Today's entrepreneur: Allie Magyar

Remember that tomorrow is a new day with new challenges and that you can always try again

Today's entrepreneur is Allie Magyar, founder of Hubb, a company that offers virtual and hybrid platform solutions to help conference and meeting professionals plan, build and manage their onsite and online events from start to finish.

Founded in 2015, Hubb has raised $9.5 million in venture funding. 

Magyar is serial entrepreneur and technology maven with over 15 years’ experience driving technology enabled service companies. As President and CEO of Dynamic Events for over a decade, she traveled around the world producing events for some of the biggest names in technology.

Seeing the need for a tool to organize and manage the events she and her team were producing, she created Hubb in 2012 and rolled it out to the wider world in 2015. In 2016, Magyar helped Hubb raise millions in venture funding and win the Bend Venture and Seattle Angel conferences.

When she's not working, she loves to cook, drive fast cars, and spend time with her husband and two children. 

I am a(n): 

Entrepreneur

Companies I've founded or co-founded:

Hubb; Dynamic Events, an innovative event solutions company that is re-inventing the way attendees engage and interact at events; Impulse Productions, created and produced the Import Motion and Import Life car show series

Companies I work or worked for:

Hubb

Achievements (products built, personal awards won):

Giving back to the local community is a core tenet of my leadership, and I am passionate about driving positive corporate culture. My companies have won several regional awards such as “Healthiest Workplace” and “Most Philanthropic.”

I am CMP certified, a member of Vistage, a two-time Inc. 5000 award winner, and was also listed as one of the 2013 Collaborate 40 under 40 in the meetings industry. 

I am an experienced speaker who has presented at conferences such as CEMA, Event Tech Live, Inclusive Summits and ACT-W Portland. I am passionate around changing the conversation as it relates to women in technology and equal opportunities for all within the venture capital world.

If you're an entrepreneur or corporate innovator, why?

I want to change the world.

My favorite startups:

Slumberkins & Realwear are two local startups that I love

Why did you start your company or why do you want to innovate inside your company?

As an experienced meeting and events professional, I saw a pain point in the industry. So I started my company a few years back to solve that. Now, I'm the CEO & founder of the event content management platform Hubb and I lead a team which powers some of the world’s largest events with the best technology on the market.

Hubb’s event management solutions & powerful business intelligence tools bring innovation & data-driven decision making to the events industry. With Hubb's application of machine learning and AI providing valuable data and insights, we continue to move our mission forward of helping event managers make smarter decisions around event content & improving event ROI.

Event tech is an often overlooked yet critical and profitable sector of the MarTech stack. Event management is a critical element of the marketing toolkit and one with its own well-developed ecosystem, promising to follow similar trend lines as the now-dominant category of MarTech. Events and digital experiences, whether fully virtual or hybrid, and the tools needed to run them, are just as important as the other elements of a company’s MarTech stack.

When COVID-19 struck, companies and conference teams large and small were thrown for a loop with events of all sizes, including major conferences like SXSW, being canceled. Event planners were suddenly faced with figuring out what to do, how to survive and where the industry was headed. The downstream effects on the event industry hit hard, including event tech, much of which is focused on the onsite experience. Our clients were canceling events and coming to us for help on what to do. Virtual events, once the red headed stepchild of the events industry, became the hottest essential.

Our engineering team tweaked some of the previously lesser-used parts of the Hubb platform to meet the current demand for virtual events. After a bumpy initial Q2 due to covid-19 cancellations, Hubb is now thriving due to its robust virtual event capabilities. Q2 sales and pipeline crushed expectations. I'm excited to lead Hubb into the second half of the year with strong revenue and a renewed company mission.

What's most frustrating and rewarding about entrepreneurship/innovation?

Most frustrating: As an entrepreneur, you have to do so many things that it's hard to do one thing really well. And there are a lot of tasks and priorities. This is where I struggle because I want to do a fantastic job at everything.

I've learned to prioritize and focus on one thing at a time to ensure that I do my best work.

Most rewarding: Definitely the ability to affect change in my own life, those around me and my colleagues in the industry. Whenever you see that, as an entrepreneur, you're able to build something useful or help someone succeed, it's a very satisfying feeling.

What's the No. 1 mistake entrepreneurs/innovators make?

The number one mistake that I have made as an entrepreneur was trying to take on and do too many things myself. Learning to delegate is a skill that I'm working on. Sometimes it's easy to think that you'll just do a task yourself and get it done on your own. But that can waste a lot of productivity and time. Delegating tasks helps people on your team learn new skills and stretch.

What are the top three lessons you've learned as an entrepreneur?

• Lesson one: It's not the end of the world if things don't work out. Remember that tomorrow is a new day with new challenges and that you can always try again.
• Lesson two: My company is not me and I am not my company. It's easy to place all of your value into your company and forget that you're human too. Recognize that self-care, relationships and health also matter as an entrepreneur.
• Lesson three: People will come and go in your career and that's ok. For example, employees will leave your company and move on to new roles. Adopt the mindset of what can I learn from their departure and how can I support them when they decide to move on.