Today, we are excited to announce our seed investment in Goldcast - the new events platform designed for revenue-driven marketers and community builders. We led this $10M round with an amazing group of investors, founders, and executives joining the family - including Hubspot Ventures, Afore Capital, Underscore VC, Scott Belsky (Adobe), Manik Gupta (Microsoft), Chandar Pattabhiram (Coupa), Elissa Fink (ex Tableau), Elias Torres (Drift), Sangram Vajre (Terminus), Kris Rudeegraap (Sendoso) “G” Cabane (ex Segment), Lenny Rachitsky (ex Airbnb) as well as Dave Gerhardt as brand advisor. 

The backstory

Every one of us has experienced the explosion in virtual events over the past two years replacing everything from our yoga classes and fundraisers to software conferences. In Feb 2020, when the US announced a public health emergency, I had a ringside view of the crisis as the (then) marketing leader at a high-growth software unicorn. 

We pivoted to virtual events immediately. We had already been organizing webinars with a lot of success so I was surprised to see how hard it was to scale virtual events even with our whole team now singularly focused on them instead of in-person field events taking up most of the budget and resources. I asked myself — why could we not do a great virtual event every single week? What were the bottlenecks? 

There were some unavoidable time/flow constraints — gather great speakers, promote the event, finalize content, etc. However, there were 10x more avoidable (in theory) constraints that required a lot of brute force and grunt work to operate within. They slowed the whole team down and prevented other GTM team members from contributing to events as a channel or even leveraging them to nurture their pipeline. 

These challenges fall into two buckets: orchestration and analytics. If you have never worked on a marketing team, here’s a sample of questions that every B2B event marketer dreads because the answer is often “I don’t know” or “I need days to figure that out”. 

The result of these challenges is threefold - fewer events, events that don’t result in pipeline (let alone revenue), and less budget for events because they are hard to attribute impact to. 

Enter Goldcast. Purpose-built for B2B event marketers, Goldcast combines great UX for attendees and flexible show production tools for marketers with an industry-first focus on simplified orchestration - with best-in-class workflows, integrations, and analytics. Their early customers are companies we consider masters of event marketing and community building - like Drift and Github. When we met them in early 2021 as an investor, I wished they had launched their product a year earlier for my old marketing team. 

Why better event orchestration is a game changer for B2B marketing

Even before lockdowns were announced in 2020, there was a secular shift happening in B2B marketing. Traditional channels (email nurture, outbound calling) were getting less effective. Marketing emails never ended up in anyone’s priority inbox and cold emails from SDRs got fewer responses day by day. The traditional GTM was clearly in decline. 

Modern GTM was on the rise. More software companies were investing in community, education, and product-led growth, changing the activities that mattered at the top of the funnel. With a push from the pandemic, virtual events have emerged as one of the best ways to engage and nurture a company’s audience — by helping them learn and grow together with their peers and community leaders. 

However, to fulfill their promise, event marketing needs to scale as effectively as email nurture, which requires great orchestration. When I met with Palash Soni, the CEO of Goldcast, it was clear that the Goldcast team was the right one to take on this challenge. 

Orchestration: Seamless sales team workflows for event marketing 

They had a strong background in B2B software products, marketing operations, and event engineering as a founding team. Most importantly, they had dug into the murkiest depths of event marketing workflows to understand how the proverbial sausage was made and had great empathy for event marketers. 

Visibility: Real time tracking of attendee engagement 

Over the past year, Goldcast has grown its customer base and revenue by 10x with the best product reviews in its category. Huge congrats to Palash, Kishore, Aashish and the entire Goldcast team on the progress they have made towards their vision of making virtual events the new top engagement platform for all B2B companies. 

If you want to check out the Goldcast community, try their weekly show - CMO Diaries featuring marketing leaders from high-growth software companies around the world.