2024 Company Offsite

Last Wednesday nearly 70 beehiiv employees descended on Montreal for our third annual offsite.

It feels like it was just yesterday when 8 of us shared an Airbnb in Austin for our first offsite in 2022. This past week we rented out entire restaurants and took pictures like this.

To summarize the experience in just 2 words: fucking awesome.

We’re a remote company with globally distributed employees. This was the first time the majority of people got to meet each other face-to-face, myself included.

It’s hard to overstate just how impactful it is to transfer these mostly-online relationships to offline friendships. A Gallup study concluded that employees who have a friend at work are more engaged, productive, and satisfied with their jobs.

But who needs a Gallup study — this isn’t our first rodeo. The camaraderie and cohesiveness of the team was palpable for months after last year’s offsite… and this year’s blew that one out of the water.

Ok, enough fluff — so what did we do?

We stayed at this beautiful hotel in the heart of downtown, and booked their conference room to work alongside each other Thursday and Friday. I’ve been told this IRL work environment is considered “normal”.

For some people that meant whiteboard sessions and brainstorming. For others it meant pair programming and design review. For me, it meant being able to walk directly up to engineers and annoy them about bugs.

Jokes aside (although not joking), obviously IRL collaboration is fantastic and no one took the limited time we had together for granted. We had a few big breakthroughs, and pushed some key initiatives forward.

Given how rare it is to have us all together in the same room, I wanted to try something different to end the week. On Friday afternoon I coordinated 3 presentation slots.

First — Quarterly State of the Hiiv

Admittedly, probably the least fun of the three. For about an hour I presented the following to the entire company:

• Recap and highlights from Q2.

• Current state of the business regarding revenue, growth, expenses, and other KPIs.

• Key themes for the upcoming quarter.

• Detailed breakdown of the product roadmap.

• Q3 company rocks (i.e. goals).

• And everything in-between…

As a remote company, I think it’s incredibly important to over-communicate things. It’s far too easy to unintentionally create information siloes across the org — so these quarterly state of the unions are super helpful to re-align everyone across the company.

Second — Employee Superlatives

Bella Rose, who you may recognize as the girl in a bee costume across our socials, dished superlatives and more or less roasted the entire company in just 30 minutes.

I won “most likely to promote their newsletter with their last dying breath.” A great reminder that you can forward this email to a friend if you’re enjoying it.

Third — beehiiv Sessions 🎤 

I wanted to give anyone the opportunity to present and pitch a new idea, feature, process, or initiative we should pursue as a company.

Nearly 20 people volunteered to do a quick 3-5 minute presentation. Topics ranged from offsite 2025 being on an Alaskan cruise (never going to happen, EJ), to initiatives to help support journalism, to practical new features that we’ll probably end up building at some point.

Truthfully I was blown away by the breadth and thoughtfulness of the sessions. It was just such a blatant reminder that the best teams are run bottom-up:

1. Hire smart and ambitious people.

2. Give them autonomy and opportunities to contribute.

3. Empower them to take initiative.

It wasn’t all work though in Montreal…

We ate a lot. Our COO, Preeya, somehow secured reservations for 70 people at some of Montreal’s best restaurants. No Tim Hortons on this trip — each meal was a multi-course gourmet ordeal.

We also had a lot to celebrate since our last time together. Let’s just say, there are two clubs in Montreal that are very happy we decided to show up.

If I ever took this picture I would undoubtedly be called a douche. So I made my cofounder, Ben, take it and it’s one of my all-time favorites.

Lots of wholesome fun and activities too. On Saturday…

• I tried to offset my hangover by doing a sensory deprivation tank for the first time.

• A group of people went on a walking food tour throughout the city.

• And others successfully escaped an escape room.

For the grand finale, almost half of the company went to a Polo and Pan concert (a BDE playlist staple), which gifted us the new dancing Daniel gif.

At the end of the day, the company is only going to go as far as the people take it. It’s my job to provide them opportunities to contribute and grow… and help foster relationships and memories to hopefully last a lifetime.

Some of my final takeaways from the week…

• We have done such a tremendous job hiring a team of smart, high-integrity, and ambitious people who are genuinely a joy to be around.

• We have built such a unique culture on hard mode (i.e. remote) and it 100% translated and cemented itself IRL.

• That wasn’t just fun by “work event” standards… the overwhelming consensus was that was a ridiculously fun week.

• Montreal is an astounding city.

• We could have spent 10x on that offsite and it still would have been worth every dollar.

But for now, we’re back scattered across the world, communicating in our little squares on the computer. Until next year ✌🏽.

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Shoutout to Christopher for the reader submission. I don’t have the self-control to have a hammock next to my desk, but I commend those who do 🫡.

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Some of my favorite content I found on the internet this week…

• The first-ever Delta One Lounge opened in New York’s JFK Airport and you had me at “second monitor for rent” (Twitter)

• I loved Mike Solana’s piece on the new age of media companies (Pirate Wires)

• Figma dropped a ton of new AI features (Twitter)

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Until next Tuesday 🕺🏽