The Rise and Fall of Hopin, the Pandemic Startup

Coming soon...

Sam Bhattacharyya Sam Bhattacharyya
Hopin

Imagine, for a moment, yourself as a historian, digging through manuscripts from an age long past, sifting through product launches and fundraising announcements of now defunct companies, when one headline in particular grabs your attention

You'd be forgiven for thinking Hopin was another Gen AI startup from the current wave, but you check the date of the article - January 7th, 2021, years before the release of ChatGPT.

Curious you dig further and find the following headlines:

  • Hopin raises $125M for its online events platform on the back of surging growth - Nov 10, 2020
  • Hopin buys livestreaming startup StreamYard for $250M as it looks to expand its product lineup - Jan 7, 2021
  • Hopin might be the fastest growth story of this era - Jan 7, 2021
  • Hopin confirms $400M raise at $5.65B valuation - Mar 4, 2021
  • Hopin buys two more companies as it triples down on video focus - Mar 23, 2021
  • Virtual events platform Hopin cuts 12% of staff, citing goal of ‘sustainable growth’ - Feb 10, 2022
  • Hopin cuts 29% of its staff, just months after its last layoffs - Jul 11, 2022

The headlines then just stop. The uncomfortable truth is that most startups die, and when they do this is typical. One day the blog posts stop, the social media announcements stop, the website returns 404, and the founders quietly update their LinkedIn profiles.

Like Mayan kings who stopped erecting inscriptions about their achievements, they leave no indication anything was wrong, no hint of trouble. The writing just stops one day, and we're left to figure out what happened.

But Hopin was too big, too important to not leave a trace, and If you dug further, you'd find

  1. Hopin, the struggling virtual conference unicorn, sells events and engagement units to RingCentral - Aug 2, 2023
  2. Bending Spoons to Acquire StreamYard - April 14, 2024

And you see that hopin.com now redirects to ringcentral. From there it's straightforward to piece together what happened - a company built out of the pandemic, that raised too much money, and went up like a rocket, and came falling down to earth just as quickly when the pandemic subsided, and to provide some return to investors, the useful parts were sold to other companies.

And for most, that's where Hopin's story ends, its just an anecdote, a just so story, and perhaps a cautionary tale about the dangers of bubbles. From the armchair it's easy to judge a company in hindsight.

But Hopin was more than a headline, there were real people involved, people who werent stupid, making bets on their careers, and responding to one of the most unprecedented economic and technological shifts in recent memory, the covid 19 pandemic.

Given we are currently in the middle of two of two, even bigger unprecedented economic/technical shifts, the rise of Generative AI and the energy shock caused by the US, Iran, Israel war, it might be easy to forget just how disruptive the pandemic really was. And it is precisely for that fact, as we all navigate through the uncertainties of 2026, that its worth remembering how disruptive the pandemic was and how we handled the uncertainty.

As a first hand witness to the events in this story, I will do what generations of historians wish the Mayans did, what I wish more founders would do, and write about the ups and the downs, and recount exactly what it was like to work at Hopin through it's rise and fall. I will rewind the clock, back to 2019, to answer questions that were never covered in the tech media, like:

  • what was it like to have an MVP that no one cared about, that wasn't fully finished, encounter infinite demand over night

  • what was it like have to choose between talking customer calls, or interviewing hires to help take customer calls

  • what was it like to have the people who hired you, get fired 3 weeks into the job

  • what was it like to do a weekly sync after the company announced its 3rd layoff in 9 months

  • what did it feel like, to hear an announcement that your CEO was fired, that 80% of staff would be laid off, and that your shares were now worthless

And most of all, I want to answer, in as vivid detail as a first person witness, in as honest and unbiased a way as I can, what in all the world happened to Hopin, the pandemic startup.

The people telling the story

My name is Sam, a founder who joined Hopin after it acquired my own company in 2021, right at it's literal pinnacle, half way between it's last fundraise and it's first layoff. As Hopin's head of AI I personally witnessed what happened to Hopin through it's decline, from the first layoffs in 2022 to the final sale of streamyard in 2024.

From the point at which I enter the Hopin story, I will focus on my own experiences which are only a slice, a small corner of the company.

I am still in touch with many of the other people in this story, so for this blog, I consulted with Dave School (employee #1, currently founder of singulate) and Franz Josef (employee #16, now at OpusClips) who had front row seats to Hopins rise, what it was like before I joined.

I will do my best to recount their perspectives, as best I can from my conversations with them. With that, let's begin

--- Before the Pandemic --

--- News from Wuhan

--- infinite demand

--- The Unicorn

--- My context

--- The layoffs

LAYOFF 1 ML OFFSITE

Layoff 2

  • session
  • data team

Layoff 3

  • Cancun offsite
  • reevaluate shares
  • Johnny wasnt there
  • trip to Rome

Sale to ring central

  • call with the rest of the team to divide resources

Things actually made much more sense at Streamyard, much closer to the rhythm of a normal startip

  • talk to customers
  • ship features

Gen AI Learning everything I could about GenAI, training

I was inundated with features

One big feature, clips.

  • the streamyard offsite

  • trip to Argentina

The layoff announcment

  • Houston solar eclipse I played Zelda

It was a shock to everyone A huge betrayal

  • I moved mountains to not be on the chopping block
  • I staked everything on one signature feature

Only to be cut short, with the caprice of people who didnt know or care about me.

This feeling of having the rug pulled out under me, with the aftermath of post pandemic layoffs along with first signs of ai induced tech layoffs, and deep uncertainty about the future of automation

Left me very jaded about tech and capitalism. It led me to decide to do my on startup, given the circumstances, it was the least risky option (see this for more)

The aftermath

  • Session, one of hopins products was shut down, many
  • Many people were Hopin were later laid off by Hopin
  • Streamyard kept on some support and engineering before being let go afterwards Bending spoons went on to acquire bendingspoons
  • most moved on with their lives
  • some started startups

Quietly most people just moved on with their lives, and Hopin lived on as a footnote.

Hopin is, however, very recent history and people involved are still doing