them 150, right? But um for someone that's like new uh you need to to have a way to train them. So I think the the program came out of this idea of like we can train them and if they start early they are within the means of what they can do to survive in the in the internship program but then over the years they get the raises they need and uh they're going to be great people. Yeah.
And you're you're so you hire a new cohort every year. Every year we apply we have about it ranges from 8 to 15 people every year that we select and yeah they are part of the program
and all over the world they is a predominantly in the US that that make it or it's very mixed.
It's very mixed. Maybe we get maybe one person from the US usually it's not really US- based. Uh we get a lot of people from Africa. We get uh very good DSMR people from um South America. This year we had people from Tunisia. one person from Indonesia and another one from um UAE. So, it's all over.
That's incredible. That's incredible. Uh what a great diverse culture that you've been building and and and how fun. Congrats on that. So, I see a lot like Anthropic is hiring an events manager there. You know, $350,000 a year role to to throw events. There's every company now looks looks to to be investing more in in inerson events. Um what? So a lot of the listeners here, they're going to be founders, 50 to 100 person companies. Uh they don't have 350K to invest in an event manager, but they want to start throwing events. Who should they hire? What what should they like h should they hire somebody more junior? Should they hire an intern? Like how should they go about thinking and and throwing their first inerson events to build community uh to also invite prospects and potential guests? what what should they be thinking about when it comes to hiring and building this out?
Yeah, I think the first very first very first thing is come up with the strategy of what you're trying to achieve, right? Is this more like a brand thing? You want to establish a new product or you have already a product, you just want to sell more of it, right? Because if you just want to promote this product, just do dinners, you know, just go through different cities in the US and, you know, invite 50 people in each location or 100 people have some of them, eight of them uh show up and do a dinner, right? And for this, you don't need to have anyone super experienced. You know, you can have a marketing team person do that or you can have a junior um team member do those things. And then as you scale those, you're going to be able to do more uh throughout the states. Go to some trade shows as well. That's a great way to start. And then you can switch to like, oh, now we have a gathering, right? Now we have clients. We want to do a brand announcement. We want to do something. We want to prepare a summit, right? So then you can hire someone that's going to be more seasoned. and then this person can come up with a proper event location. We're going to invite maybe 100 people, 150 people to a summit and you can think about more complex things. But I would say starts really small. Uh events of as as low as five people are a great way to start and you don't need to have tons of resources that are expensive to run.
I love that advice. That's something that everybody can go and do today, right? You can go and and you said you got to invite 100 people and you'll get five to show up. Is that the ratio that that you see?
That's a good that's a good percentage. 5% is a good conversion I would say unless you have a super close audience like you are a New York company you're going to do a dinner in New York you know then you can get like maybe 33 or 40% but if you are like remote and you don't have a concentration I think five five to 10% is pretty good and then you said you can get a marketer to go you don't have to go and hire anybody new so you're just taking somebody from your team getting that and then having them run the playbook if it works well then you're uh then you're hiring somebody dedicated to be that events person.
Exactly. And trying to balance it out like the invitation list, you know, like if you can balance clients. One thing to do is like open your client list and see where they are, right? Put on a map, see where you have the highest concentration of clients and just go do a dinner there. You know, start with that. You start with the number of clients that you have, how many are going to go and duplicate the amount with prospects. So you have 50/50. And that that's a great way to run a dinner and not so risky. Yeah.
I I love it. It sounds like you have this playbook published somewhere. I'm going to go research for it for after it's like start with the dinners, do these dinners, open the open the CRM, look at this. It's uh you you have the step by step and uh and then you have the summit and the the the big one once you're successful at dinners. But I I love that advice because it's something that everybody can go and take and do. Go and invite your customers to dinner. Go and invite some prospects to dinner. Um and
free food, you know, that's something that we learned over the years. Like I thought like people like free food that's like a general general idea that's you know makes sense but people really love free food you know people they want to go there and be ded out and that experience for them really drives a lot of value more than um anything else that uh you might you might do for them uh that's for the same price point you love that. So as we wrap up here Pedro where should folks find you and uh and your team? Yeah, you can uh connect with us on LinkedIn. Uh but I'm also available I write there every two weeks or so. And you can also find us on linavvent.com or snapdad.ai. These are some of our recent products that we can reach out to. Yeah,
love it. And hopefully we uh we see you at an event real soon. Go and host some dinners, folks. Pedro, thanks for being on who we hire.
Thank you, Elise. Thanks so much. It was it was a great
