Building An Offsite Cadence (For Team Retreats and Community Engagement As A Leading VC Firm)

Our Client

Forum Ventures is the leading early-stage fund, program and community for B2B SaaS startups. Founded in 2014 as Acceleprise, their 250+ portfolio companies have gone onto raise from NEA, Andreessen Horowitz, Uncork Capital,8VC, Founders Fund, Menlo Ventures, Canaan, Bowery Capital, Susa Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, SV Angel, True Ventures and many more.

Forum For Founders, their pre-seed program, provides founders with $100k in funding and 15 intense weeks of talks, events, mentorship and 1:1 guidance focused on go to market and fundraising. Forum Seed, our seed fund, backs exceptional SaaS startups at the seed-stage both from within and outside of our pre-seed program. Learn more at www.forumvc.com

Making The Shift To “Remote-First”

Prior to the pandemic, Forum Ventures operated in New York, San Francisco, and Toronto with in-person accelerator programs. In fact, they would only invest in companies whose founders they’d met in-person, and expected founders to work in their offices during the program.

Making the transition to remote-first out of necessity was difficult, and by the time Forum Ventures was planning their own team retreat, there were employees who hadn’t me tone another yet as “COVID” hires.

With a location and venue in mind, but little else planned, Forum Ventures decided to hire Offsite and allow us to support their team-building efforts by curating and executing a team retreat in October 2021.

While some logistical challenges presented themselves, such as flight delays and international travel during a COVID flair-up, ultimately the team enjoyed a few days together in upstate New York and posted later on social media that the Offsite was the highlight of their year.

Saving Time and Stress In Planning Offsites While Maximizing ROI

Faye and Forum Ventures hired Offsite largely to take away the stress of planning logistics. What they got was so much more.

“Having you guys decide what made sense for the team was really great. It took a weight off in terms of making those decisions…I didn’t expect you guys to go so deep with helping us solve some of our internal struggles."

Offsite coordinated with the venue owner, activity providers, caterers, and more so that Faye didn’t have to think about it.

We also provided an hour-by-hour agenda complete with notes on how to self-facilitate “icebreakers” such as TEDx-style Talks, where each attendee would get a few minutes to give a speech on a hobby or something outside of work that they were an expert in.

Ultimately, the Forum Ventures team left their retreat more connected, aligned on strategy for 2022 and beyond, and committed to a longer-term partnership with Offsite.

Committing To Regular Offsites

After our first Offsite with Forum Ventures, they’ve committed to planning All-Hands meetings every six months, and then more frequent Offsites at the department-level.

Additionally, Forum Ventures is exploring regular Portfolio CEO retreats, LP retreats, and other community-facing events. Ultimately, as a venture capital firm, Forum is in the people business and building deep, meaningful relationships internally and with their founders through regular Offsites is one of the highest leverage activities they can invest in each year.

Since Forum’s Offsite, we’ve also planned Portfolio CEO retreats for numerous other VC firms, including Greylock and XRC Labs.