Hopin

» see hopin.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The first time Hopin registered with me it was a headline, not a login. Around 2021 it was the startup you read about because of a number, the fastest company ever to reach a billion-dollar valuation and then several billion more, all in under two years. i was in Ankara through the pandemic doing my own remote work, in the meetings everyone was in. Hopin was the thing running the big virtual conferences i was mostly not attending, a business story more than a tool i touched.

The origin is genuinely strange. Johnny Boufarhat, born in Australia and living in London, built the first version in 2019 while an autoimmune illness kept him largely stuck at home. He wanted events that felt like being in a room without the room, and he launched Hopin in June of that year into a market that barely existed yet. For about eight months it was a small idea with modest traction.

Then the world locked its doors. Every conference and company town hall that used to fill a hall needed somewhere to go, and Hopin was sitting there ready to host it. The growth was almost violent. Past two billion dollars by late 2020, then seven and three quarter billion by that August on a four hundred and fifty million dollar round. Boufarhat became, on paper, Britain's youngest self-made billionaire.

The problem with being the shape of a crisis is that crises end. As offices reopened, nobody wanted to sit through a day of virtual booths if they could stand in a real one. Demand for what Hopin sold fell about as fast as it had risen. The company cut staff and shed products, and in August 2023 sold its flagship events and session platform to RingCentral for a sum nobody wanted to print, a small slice of the peak. RingCentral rebranded it, and the Hopin that had briefly been worth more than most airlines was done. i had watched the whole arc as a spectator, the way you watch a firework, the bright part and then the part where it is only smoke.

~ the dossier ~

~ the bubble ~

Hopin's rise was so fast that it never really got to be a normal company. It hired thousands of people in a year and spread across a dozen product lines while its core demand rested entirely on a situation the whole world was desperate to end. That is a strange thing to build on. Every quarter that the pandemic receded, the reason to use Hopin got a little weaker, and there was no second act big enough to replace a planet stuck indoors.

~ the next chapter ~

The parts of Hopin that survived tell the real story. RingCentral took the events platform and folded it into its own products. StreamYard, the livestreaming tool Hopin had bought along the way, turned out to be the quietly useful part that outlived the flashy one. The lesson sitting in the wreckage is old and unglamorous. A tool that solves a temporary problem earns temporary demand, and a valuation that assumes the emergency is permanent is a bet the calendar always wins.

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