venue-sourcing
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Cvent Nearly Died With $400,000 on the Founder’s Credit Cards. Then It Sold for $4.6 Billion.
A lawyer built software to escape the sticky-note chaos of event planning. The dot-com crash nearly buried it; a two-sided event machine, two IPOs and a private-equity relay turned it into a $4.6 billion business.
Marco Experiences
Marco Experiences is a San Francisco startup that turns the miserable job of booking a company offsite into something closer to a search box. Its AI scans 4,000-plus vetted hotels, negotiates group rates 20-40% below retail, and lets teams book rooms, meeting space, and meals with no phone calls, contracts, or service fees. Founded in 2019 by Suman Siva and Nick Freeman, Marco started life as a social-events product, pivoted through virtual experiences during the pandemic, and landed on group travel for distributed teams - now used by 5,000+ teams including Figma, Gusto, Ramp, and Notion.