The (continued) unraveling of 2020-2021

My University of Washington Huskies start their football fall camp today and I couldn’t be more excited. August is here. Summer is wrapping up. And football season is starting in a month. While I do love summer, I’m a bit tired of all the travel and excited to be largely at home and back on the grind.

I’ll probably round out my busy summer travel with a few weekend trips to Lake Tahoe to visit friends and play some golf, but it’s largely at home for the rest of the month. Football season is a nice welcome distraction from my day to day of work. I expect this to be a really busy fall both personally and at work.

The big news in VC and startup world today was that Hopin was selling most of their events business to Ring Central. I don’t really have any details about the “acquisition” yet, but it doesn’t seem to be great for the company or the shareholders on the surface.

Hopin may be yet another victim of the unraveling of the pandemic era boom. They seemed to have rode the wave up with their online events platform in the middle of COVID and raised a massive Series D at the peak in 2021. Like a lot of companies that raised during this period, I’d imagine the company was stuck between a rock and a hard place the last 1.5 years.

They have a massive valuation of $7.66B to grow into. But with events likely going back to in person, my guess is that revenue has dropped sharply. They were likely forced into this sale.