Run the World

Run The World was a virtual events platform that gave organizers an end-to-end toolset for online conferences, webinars and social gatherings, including event templates, ticketing and payment processing, livestreaming for keynotes and panels of up to eight speakers, interactive formats, attendee networking and post-event follow-up. The company positioned itself against webinar-style tools by emphasizing engagement and social interaction rather than one-way broadcast.

Distinctive product features included "video profiles," short Instagram Stories-style attendee introductions intended to help participants learn who else was present; "cocktail parties," which matched attendees for brief one-on-one conversations before, during or after live sessions, with the option to follow up afterward; and "fireside chats" that let audiences respond to on-stage conversations. Attendee profiles were used to match people with relevant counterparts, addressing what the founders described as the difficulty of identifying relevant contacts at physical events.

The company was headquartered in Mountain View, California, with small teams in China and Taiwan, and its staff included people from Facebook, Instagram and Amazon. It said it connected millions of users and hosted more than 50,000 virtual events between its 2019 founding and its 2023 acquisition by EventMobi.

Founding story

The idea came from founder Xiaoyin Qu's mother, a pediatric neurologist in China, who traveled from Qingdao to Chicago for her first international medical conference. She found the connections invaluable — including meeting a physician from Dubai with a patient case similar to one of her own — but the cost, two weeks away from work, and the need to apply for a US visa in Beijing made attending again impractical. Qu, then a senior product manager at Facebook and Instagram, dropped out of Stanford Graduate School of Business after a year and, with former Facebook colleague Xuan Jiang, set out to digitize the conference experience, including its social component. Before building software, the pair studied the events business through resources including PCMA's CMP online course and attendance at about 12 conferences, and tested demand by organizing their own product-manager conference using Zoom and Slack, selling roughly 300 tickets in about two weeks to attendees from around 20 countries.

Business model

Run The World sold a self-serve, one-stop software platform to event organizers, bundling event templates, ticketing, payment processing, livestreaming infrastructure, attendee networking and post-event follow-up. Rather than a pure subscription, it monetized largely by taking a share of ticket sales, and it waived set-up fees for events forced online by the COVID-19 outbreak. Customers ranged from individual organizers and community groups to large institutions such as Forbes, Meta, Amazon, the United Nations Development Programme and Harvard University.

Take-rate on ticket sales — the company retained 25% of ticket revenue in exchange for event templates, ticketing, payment processing, streaming and related services. Set-up fees were charged for events but were waived for organizers moving events online because of the coronavirus.

Traction

By May 2020, roughly three months after launch, the company reported hundreds of inbound event requests per day, more than 2,000 events hosted, and a core team that had doubled to 30 employees; headcount reached about 45 by October 2020 from around six at the start of that year. Cumulatively from founding to its 2023 acquisition, the platform said it hosted over 50,000 virtual events and connected millions of users for customers including Forbes, Meta, Amazon, the United Nations Development Programme and Harvard University. Activity contracted afterward: an April 2022 report noted its event discovery tab listed fewer than 500 events, versus more than 15,000 in November 2020.

Latest developments

In August 2023, EventMobi announced an agreement to acquire Run The World for an undisclosed amount, with Run The World customers offered the chance to migrate to EventMobi's platform over the following months with support from its customer success teams. Coverage linked the sale to the post-pandemic decline in demand for purely virtual events, noting that rival Hopin sold its events and engagement units to RingCentral in the same week; Qu declined to confirm or deny that as the reason. Qu said the company was joining EventMobi as the world settled back into in-person events.