How Voxel51 planned their biannual team retreats
How Voxel51 planned their biannual team retreats
Victoria Kwon · 9/14/2023
Voxel51, on a mission to bring transparency and clarity to the world of data through their platform FiftyOne, partnered with BoomPop to plan their biannual team retreats.
We spoke with Voxel51's Chief Operating Officer, Dave Mekelburg, to delve into his experience of working with BoomPop planners. Mekelburg shared how this partnership not only elevated their team retreats but also saved him valuable time so he can focus on other critical aspects of his role.
Scaling team retreats for a fast-growing company
In the early days of last year, Voxel51’s team comprised just four people, but fast forward to 2023, they have grown to 26 people spread all across North America from Costa Rica to Canada and everywhere in between.
Bringing their remote team in-person twice a year was always part of the company’s operating plan. Their first retreat was held in June 2022 around the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR) in New Orleans.
As COO, Mekelburg wore many hats including planning the retreat which felt manageable for a group of nine in a city Mekelburg was very familiar with.
However, as the team expanded and sought new destinations for their 2023 retreats, Mekelburg knew he would need to seek the help from external planners to pull the event off and began researching who could help.
Beyond handling the planning logistics, Mekelburg was seeking a partner who could translate their vision into a reality. “It was crystal clear that I should work with BoomPop. We had a specific feeling that we wanted to capture with our retreat—something that was hard to put pen to paper to describe,” said Mekelburg. “And BoomPop was the only one that not only understood it, but came back with concrete suggestions of what we could do and immediately started to walk us down the path.”
Turning a vision into reality
Voxel51’s most recent retreat in August aimed for an experience that would refresh, energize, and provide space to relax, while also being together. BoomPop’s Event Experts got to work to make it a reality, beginning with where to go.
Mekelburg gave a high-level description of their desired destination: “We want to go somewhere that’s going to be nice in August, with beautiful nature, and a place to stay that when people get there, they go ‘whoa, we get to stay here? This is so cool’.” The BoomPop team picked a location at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge, bringing together the vibrancy of San Francisco with its natural beauty.
Once the location was set, BoomPop Event Experts helped Mekelburg curate activities that would bring the whole experience together. Mekelburg wanted to do an activity that would capture the art and heartbeat of old San Francisco but wasn’t sure what that would look like.
BoomPop planners suggested renting a theater at Audium, an immersive sound experience where listeners hear “sound sculptures'' through 176 speakers in complete darkness. For Mekelburg, the activity was exactly what he was looking for. He states, “No amount of googling was going to take the team and me to Audium. You’re just not thinking about a world where you can rent out an entire theater and give everyone this insanely special experience.”
Focusing on what matters
With the help of BoomPop, Mekelburg could shift his focus to the other crucial aspects of his role while being reassured that one of the most important components of their company culture was in good hands.
As someone whose core responsibility wasn’t event planning, Mekelburg states with BoomPop planners, “you have an extra set of people also thinking about your event that can help steer and make things happen. It’s not just execution, it’s also the creativity,”
The biggest value of partnering with BoomPop, according to Mekelburg, lies in having a trusted partner who can transform a vision into reality while seamlessly handling logistics. He emphasized, “Being able to take a vision, make it real, and handle all of the logistics that you don’t want to think about—it’s absolutely magical. It is very rare that in such a short period of time, you can bring a vision directly to life. It’s happened twice now, and it’s wild.”
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