Every time I talk about something, we talk about need. Is the need there? Is it the customer? Is he really solving the problem? And the other thing is adaptation. Both the individual and the company. If something doesn't make sense, just throw it away. You can spend your energy elsewhere and in better ways.
Zdeněk Hesoun is the co-founder of the start-up Happenee. In 5 months he built a company in Prague's Hloubětín, which is a global player in the field of virtual meetings. The company is built on the foundation of the turquoise organization. This year he received an investment of EUR 1.5 million from Reflex Capital.
In the episode, we look for answers to the following questions:
How is he building a turquoise organization?
What led him to do this and where does he get his inspiration?
How is vision important for recruitment?
What is most important to the success of a project?
How does he see the future of the conference world?
Important links:
TRANSCRIPT OF THE INTERVIEW
Martin Hurych
Hello.
I'm Martin Hurych and this... This is Ignition.
Ignition is the beginning of acceleration. And acceleration is something you need when you want to move from a standstill. If you're listening to this podcast, which I thank you for, by the way, you've already taken the most important step, namely the first step, to accelerating yourself.
At Zážeh we share our experience in B2B business. From business, from innovation, from working with people and from other areas.
Today we will accelerate with ZdeněkHesoun, co-founder and CEO of the start-up Happenee.
Hi, Zdenek.
Zdeněk Hesoun
Hey, thanks for inviting me.
Martin Hurych
You're welcome. You can introduce yourself and Happenee a little bit.
Zdeněk Hesoun
I'm sure. Where should I start?
I'm a corporate junkie. I worked there for 13 years. Towards the end, when it was no longer just numbers and repeating quarters that made sense to me, we were looking for something to do. I enjoyed software like that and it seemed like a good future. At Hewlett Packard, where we were working at the time, we saw how many different events were being organized there - dozens to hundreds of events a year, for customers, for partners, for employees. We saw how complicated it was with excel tools, etc. So the initial idea was to make a simple mobile app for the participants where they could see the information about the events and interact with each other. And for the organizers to complete the whole registration part. And that's how Happenee was born. Which is, let's say, 6 years ago.
Happenee was only dedicated to in-person or offline/live events at that point. Last year when March came and the whole thing crashed, after 3-4 months we switched to virtual events. But we wanted to do it differently. There was a section for virtual and hybrid events. To sum it up, the point of Happenee is to help companies connect people at the most amazing events in the world.
Martin Hurych
And that's exactly why you're here. I'm interested in Happenee for two reasons.
One is your innovation and your ability - you said you went bust in March - to build a business in less than a year that already has a global reach. Not many companies here have been able to do that.
And the second thing I want to get to during this podcast is the style in which you build your business. How fast you're growing.
Coming back to the fact that you've grown into a global player. How does it happen that from Hloubětín you start controlling virtual events all over the world?
Finding the customer need and validation of the idea by the market
Zdeněk Hesoun
I think it is also a great preparation before that. We weren't exactly new to the event world. We had contacts, we knew the companies, we knew the partners. When this time came, the first thing we said was "hey, let's wait for the fall". It's a good thing we didn't, we wouldn't be here anymore. We said" OK, let's look at how we can help our customers do things differently. " And so we started to find out. That was the most important thing. Analysis, discussion with customers. At the same time, we were looking around and looking for partners that we could put this together with. We were looking for somebody who might be able to produce the event. Where it met I think at the right time was when we met the ce from XLAB. Those were the guys who first started producing, right away I think in April, virtual events. They were doing event production on the green. By having the experience and starting to offer it to corporations, they got to where the need was. When we met with the guys, they were like, hey, we're looking around the world for different event platforms that we need to go to where we need to get the rest of this done, say virtual venue, registration, etc. And we were like "yeah, great, we've got that. "' We started building together and doing events together. The customer didn't care and doesn't care that somebody has a platform and somebody can produce it. He wants an experience, he wants a virtual event. That's where we found a great complement. The synergy effect.
That's how we started doing global events. We started the first Globsec Digital Forum last August. A big conference for about 80 speakers from different countries. That's how it started. And then more and more events. The demand was there and we were ready for it in the market. After a year, it was a cascading effect.
Martin Hurych
So after less than five months, the first global player and the first global conference!
How much of being successful is a matter of preparation and, let's say, clear strategic targeting of a given segment or product, and how much is a work of luck? Why I ask... I see a bunch of start-ups around me that believe they have something in their pocket. After a year or two, they find that they have something in their pocket, but no one wants it.
Zdeněk Hesoun
Going back... We had a great product before, but we needed to find the ideal customer who needed this unit. And that wasn't easy. The most important thing, and I only realized this now that it started working for us, we just needed to look at what the market needed and where we were valid. I said at the time that I didn't want to do something that didn't make sense and that the market didn't realistically need. What helped the most was the discussions, the specific requirements. We were really creating something where we saw that there was a demand for it. And it fit into our product and our whole portfolio. Where we could synergistically use what we already have and build a new part for online events. Happiness in adversity. The COVID era came along, which helped us, but if we didn't move, we'd be dead. Everyone was starting from scratch, there were few companies that were dedicated to virtual. We grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and really worked from morning to night to be able to take it to that level. That we would say, here's the target market and here's what we're going to do... No. It was more of a pretty organic thing, it built on itself, we just listened to the market. That was the most important thing
Martin Hurych
Validation by the market and good luck to the prepared.
Zdeněk Hesoun
Exactly. That's one thing. I take adaptation as the most important competence, both for the individual and for the company. The moment a person is not able to adapt and adjust the company and himself to the conditions, to the situation, he will just be dead. I think that's the way it is.
Martin Hurych
Now, thank God, it's loosening up. I recognize it personally in that everyone who hasn't seen me in a year and a half wants to see me, so I don't know where to jump first. What is the future of virtual events?
Zdeněk Hesoun
There are still people who think that everything will go back to normal. But it won't be like that anymore. We have information from corporates that maybe 50% of online events will stay online, 25% will stay in some hybrid mode (i.e. 100-200 people will come to the event, the rest will watch online), and then the remaining quarter will go back offline. There are a lot of advantages to virtual. They allow you to communicate across the world and across the country, very quickly and again at a fraction of the cost. Speed and the need to bring information to the world is central today. And that's what virtual offers. I'm sure team building events will be offline again. Where people are building relationships, they will want to be offline. Where it's definitely not going to come back are global players, global and regional events. That's what we're seeing. Just to do an event here and now for the DACH region and for the Middle East - we just did it for GENESIS - physically? They won't be able to do that for at least another year. But at the same time, it saves a lot of money on travel and all the costs. Those kinds of events will stay online.
The future of virtual meetings. Virtual and augmented reality.
Martin Hurych
I understand. When's the virtual meeting in virtual?
Zdeněk Hesoun
A virtual meeting in the virtual? I wonder what it should look like?
Martin Hurych
So far, if I understand correctly, you're doing a virtual action, however my interface is still a flat monitor... When I really get into what's going on in the virtual world.
Zdeněk Hesoun
It already exists today. There are many methods that have emerged. We still emphasize that we want to be unique and different, that's what we offer customers. We call it fun & quirky. The important aspect is to allow anyone to connect from any device and not have to have a superfast computer or special equipment. That's something that limits you partially in the technology you use, but it also allows you to really target anyone. Our customers aren't the ones that say "hey we have one target here". It's usually quite a large range of people. They don't want to install anything today and they don't want to mess with it too much. But there's AR (augmented reality) technology, or VR (virtual reality), or other ways to do those meetings. Nowadays you can wear VR or AR glasses, connect with people in a room and collaborate on a project, a document, a paper. There's already software like that. The moment everyone has those goggles at home, it's going to be nice. The other thing is that, again, you don't want to have huge glasses on your head for a long time looking into that artificial environment. It seems to me that augmented reality is going to be much more interesting in that you just have the glasses on, one eye looking and seeing the person next to you, and the other eye looking at the model you're talking about. Microsoft, for example, has technology like this, and there are other players that have been working on it for a while.
Martin Hurych
I agree. Spatial.io I'm trying out right now...
Zdeněk Hesoun
Yeah, one of them. And Microsoft has... and now I forgot. It's been going for about 4 years now too, there's some technology like that that works with augmented reality...
Martin Hurych
MicrosoftHoloLense is my secret dream.
Zdeněk Hesoun
...HoloLence, yeah. This sounds awfully good to me. It will all depend on how quickly the device gets out to people or the availability of other hardware.
Martin Hurych
When I see my son, who is a VR fan - although I prefer not to lend him much, I want to play too - I see how this younger generation looks at it differently. Ironically, all they have to do is buy a pair of paper goggles for two hundred and stick their phone in them and they have virtual reality. When will Happenee maybe be at that level? Are you even thinking along those lines?
Zdeněk Hesoun
We really need to stick to what we have now. We're very focused. We've taken a fairly large breadth of software, of what we market. In terms of these innovative things... We're not looking at what's going to happen in five years. We're looking currently at, say, one year. In this day and age, with what's going on, how fast things are changing, it's terribly complicated. Our vision is to keep adding uniqueness, differentness. And to build a kind of market place around the product that will allow customers to "stick" anything in there. The market place is built from some of our functionalities, but at the same time we build it from functionalities of other software that are on the market. One of the things is 3D avatars running inside our part. Another thing might be augmented reality, which we're also working on, looking at the technology and the possibilities, but we're still taking that peripheral. We want to be core to the event and all these extra things can be add-on modules that a person can buy. At the moment it's still an add-on for us. We haven't thought about moving the whole thing on. It's more like individual technologies that are going to fit into the big platforms and help make them different for that event.
Martin Hurych
Does this mean that Happenee is to be a virtual convention palace in Prague in the future?
Zdeněk Hesoun
Basically. What else Happenee brought was that we started with virtual events, and with that we started doing virtual booths, and with that started some Expo events. We've done 3 virtual trade shows of our own, which is a bit of a different area, it's quite a bit more challenging, but at the same time the technology and the capabilities that are used are quite the same. We have some conventions behind us, it's a goal that we are building. But why am I saying this ... At one point in the virtuals we started to look at whether it would be possible to keep the events open for a month because people will have archive videos etc. We've gotten to the point where we're not only communicating with customers today, but we have those solutions deployed. We call it a community/communication platform. It's a year-round open access within a 3D environment that replaces the company space, not only are events held there, but information is there, people can go back, interact with each other.
We were always used to communicating with an event manager who already had an event goal and a goal to accomplish. Here, we've taken it up a level and we're communicating with the CMO or C-level. We discuss what his digital communication is and what's missing. Every event is to support the community, whether it's partners, customers or employees. We focused on that and we said " let's do a community part for the community, for people to come back, for them to interact". That's the vision that we're driving now. We have X number of big customers that are using it this way. It's kind of like an extension of the intranet for internal employees. Or for a partner network, maybe 3,000 partners that are in an environment. That's where we're moving it.
Martin Hurych
I saw on our website and on your profile that Microsoft is already a customer of yours. Who's the next target? When will we see Happenee as a producer of an announcement from Apple or Google?
Zdeněk Hesoun
I understand. So Apple and Google, that's not where we're headed yet. Probably the biggest recent success has been Genesis, which is a big corporate company that focuses on cloud services and PBX. We've now done the DACH region and the Middle East region for them. Those are terribly interesting events. For one thing, the foreign language ... Middle East is Arabic, etc. For one thing, it's interesting to work with those people because obviously as you're on a global level, there are different budgets, different opportunities and the emphasis on quality, on diversity and what that should look like is completely different. Well, and at these events, we've had partners like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc., and that's how we've been able to get some awareness.
Otherwise, our focus today is very much the DACH region and the Nordic region. We are looking around the world to see what region we would open. We are also thinking about India, but it's all speculation for now. We need to stabilize here first.
Company acceleration. Vision and its impact on recruitment
Martin Hurych
Seeing your enthusiasm, the question is not if, but when. I support this. I'd like to see more and more companies like this have a global reach. We're a bit of a different job bubble. I suffer when it is considered innovation to move a machine from right to left somewhere, or to take European subsidies for nut production. That's why I support this so much.
If I'm not mistaken, you're the 3 co-founders? Am I forgetting someone?
Zdeněk Hesoun
We're 2 today, actually. In the register it is still somehow different, but there are two of us, me and Pavel Hodinka, who is our CTO.
Martin Hurych
When you started in March, how many of you were there?
Zdeněk Hesoun
We were four full time and one part time person.
Martin Hurych
Why am I asking... In 5 months, the first global, in March more or less - you tell me if more or less - wrinkling what you have and building something completely new. You told me before the broadcast that you're now squeezing again and again building something... You can't do that at four years old, even if you were working 24/7.
Zdeněk Hesoun
We worked 24/7, that's what helped us move forward. We were already looking for people before March came. We already wanted to develop a product, but still for off-line events. And push the product a little bit more into the range. When the time came, we said we'll still push the product that's already this broad into on-lining. In the end, of course, we're glad we went for it. We started hyping in July or August, with the idea that by January, by February we were something like 15, today we're 20, something like that.
When we saw that it was possible, we started quite a lot of parallel things. One thing was Happenee 2.0, a much more scalable product, much more self-service, but still at the Enterprise level, still targeting the hi-touch business. And alongside that, there was a discussion with investors, which we're now finalizing, putting together, so that.
Martin Hurych
You told me you wanted to double the size of the company this year in terms of people. I heard on the way here that there's another labor shortage. I talked to a client yesterday, the price of a decent programmer is breaking through the glass ceiling for about the third time this year. How do you get people to come to you? Where are you looking? What do you use to charm them?
Zdeněk Hesoun
The first 20 people came organically. It just kind of happened. It was my contacts, my friends, it was the event market that was open at the time and people were looking for work. We took people from the event world. And now we're showing them the product world, the event tech company. So it was pretty good. Now it's just getting started. There's 20 of us, we're hiring another 20-25. Now the positions are going out, now it's all opening up, now the bread is starting to break.
On the other hand, we believe in humanity. We have always built our company on trust, on transparency, on cooperation, on openness. These values are very important to us. I think of the company as a living organism. It's the people who make the company and move it forward. That's kind of the basic benchmark that helps us draw people who are interested in the universe. But I will say, we're on a path of double growth now, I'll be able to tell you in a month or two.
Martin Hurych
By the way, we can meet here sometime in six months maybe, let's see if you've got 80 people in the Apple portfolio at that point.
Zdeněk Hesoun
I'll be glad, it'll be a good retrospective.
Martin Hurych
I'm probably guessing the answer, but how important is the vision of the company to you as the glue that holds the company together?
Zdeněk Hesoun
Actually, that's the most important thing. It's something that we're constantly emphasizing and developing with people. The principle of it is not "we're going to tell the founders here and now it's going to go down". The principle is that we build everything with people. The company values that we live are not written from the top and said "this is what we live, it's good marketing to people to come to us". It just has to come from all of our people.
The second thing is adaptation. The moment we find out in six months that something doesn't make sense, that we are capable and valid somewhere else, we will do something else. It's important to have people who are able to work with that. It's terribly important for us to do something that makes sense and that the market needs. Not something that I'm going to think is terribly cool, but nobody wants it.
Martin Hurych
What is the first name of the last person you recorded.
Zdeněk Hesoun
Nikola
Martin Hurych
When I ask Nicola what the vision of Happenee is, are you sure she'll answer what you'd like her to answer?
Zdeněk Hesoun
I'd say so.
Martin Hurych
Well, congratulations!
You said you're trying to build a turquoise organization, which I find terribly sympathetic. How do you think the dramatic growth of the company goes hand in hand with the turquoise of the organization?
Turquoise organization. Reasons and where to get inspiration.
Zdeněk Hesoun
We have had a close relationship with this approach - we can call it freedom at work, responsibility - since the beginning six years ago. Generally speaking, the turquoise organisation is built on people. It's about humanity, it's not about a greased machine. It's about a different approach, about wholeness, about being able to come to work as you are, not taking on masks. Everybody has emotions and that's the right thing to do. It's about the art of creating a safe environment where energy and innovation is born. It's about wanting to work there. We've been through it before, but we hit limits when it didn't quite work economically. When Maslow's pyramid is not met, or meeting basic needs, like paying rent or something, it's difficult because of course at that point you're mainly worried about your livelihood. It's logical, and it's hard to develop these values that are higher up in the pyramid. I took that as a lesson. First you have to stabilize the company and then develop it so that it makes sense, so that it works, so that everyone knows what to do, has responsibilities, settings, etc. And alongside that, putting together the principles of "turquoise". In other words, "turquoise" is very much about decentralization, trust in people, not about control, about the possibility of realizing what people really like. And if it gives meaning and vision to the company, and if it goes to the company, then it's great that one does it. It's balancing certain scales where we can't forget about the business, about growth, about being able to deliver everything that we promised. But at the same time thinking about the principles that we operate on. One of the principles, for example, we have an open cash flow from the beginning, all the information flows from top to bottom, there is no secret. I try to encourage less individualism and more collaboration. For example, now we're going to deal with business. Motivation, how and in what way. It's much more important for us to work together as a team and pass on the individual customers we work for than to talk about whether commisssions will have this one or this one and at what rate. That's what I want to avoid terribly. I came out of a corporation, I would know how to set it up, it's awfully simple, but I always say to myself before every setup, "hey, let's do it differently". That's when the experiment starts, quite a long journey to get it stable, because there's still no manual for it today.
Martin Hurych
Who might inspire you in this journey?
Zdeněk Hesoun
Probably the greatest book or the greatest inspiration is FredericLaloux and his The Future of Organizations. There's a nice story there. First of all, the theory where he describes the different colors of organizations and explains what the motivations are and where it leads, how it evolves. Second, the story of the 12-15 companies he went through in those 2 years where he looked for ... The general idea was to look for companies that, even in a crisis, had the most satisfied employees, grew the most and had the most profit. He came to the conclusion that these are the companies that devote energy to people, where there is a huge decentralization, where people can really go there the way they want, where they can make decisions, where they have a huge field of responsibility but at the same time freedom. Companies are from 500 people to 10,000, so there is no limit to the size of the company to build that. This has given me a lot.
Then, of course, there are many companies that promote "turquoise". Etnetera is one of those benchmarks. Martin Cernohorsky. There's Michal Beranek from OpenOne, who I work with, who went through this in his own company and now guides other companies, including us. We discuss these things with him. And there is Evolutio, if I remember correctly. That's a platform, a lot of people who are dedicated to this topic. They're doing nice webinars, different meetings, and supporting the community, which has been missing here for a long time. It's nice to hear similar stories, connect and say practical things - what worked, didn't work, etc. Because it's still trial and error. Not everything works everywhere. But internally it makes the only sense to me, so even if I'd like to set it up more corporately, I just don't want to do it. That makes everything a little more complicated.
Martin Hurych
If I brutally cut it short to say that you wouldn't make it that fast in Happenee without the turquoise organization, would I be too wrong?
Zdeněk Hesoun
I can't answer that. I think we principles still have both turquoise and orangeade.
Martin Hurych
Oranged?
Zdeněk Hesoun
Yeah, orange. If I take some basic set-up:
Red organizations are basically gangs, there is a motivation of fear.
Yellow is the army or religion, strict hierarchical continuity and obedience.
Orange is something that 95% of companies live in today. It has to be said that neither option is bad. It's just an evolution. Orange is in 95% of companies today. It's about motivation, a lot about innovation, but at the same time it's a greased machine. It's all about being tuned to the person.
Green is very much a non-profit these days. Decision making is more people oriented, but at the same time the decision making process and movement/process is very limited or time consuming.
From this emerges the turquoise organisation, which aims, as I said, at decentralisation, individual responsibility, but also innovation.
Also that people can decide things themselves and deliver a service much faster to a customer without any bureaucratic apparatus behind them. But of course all this is based on several foundations. And the fact that not all people like it, are suited and don't want to go down that route. And the second thing... The way we're brought up, the way we operate from the beginning - grading, school, kindergarten - all the principle of control, managerialism, because we don't naturally trust, so there has to be control... Of course, to eradicate that from people and from me after a while, or to show that it can work differently, is a long run and not everybody gets there. So today I don't want to make the mistake that we made before, today it's important to keep building on a solid foundation and to know that this works, that this way and the economy, the way we're going, is workable. Alongside that, we're putting these principles into it. We do team building events or meetings just for personal development for people, among other things. That's one of the things that's important to me. It's one thing that it's great that we're experts in the field, that we're educating ourselves and going in that direction, but it's important to me that we go this on a personal level because the side effect is that it helps us at work, and in our daily lives. And then the impact is much greater. That's ultimately what motivates me tremendously, and why I do it this way.
Martin Hurych
Did I understand correctly that you don't have Work Life Balance, it's just one life and you live it?
Zdeněk Hesoun
That's right, that's right. The work is my hobby, it's the people, it's the whole company, it's the customers, it's the joy of the results. But I have to say, of course, it's a subject I need to address. And they're working on it. Work Life Balance in terms of family and that time. Building something like this at this speed, the parallel things that we've taken on ... It's a lot, it's obviously terribly complex. Even more so, turquoise and decentralization is about not being expected to sign something. It's still not the way I'd like to see it, that I'd get out in a month, come back and the company would go completely on its own. That's one of the reasons it makes sense to me.
Martin Hurych
When do you think you can fulfill it?
Zdeněk Hesoun
I might be out of surgery right now. That's a very important point for me. I can focus on more strategic things. I believe it's going to take 2-3 months to get those 30-35 people in place, to get some structure, especially competencies in the company, so that we have everything ready for growth.
Martin Hurych
I'll ask you... Next time you come here, you take your wife, and I'll ask her how you did.
Zdeněk Hesoun
I'll be glad to.
Martin Hurych
And to wrap things up today, Zdeněk... If I, as a business owner or CEO, want to build a global hegemon in 5 months... How do you do that? What advice do you have? What should I do?
Zdeněk Hesoun
So either there's got to be a crisis and you have to know what to do at that moment. If the crisis doesn't come, then for me the standard is just needed. We laugh about it today, but every time I'm talking about something, we're talking about need. Is the need there? Is it the customer? Is it really solving the problem? Just focus on what the need really is in the marketplace. And the other thing is the adaptation. Both the individual and the company. Just if something doesn't make sense, throw it away. It took us a while too. Today I have a much quicker view on it. I know what to do when it doesn't make sense for the market. You can spend your energy elsewhere and in a better way.
Martin Hurych
So I'll keep my fingers crossed that you do well. And I'll wish I could see you even higher than you're currently flying.
Zdeněk Hesoun
Great, thanks a lot.
Martin Hurych
Okay. That was Zdenek Hesoun from Happenee. If this episode sparked anything in you, be sure to tune in for more, whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app. Or check out my website www.martinhurych.com for more accelerator tools. Fingers crossed and best wishes for success.
(edited and shortened)
(automatically translated by DeepL - free version)