Building a startup is risky at the best of times. Building a startup during COVID is terrifying. Building an event insurtech startup during COVID is downright insane, but here we are.

I won’t go into too much detail about what we do; just enough to provide a bit of context. As I mentioned, eve is an event insurtech startup. We’re building a SaaS platform for large-scale event organizers, think music festivals, sporting events and even entertainment productions. eve leverages data to provide event organizers with actionable insights to mitigate their risk which, when paired with our solution oriented insurance, means events can be executed more quickly, more efficiently and ultimately, better. We believe in “Insurance as a Service”, which you can read more about here.

But enough about what we do, I want to tell you our story; who we are and not only how we’ve managed to continue to grow despite the event industry shutdown but how we’re modernizing the standard workweek.

The story of eve

Why? I’ve worked in tech and music my entire life and like most people who find themselves in the live entertainment industry, I’m not entirely sure how I ended up here. What I do know is that I’ve had a passion for the industry from the get go and with my background in tech, I’ve seen the potential for technology — which the events industry is notoriously slow to adopt — to not only make events better, but significantly reduce cancellations.

Some things you may not know about the industry:

1. Many promoters are still using excel to collect event data and walkie talkies to communicate.
2. When it comes to event cancellation insurance, 4 in 10 total losses are completely preventable.
3. Event cancellation insurance is one of the worst performing insurance products in the market with loss ratios above 250%.

These 3 things were the inspiration behind eve.

Where? From the very beginning, I knew we needed to set up shop in Munich and London; London because it’s the insurance capital of the world and Munich not only because it is second in insurance, but because it’s quickly becoming a tech hub in Europe. It has all the makings of a great tech city and that’s being validated by the arrival of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, as well as American venture capital. And we don’t have to tell you why but our next stop is Austin. We’ve been working on our expansion to the US since October of last year but, for obvious reasons, we’ve been a bit delayed. However, now that vaccines are rolling out around the world… Austin, here we come!

Who? Since the pandemic began, eve has grown from 6 to 21 people. From Hawaii to Ho Chi Minh, we hail from 10 different countries (and counting). We have serial entrepreneurs, one of Vue’s core team members, engineers who contribute to Google projects, a mindfulness expert, a mixologist, two published authors, the list goes on. Each member of our team brings unique talents to the table and they’re not necessarily tech, insurance or event related. I don’t confine hiring decisions to a particular type of person or a specific kind of experience; my team is made up of people that come from corporates, people that were looking for a career change and people who are just starting out. Diversity isn’t just about where a person comes from, it’s about their experiences, their perspectives and all the little things that make them different.

The “weekend” project

Don’t get me wrong, the pandemic hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows, far from it. Live entertainment was the first industry to be shut and we’re still waiting on its return. As we continued to work with industry experts on the core product, garnering feedback despite the inability to put on an event, things started looking up and Munich began to emerge from lockdown. My CTO and I were asked at a cafe to complete a form with our names and contact details, using a pen that had been shared by many diners before and would be shared with many diners after. Not only did we cringe at the possible exposure to the still relatively new threat of COVID, but also at the idea of having to fill out this information every time we wanted to go for a beer (and considering our locale, that was going to be often).

Back in the office we put together a plan and launched evePASS (a social tracing app) 10 days later, which we offered completely free to any and all businesses around the world. Why free you ask? It was our aim to provide the solution free of charge in hopes that successful contact tracing would speed up the return of live events. Governments around the world were slow to react and given our industry experience and our expertise (we were already working on a similar partner app for eve) we decided to give it a go.

We reached one million customers in a couple of weeks and four million customers in just a few months, then came lockdown 2.0. Why am I telling you this? Other than the fact that I’m so proud of what my team was able to accomplish in such a short period of time, it speaks volumes about what it means to be a startup. It’s not just about the funding or the rapid growth, it’s about adapting, being resilient and when something gets in your way, knocking that barrier down and forging ahead anyway.

Now, going on a full year later, live entertainment still hasn’t returned; but, we’ve spent that time expanding our team and eliciting feedback from the events and insurance industries to enhance our SaaS platform and improve our insurance product. We’ve managed to continue to grow because of the team we’ve become and our ability to stay positive and focused at a time when that is a much more challenging feat.

What it all comes down to

One word, culture. I base the majority of my hiring decisions on what someone will contribute to the team rather than title. Job descriptions are fluid and expectations can be modified to fit the skills of the individual and the needs of the company; that’s one of the biggest advantages of being an early stage startup. Culture isn’t just about finding people that get along with one another, it’s about finding people that drive one another forward and motivate each other to learn more, do more, try harder and become better.

My team and I strive to create an atmosphere where people want to come to work. Part of this comes from the people we hire but the other part comes from creating a space where differences are viewed as assets and everyone is welcome and encouraged to participate wherever and whenever they feel inspired. We’ve had multiple people switch from one team to another because their skills (not only the ones they already had but the ones they wanted to develop) were an asset elsewhere and the shift would continue to push things forward.

Everything that’s happened over the last year has made me start to think long and hard about how our current circumstances will change, not only as COVID (hopefully) becomes a distant memory but as we continue to bring on new team members. Growth will always impact culture and make it more difficult to build those relationships and maintain those connections that have made us so successful thus far. So, we’re currently conducting an experiment...

Introducing: The eve Way™

We started our experiment with modernizing the workweek by shifting all meetings into 3 hour time slots 4 days a week: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday from 9–12. We fully embrace the concept of deep work, coined by Cal Newport, and by shifting all of these essential…but let’s call them what they frequently are…productivity blockers to a common timeframe, we’ve trimmed the fat and made those meetings more beneficial. Not only do we have uninterrupted afternoons where we can maintain focus without the distraction of shifting between meetings and projects, but the limited time we have for meetings have made the meetings themselves more productive as well. Why schedule a meeting for 30 minutes when you only need 10? Why host a meeting when the goal can be achieved via email? Does Elisabeth really need to be included or would her time be better spent doing something else? These are the things we’ve started asking ourselves and our mutual respect for each other’s time has grown exponentially.

Part 2 was the introduction of our rotating Fridays. I’m an avid supporter of personal projects and we’ve always allocated 10% of our working time to furthering our professional development. However, the busier we got, the more challenging it was for people to use this allotted time to do what it was intended to do: generate new ideas, work on something that inspires them, etc. We’ve modified this from 4 hours a week to 2 full days a month (still 10% for those of you who hate math). Every other Friday is spent working on something that will help people grow, improve their skills and fundamentally make the company better than it otherwise would have been. Projects range from learning a new language to taking an online course to building an announcements dashboard for the office.

The remaining 2 Fridays in the cycle swap between eve days and team days. eve days are the time to complete those fundamental tasks that involve the entire team. We kick off the day with an all-hands meeting where we discuss company updates, product status and other announcements that affect everyone. Following that is generally an industry guest speaker; an opportunity to learn from people who’ve been there, done that. Then we wrap up the day with a workshop intended to flex our creativity; it could be focused on solving a current problem or developing a new feature. Team days on the other hand focus on people. Our first installment involved PechaKucha presentations to allow us to get to know one another on a more personal level and ended with some online games and a virtual visit to an alpaca farm 👇. These days are more about bonding and growing together and could vary from going on hikes to hosting a hack-a-thon.

TL;DR

• Week 1: eve Day
• Week 2: Personal Project Day
• Week 3: Team Day
• Week 4: Personal Project Day
• repeat!

To sum it all up, everything comes back to people. Startups are only as strong as the people that build them and helping those people grow and thrive reflects in company performance. We’ve already seen substantial growth in our culture and output along with so much inspiration from the entire team to justify continuing this experiment.

So, cheers from Munich & London and we’ll see you soon, Austin!