‘Boring’ Compounds. 20+ years of investment in the picks and shovels of live events
“Picks and shovels” is one of the oldest ideas in capital allocation, and it comes from the original gold rush. Back then, the reliable money was never in the river. It was in supplying the people standing in it, because a supplier gets paid on every claim, whether or not the claim ever pays out.
My previous PE article looked at our industry from the miners' side: The organisers; and explained what two decades of private equity did to them. Turn the same lens ninety degrees, and a different industry comes into view. If organisers are the miners, who sells the picks and shovels?
The halls: venues and convention centres.
The tech: registration, badging, lead capture, matchmaking.
The production: AV, staging, rigging.
The floor: general contractors, stand builders, drayage.
The agencies: experiential, brand experience, professional congress organisers.
Twenty years of capital has also flowed into that list. Some of it compounded beautifully. Some of it produced the most spectacular value destruction this (or any) industry has ever witnessed. The difference lay in what each investor believed about face-to-face interaction. Let’s start with the obvious:
A shovel maker cannot bet against the mine
Hopin was founded in 2019 and launched in the first weeks of 2020, days before the world shut down for the first time. What followed has no real precedent in this industry. Eight employees became more than 800. The company raised roughly a billion dollars in about two years. The valuation ladder ran from a few hundred million to $2.1bn in November 2020, to $5.65bn the following March, to $7.75bn in August 2021. It spent as fast as it raised, buying five companies in 2021 alone, including StreamYard for $250m. By then, Hopin was running around $100m in annual recurring revenue. The August round priced it at roughly 78X that, against a software market average of 20X to 25X. The ratio was not hidden. EventMB had flagged it five months before the peak round.
The names on the cap table were not amateurs: Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, IVP, Tiger Global, Coatue, Salesforce Ventures, Temasek, GIC, Altimeter, Arena Holdings.
It is worth being precise about what they were buying, because they wrote it down. Andreessen Horowitz's investment note said that whatever gathering looked like in the future, "it won't look like events did before." Brad Gerstner of Altimeter, co-leading the round that set the $7.75bn mark, said the pandemic had "forever changed how companies and communities interact."
These were serious investors making a defensible call at a time when even meeting your friends was illegal. The point is not that they were foolish. The point is they were pricing a permanent reduction in the value of being in the room.
And here is the structural problem with that trade. Hopin was a picks-and-shovels business. It sold tools to event organisers. But it was underwriting the opposite of its own customers' business. A shovel maker cannot bet against the mine. If the diggers stop digging, there is nobody left to buy shovels. If they don't stop, the bet was simply wrong. And Hopin's valuation depended on permanent behavioural change that was ultimately adverse to the underlying live-events ecosystem it served.
The diggers did not stop. Live events returned, Hopin staff were cut by around 29%, and in August 2023 they sold their core events assets to RingCentral for roughly $15m, with up to $35m more contingent on targets. The UK entity went into liquidation in 2024. From $7.75bn to almost nothing in about the time it takes to plan and run two editions of a trade show.
Hopin was not alone, merely the largest. Billions were invested in virtual-event startups across 2020 and 2021. The vast majority of that cohort never raised again.
Figure 1 · B2B event tech
The bet and the backbone
Flagship valuations, 2013–2026 ($bn). Cvent went public, private, public and private again — and compounded through all four. The platforms that bet against the room did not.
Four ownership changes in twelve years. The line still points up.
Points are reported transaction values, enterprise values, IPO valuations and funding-round post-money marks — not a continuous market price; lines interpolate between dated events. Cvent: NYSE IPO Aug 2013 at $21/share (~$0.8bn at offer, closing up ~57% on day one); Vista take-private Nov 2016 ($1.65bn); Dragoneer SPAC Dec 2021 ($5.3bn EV); Blackstone take-private Jun 2023 ($4.6bn EV); Vista sells its residual stake to Blackstone Jul 2025 ($1.3bn) leaving Blackstone in majority ownership; ~$700m of acquisitions Dec 2025 (Goldcast, ON24). Hopin: Series B Nov 2020 ($2.1bn); Series D Aug 2021 peak ($7.75bn); sale to RingCentral Aug 2023 (~$15–50m); UK entity liquidation 2024. ON24: IPO Feb 2021 ($2.22bn); acquired by Cvent Dec 2025 ($400m). Sources: Blackstone, Cvent, Forbes, Cbonds, Hotel Dive, Private Equity Wire, Sifted, City AM, Skift, Event Tech Live.
The same pattern now stretches far beyond software: through AV, venues and agencies, and ultimately into sports and the wider economy built around people gathering in rooms.
Bets and investments
The distinction that matters is not between good investors and bad ones. It is between two kinds of capital doing different jobs.
Venture capital underwrites bets. Private equity underwrites backbones. A bet is what customers try in a boom. An investment is what they cannot run a Tuesday without. Registration does not get cancelled when a budget is trimmed, the show still has to let people through the door.
Cvent is what the second kind looks like over twelve years. NYSE listing in 2013 at roughly $0.8bn. Vista take-private in 2016 at $1.65bn. Back to public markets via the Dragoneer SPAC in 2021 at $5.3bn. Blackstone take-private in 2023 at $4.6bn, a 52% premium to the unaffected price. Vista sold its residual stake in 2025, leaving Blackstone the majority owner.
Four ownership changes in twelve years. Public, private, public, private, and the line still points up.
The dip you see in the graph is not a systematic decline. The $5.3bn was struck at the top of the SPAC window, software multiples compressed sector-wide through 2022, and part of that mark was priced on virtual bookings that ran from $32m in 2019 to $266m in 2021 before receding. Even the backbone's peak was inflated by the bubble it survived. The $4.6bn was the sober price of what lay underneath, and Blackstone paid a premium for it.
What is it worth today? Rough guess: about what Hopin was worth at its peak.
Boring compounds.
The four fates of Event Tech
Zoom out across the event technology layer, and the outcomes are not binary. They fall into four groups, and which group a company falls into is largely determined by the type of money it took.
Compounded: Cvent, and one tier down, Stova, Aventri, and Eventcore roll-up backed by Sunstone and Camden. Both are private-equity built. Both sit on recurring, mission-critical, data-rich revenue.
Survived lean: Swapcard raised roughly $4.7m in total, never took a mania round, and is still independent, serving the likes of Clarion and others. Grip raised around $13m, stayed disciplined, and in 2024 became an acquirer itself. Bizzabo came through a down round of about 30% and pivoted back towards in-person. There are many more players in this cohort, but they haven’t raised institutional money, which leaves them out of this article’s lens.
Absorbed: Spotme went to Swiss Post, a national postal operator. Socio went to Cisco. Hubilo returned around $75m of its capital to investors before selling to Brandlive. Run the World, backed by a16z and Founders Fund, went to EventMobi and had its platform switched off within weeks: an acquisition in form, a shutdown in substance. Goldcast and ON24 went to Cvent. ON24, being the public-market version of the whole story, had a $2.22bn IPO valuation in February 2021 and sold for $400m in December 2025.
Vaporised: Hopin. That category has one member, which is worth sitting with. The feature layer did not mostly die. It mostly failed to become institutional: surviving lean, or folding into someone else's stack, but never once reaching the scale that buyout capital respects.
In December 2025, Blackstone-owned Cvent spent roughly $700m on Goldcast and ON24. The boring registration company bought the companies that were going to make registration obsolete.
Figure 2 · B2B event tech
Four fates of event tech
Where the capital came from largely decided where each company ended up. Vertical position is outcome; horizontal position is the kind of money behind it.
The agencies came last
Not to private equity. MCI had Iris Capital in 2010 and Edmond de Rothschild in 2013, all while the Tondeur family kept control. Opus took Fan Creek's growth capital in October 2015. And when CI Capital bought PRA in 2017, it was buying from Core Capital, PRA already had a sponsor.
What took longer to arrive was industrialisation: a repeatable market in which one sponsor sells to another, the buyer funds acquisitions with it, and the enlarged platform sells again.
That market turned up around 2023. EagleTree bought PRA from CI Capital that March, and The Opus Group from Growth Catalyst in April 2026. L-GAM bought out MCI's 2017 investors in 2024. Riverside took Impact XM in December 2023 and used it to pull Jack Morton out of Omnicom in January 2026. Shamrock backed Nth Degree in September 2024, then bought INVNT in April 2026. Platinum Equity took Czarnowski from the Nagle family in January 2026. And in December 2025, Blackstone's Encore bought FIRST, the AV platform swallowing the agency layer whole.
Freeman bought Sparks from EagleTree in 2023. The family-owned holdout is not sitting out the consolidation. It is bidding in the same auctions.
The agency layer came last not to private equity, but to private equity's industrialisation.
Figure 4 · agencies
The agencies came last
Not to private equity — several had sponsors well before 2015 — but to private equity’s industrialisation. What arrived after 2023 was a repeatable market: sponsors buying from sponsors, then funding acquisitions of their own.
The same hands
Follow the ownership of all these asset classes up a level, and the picture stops being about just tools.
Blackstone owns the full stack. Clarion Events, acquired in 2017 for £600m organises the show. The NEC Group, acquired in 2018 for a reported £800m, bringing with it Amadeus catering and The Ticket Factory serves the hall. PSAV, now Encore, acquired in 2018, sets the stage and turns on the lights. Cvent runs the software beneath it all.
Consider what this means in practice. Theoretically, an exhibitor at a Clarion show at the NEC stands in a Blackstone hall, catered by Blackstone, is scanned by Blackstone software, lit by Blackstone AV, probably buying a ticket through a Blackstone agency. The house owns the table, the chips, the lights, and the door.
Blackstone has been explicit about why. Announcing the Cvent deal, senior managing director David Schwartz described the events and travel recovery as "one of Blackstone's highest-conviction investment themes."
Apollo owns something wider. Emerald and Questex, combined in 2026 into a platform of some 160 events is the organiser. The Venetian Expo operating company, acquired in 2022 for $2.25bn with VICI holding the real estate. 2.25 million square feet, home to CES, SHOT Show, AAPEX, and ISC West. And Atlético de Madrid. A majority stake of around 55%, completed in March 2026 at a club valuation near €2.5bn. That went through Apollo Sports Capital, a platform launched in September 2025, built on the $17bn Apollo has already invested in the sports ecosystem. Announcing the Emerald and Questex deal, managing director Shahid Bosan argued that AI is "elevating the value of trusted, in-person gatherings."
None of this is new. Onex ran the same trade a decade before either of them. It bought Nielsen Expositions in June 2013 for $950m, renamed it Emerald, and owned the largest trade show operator in the United States. Four years later, it bought SMG, the venue manager, which merged with AEG Facilities in 2019 to become ASM Global. For seven years, Onex owned the show and the hall manager at once. Then it sold both halves at the top. ASM Global went to Legends, majority-owned by Sixth Street, in August 2024. Emerald went to Apollo in 2026. Onex did not so much exit the thesis as hand it to the people now running it at a greater scale.
Figure 3 · ownership
The same hands
Onex ran the trade a decade before either of them, then sold both halves at the top. Blackstone bought every layer of a single event — the show, the hall, the lights, the software and now the agency. Apollo bought every kind of room, from the trade-show floor to a football stadium.
What actually compounded
Strip away the categories, and a single rule explains twenty years of returns in this industry.
The handshake is the asset. Everything that augments the handshake compounds. Everything priced on replacing it eventually gets repriced.
Which amends the doctrine we started with. Picks and shovels says: supply the diggers, don't dig. Events says something more accommodating. Here you can own the mine and the shovels (Blackstone demonstrably does), provided every asset you own serves the face-to-face gathering.
Boring compounds. The registration database, the badge scanner, the rigging, the loading bay, the hall itself. None of it will ever be described as visionary. All of it got bought, re-bought, and marked up by PE, while the visionary alternative either survived with bruises, consolidated, or was written down to zero.
That is an IRL thesis, not an exhibitions one. The allocators already understand this.
I’ve argued before that events are handshakes businesses, that AI makes the handshake more scarce, not less, and that private equity is increasingly treating the best event platforms as assets to compound.
This is the other side of that thesis. Everything that augments the handshake compounds. Everything priced on replacing it eventually gets repriced.
If you’re a PE investor or CEO thinking about where the next layer of value comes from: pricing, rebook, data, digital, M&A, or new commercial models, that is exactly the work I do. Let’s have a quick chat, or simply send me an email.
Alternatively, The Event Strategy Bot is a good place to start.
Here’s the full dataset below:
Annex · the deal record
Twenty years of capital in the picks and shovels
Chain-defining transactions across the B2B live-events supply chain, 2007–2026. Agency rows include the sequence of institutional owners, not only the first. Enablers only — organiser deals belong to the miners’ side of the story. Filter by layer, or sort by date and value.
| # | Date ▼ | Layer | Asset | Buyer / investor | Prior owner | Type | Value ▾ | Source |
|---|
Method. Values mix reported transaction values, enterprise values, IPO valuations and funding-round marks — each is labelled in the value column. A funding round is not a sale; rounds appear only on the event-tech and virtual lines, where the boom and bust is itself the story. Several transactions were never officially disclosed and are marked as press estimates. Deal numbers are fixed and chronological, so they stay stable when the table is filtered or re-sorted; sorting by value places undisclosed deals last. Sources are the primary announcement wherever one exists — company, sponsor or newswire — and open-access reporting otherwise. Asset names link to the company where a current site exists.
