XLIVE is proud to present its second annual list of Emerging Leaders. Our group of 2022 winners includes young event professionals — across both B2B and Fan Experience — whose innovation, creativity, and drive are pushing the industry forward. We will be featuring all of the winners on XLIVE over the coming weeks, so be sure to check back!
Event tech platform InEvent started as an app when co-founders Pedro Góes, Vinicius Neris, and Mauricio Giordano were in college. Góes and Giordano both studied Computer Engineering, while Neris was studying Mechanical Engineering. They eventually started working with events, and decided to pivot to event technology specifically.
“We’ve been at it for close to a decade now and in that time, we’ve experienced tremendous growth and several changes,” shares Góes. “With sheer grit and tenacity however, we have stayed the course and continue to innovate and evolve daily.”
InEvent has indeed grown into a full-fledged virtual and hybrid event platform, working with events in APAC, EMEA, and North America, with Góes serving as CEO. Like other event tech companies, InEvent has had to adapt to ongoing challenges and changes within the events industry as in-person events return.
“I think adjusting once again to the clamor for in-person events has been interesting and challenging in its own way,” he notes. “We had to create and deliver a lot of new products, including housing, travel and registration modules. Customers are no longer accepting a temporary solution, they want the final industry standard product available to them from day one. But as has been the history of InEvent to this point, we’ve stayed adaptable.”
Góes shares that the recent shift back to in-person meetings has triggered an exodus from the event tech industry, which is still bigger than it was pre-pandemic but is no longer seeing the boom from the height of the pandemic.
“This new landscape is less competitive currently but more demanding,” he says, “as customers require a strong combination of labor and technology, most of it in-person and face-to-face. Travel is great, but once you have to do layovers of 4 hours every week, it starts to highlight which companies are resilient in the event industry and those that aren't.”
Within the next few years, Góes foresees a major merge between travel tech and event tech. “Customers are thinking of their events as experiences, and those experiences do not start on the event's first day keynote,” he says. “It starts much earlier, when you register, pack your bags, go to the airport and more. Technology can be used to organize all this information and turn complex meetings into accessible projects for attendees. It is a major task that our company and team of 200 InEventers is pushing forward very strongly for 2023.”
In addition, he believes that moving forward, “it will be crucial for event stakeholders, and more specifically event technology platforms to see the future with fresh eyes, as the industry requirements are again changing.” When it comes to integrating travel tech with events, for example, he notes that most players do not have the bandwidth to create these new products with their tech teams.
He adds, “Presently, there is a gap between affordable platforms who are not delivering 100% of the things event planners are looking for, and very expensive solutions that fill all the requirements but lack an out-of-the-box product solution. Filling that void with the right amount of services, partners, and software will be key for 2022 and 2023.”
When he’s not thinking about the future of events and needs to unwind and detach from working, Góes enjoys reaching and watching movies, and he is a big LEGO fan. He also makes time to swim twice a week at night when his workday is over.