MFM x Trends - How Johnny Boufarhat Took Hopin from 0 to $1b+ in Less Than A Year

**Sam** (0:00)
This next episode is kind of mind-blowing because this guy, his name is Johnny, started this business that went from zero to over a billion dollar valuation in something like 10 or 12 months. I think that's the fastest it's ever been done.
So let's get to the story or the background. It's basically, this episode is an interview with Johnny Boufarhat, he's the CEO, he's the founder of this company called Hoppin. And Hoppin started before the pandemic and what they were trying to do was bring in-person events online. So just like to dumb it down, a virtual event platform, but COVID hit.
So you can imagine that it just like took off.
So this company, it's just been astounding to watch these guys because some of their founding team wrote for Trends and we were friends with them at our company. So we got a little bit of an inside track or an inside view of how this business works. But Johnny is the CEO, he's the founder. He's in his mid 20s and he's got a very, very, very amazing story, a very interesting outlook. He was sick at a young age and that kind of changed how he started looking at the world. And he looked me in the eye when we were doing this interview and he goes, my goal is to make this $100 billion company. That's all I'm gonna do. And it's really weird and strange and odd to be around people who are so blunt with their ambitions and frankly, it's quite inspiring. And I don't think that that's the right move for everyone, but I respect people who know what they want and they get after it. So today's episode is with the CEO of Hoppin. He's gonna talk about how he grew the business from zero to something like, I think, three, 400 employees in only 12 months. How he's done it all remotely. How he's handling just the personal weight about going about this at such a young age. And it's very fascinating, very interesting.
I asked him about some of the stuff that kind of seems boring, but it's really important. Like how do you create a brand guideline document that your whole team can use and onboard them so quickly? How do you even recruit that many people? I mean, if you recruit 200 people in a year, that means you're going to talk to tens of thousands of people. That's so hard. So I talked to him all about that.
This is for Trends members, but the first bit is free. If you want it, the whole thing, and a lot of other interviews like this. So just go to trends.co, it's a dollar, check it out. So let's get to it.

**Johnny Boufarhat** (2:21)
Honestly, I was already saying in November, we're going to be one of the fastest growing companies in the world next year because of how much demand there was for the product.
And basically what happened was February hits, coronavirus is happening. We have tons of companies on the wait list that are like, hey, this isn't funny anymore. Like we actually need to move our events online. Can you let us in sort of thing? And we were like, we're six people. We've been very selective. And I realized that probably the right thing to do, not only from a business perspective, but also like a humanitarian was at the time, was like, let's try and launch this and go as fast as possible. And that was my plan anyways, but from November of that year. So literally now we would have been launched, which would have been funny, but considering what's happened in that time. So we pushed out in February.
And since then, let's just say we're 230 people now from an employee size perspective, and we have over 50,000 companies using the platform, well, organizations using the platform.

**Sam** (3:24)
Almost 300 employees since like March, right?

**Johnny Boufarhat** (3:30)
That's correct. Yeah.

**Sam** (3:31)
So what's that? Like eight months, nine months or whatever it is. I mean, that's pretty phenomenal in itself, no?
I mean, how on earth does that even work? So when you started, it was just like you and Dave and a handful of other people.

**Johnny Boufarhat** (3:47)
That's right.

**Sam** (3:47)
I imagine it was small. Did you have any money before this?

**Johnny Boufarhat** (3:50)
We had raised from Accel Ventures, we had raised, I think it was $8 million, $8 million at about 32 million valuation or something like that.

**Sam** (4:00)
In what month?

**Johnny Boufarhat** (4:01)
That was, I mean, we had agreed that in January, or not in January, in November, but the... By the time the lawyers were done, it was January and the start of February.