How twine Plans to Reinvent Business and Event Networking
Announcing Moment Ventures’ Seed Investment in twine
June 17, 2021 by Clint Chao, Moment Ventures
I’m super excited to announce that Moment Ventures has led a $3.3M seed round into twine. And I’m thrilled to be working alongside a seasoned set of entrepreneurs and some terrific co-investors to bring simple and efficient technology to bolster business networking for the post-pandemic world.
Forced Transformation for the $400B Events Industry
I used to love going to trade shows. As a sales & marketing executive at a couple of high tech startups as well as a tech investor, it’s always been the biggest bang for the buck as far as meeting people in the industry. My litmus test on the ROI of attending in the first place: who did I meet, and could I build a relationship once I did? In the physical events era, I would proactively or serendipitously meet really interesting industry people at a company booth, networking mixer, after a keynote or panel, or even in a cab line on the way to the venue. Once I met them, it was up to me to make the appropriate follow-ups to enhance the relationship, but it always helped to cite the context as to how we met. To this day, many of my favorite business contacts originated from a chance encounter at an event.
Once we entered the COVID era however, that all came to a screeching halt. Events were canceled, people stopped traveling and we chained ourselves to our home office set-ups and Zoom cameras.
The resilient events industry bounced back relatively quickly with 100% virtual alternatives using Zoom or Google or any of the umpteen other venue platforms, largely out of necessity. I quickly found that this market doesn’t translate well to 100% online if the intent was to network with people from that industry. The breakout room or meet-a-random-person carousel features weren’t very rewarding, as there was no real context between my counterpart and me (no rubbing elbows at the networking party, product demo at the booth or crazy cab line where we shared war stories of our travel hassles). I felt like I was speed dating to meet random people and even though they were nice to talk to and we’d vow to stay in touch, it rarely happened.
A Chance Re-Encounter With an Old Friend
As 2020 came to an end, I came across a blog post from an old friend Lawrence Coburn. Lawrence spent the prior decade at the helm of one of the pioneering tech companies in the events industry, DoubleDutch, a company I looked at during their seed raise in 2011 (DoubleDutch was acquired by Cvent in 2019).
Lawrence began to share his ideas with me on his new company, twine. What Lawrence got that really resonated with me was that while the events industry was undergoing a complete transformation as far as hosting gatherings for people in their target industry, one thing remained the same: people attend events so that they can meet people. Online or offline, your objective is to meet interesting people that have a shared interest in the domain and can be someone to build a mutually beneficial relationship for the future.
Introducing twine: Twilio for Networking
The pandemic threw all the balls in the air and somehow left out an effective way to help people meet other people as a result of shared interests from attending an event. And that’s why I got really intrigued with the idea behind twine: a dead-simple technology to enable people to network with other people at an event. twine puts networking in front as its top priority and is not a venue platform, as there are so many of those already. So, regardless of the video platform being used as the event venue, conference planners use twine as an API connector enabling attendees to start meeting new people, a Twilio for networking— if the event coordinator wants to initiate a networking session, they simply drop a twine link into the comments section and you’re instantly transported to a branded platform that matches you with someone with a common interest, planned or serendipitously. And to help you stay connected, twine has features built in to let you exchange contact information.
twine builds algorithms to optimize the relevant matching with people to increase your hit rate on effectiveness of the networking event, and they even provide the technology to help facilitate the conversation so you can talk about something other than what’s listed on the back of your business baseball card. twine works for any kind of event: large scale conferences, company-specific events (such as user groups or sales meetings) or even small team gatherings for companies onboarding new or remotely-located employees. Their early customers include Amazon, Microsoft, Forrester and more, and we have super high hopes that they can quickly become the de facto way in which people network with others.
The Role of the Conference Planner
Given their heritage in the events space, twine’s founding team knew from the beginning that serendipitous networking with people doesn’t happen by accident. There’s a huge opportunity for conference planners to create backdrops of context for their attendees to meet like-minded people.
In the physical world, those activities included speaking panels and keynotes, larger than life booths and attention-getting signage, and after-hours sponsor mixers. In the virtual world, planners can facilitate other ways for people to connect serendipitously, and twine is building a trove of technology solutions enabling facilitators to create similar experiences. twine is also building product offerings to help extend the life of an event to well beyond the duration of the event itself. Check out one of Lawrence’s posts about how events are transitioning from points to lines and circles.
Networking is Critical to the Future of Work
As we all know by now, the pandemic didn’t stop us — it just reconfigured us. So what happens to the events world once people start heading back to physical venues for their events? No one can really predict how this is all going to end up exactly, but I’m a firm believer in a hybrid future, where some things will occur in person, and some things will occur virtually, and technology solutions need to leverage that new normal. Events are very likely going to become much more full featured as they embrace the best of both physical and online worlds.
twine believes that a successful networking component of every event will be the thing that ensures that attendees keep coming back, year after year. We’re excited to see the twine team cooking up some really interesting capabilities for event planners as we enter this new Future of Work reality. Stay tuned!
Want to try twine for free? Check it out!
Clint Chao is a General Partner at Moment Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund based in Palo Alto, CA. You can reach/follow him on LinkedIn, Medium and Twitter.
