# Lee's story — from aspiring entrepreneur to Confetti CEO - **Episode:** [119](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/119.md) (2024-07-30) - **Type:** interview - **Tags:** entrepreneur-story, ceo-journey, confetti - **Time:** 4:28–11:20 (start 268s) - **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/119?t=268](https://truthliesandwork.com/119?t=268) --- [4:28] Lee Rubin: I'm Lee Rubin. I'm the founder and CEO at Confetti. I'm one of the world's experts in employee culture and event planning, especially virtual team building, because that's That's really the essence of what Confetti is all about. My company, Confetti, has over 8,000 customers, and we've worked with companies like Google, Facebook, Shopify, Spotify, Pinterest, Etsy, you name it. All the logos in the book, we work with over 30% of all Fortune 500s in improving their company's culture. And in short, Confetti is like the easiest way to discover, plan, book unforgettable virtual and hybrid employee experiences, anything from like hosted games to shippable classes. It's really the, the only platform that takes care of the entire planning process end to end, but with a happiness policy, because we care so much about the quality and ultimately making sure everybody has a great time. And there's truly something for everyone [5:28] Al Elliott: Was there a point in your life where you suddenly decided, yep, this is my passion, this is what I'm gonna, gonna do for, for the foreseeable future? Or has it just evolved? How did it all start? [5:38] Lee Rubin: Oh, it definitely, it definitely evolved, I think. So I'll just give you kind of my, my little career story and through that evolution. But I'd always wanted to be an entrepreneur from a very young age. I didn't even fully know what I wanted in the scope of entrepreneurialism. I just wanted— I knew that I liked creating, I liked building [6:05] Al Elliott: Yeah [6:06] Lee Rubin: I like playing around. Like, I still call it play, even though some people would be like, this is not play. You're an adult. This is venture capital money. And this is like real people. But like, to me, there's still an essence of play. And I came out of college, I worked in a company called Zocdoc as a sales team member. And there was a really kind of beautiful evolution at the time because there was this trend of the best place to work, which is now a pretty recognizable brand and opportunity for companies to be able to showcase their culture. And Zocdoc was an exponentially growing startup with new venture capital money, and they were, they were succeeding. And they were recruiting really hardcore. They needed to bring on a ton of people, and in doing so, they were very generous with their culture budgets. So we got, as a team, in the spirit of, you know, them trying to promote that, that Zocdoc was a great place to work, really generous budgets of around $100, $120 per quarter per per person to spend on team building. And it was at that point that I saw the opportunity because I was tasked with planning these events often, and I found out how difficult it was to plan these events. So when I first started the Confetti journey, I had this element of myself that I was like, I knew I wanted to build something of my own. I saw this pain and opportunity where it's like, it's really hard to plan events. What happens if there was a solution that would make it easier for teams to find something great and put it together. And then that evolved to realizing at the time marketplaces were trending. As you can imagine, like Airbnb was at the start of its kind of, you know, popular, more trending side of it, of its Like path. Zocdoc was a marketplace. So, so Confetti started off as a marketplace where any vendor could just come on and, you know, share what team building opportunities they could offer. And then companies could just, you know, click book. And then if you don't like it, review it and give it a bad review. But I realized there was really a miss of an opportunity. Because it was really amazing to follow up with customers when the events were great. And it was really crappy to follow up with customers when the events were not great. People really don't like going into a bad event. And there's so much social pressure as the organizer when, when you put together a bad event. So that's when I made the change within Confetti that quality was really core and key to what it is that we're building. And after that, the quality became kind of the focus of Confetti. Like, even today, we don't have review systems on our platform openly, like, displayed in typical fashion because we don't want anything under 5 stars. So we're monitoring every single piece of feedback that's set from a human. We review the constructive feedback and literally implement it immediately. And if things through the vetting process, through scale, just doesn't hit the mark, then it doesn't stay on our platform. It either becomes a 5-star event or it gets the chopping block. I really loved seeing how these positive events affected culture. And I realized that it's not just about the event, it's really about You know, the dynamics of people working together and how events is often just that foot in the door that can spark a conversation that can, you know, make people take off their, their mask for a second and be silly or competitive or whatever else. You know, I don't know. I don't know about you, but me and my significant other, as soon as we play like Monopoly together, we put ourselves in like some kind of competitive place where all of a sudden we're like, oh, you're going down. And we start shit talking like crazy. You know, you really You do start seeing these fun, playful, different sides of people. And I became obsessed with not just like the quality of the events themselves, but what other items in culture can lead to something positive or negative, and how can events still be very much a facilitator of that. But the culture is so much deeper than just the events itself, as I mentioned [11:14] Leanne Elliott: Yeah [11:15] Lee Rubin: All that, all the crap in between and the people dynamics, that's very challenging to navigate