A Fireside Chat with Reggie Aggarwal, CEO CVENT

Interview by: Dr. Donna Quadri-Felitti, the Marvin Ashner Endowed Director of the Penn State School of Hospitality Management

Q/Dr. Quadri:
Welcome. We’re here tonight for the 2025 Penn State Hospitality Executive of the year presented to CVENT founder and CEO Reggie Aggarwal. We’re going to get right into your background. In the first quarter of 2023, Blackstone acquired CVENT for $4.6 billion. But in 1999, that kind of valuation wasn’t really in the crystal ball. Not everyone knows the story of how you invented this transformational, successful event management thing. Tell us the origin story: it’s 1999. You were annoyed and you created a solution. 

A/Reggie Aggarwal:
I’m very excited to be here. I’ve been to Penn State before and I’m so glad to be back. I’ve recruited here and we’ll talk about some interview advice later. 

When I was in high school and college, I was very involved in student government. I always liked events and bringing people together. I became a corporate lawyer, and it was two years after law school (about 1996) when I was organizing multiple events. There weren’t that many technology companies out there. We were doing close to 50 events a year. I was still working 60 hours a week as a lawyer, so I was going crazy. I was basically the secretary, the meeting planner, the president of the organization and kind of doing everything. The tools I used were Excel, Outlook, even yellow sticky notes. That was kind of the technology that I had. When you ask, how do you start a business? The first thing you do is find a pain point. And what was the pain point? It was organizing events. 

When I graduated from law school, I moved back to the D.C. area, and I lived with my parents. For the first year, it was just to get my bearings, but then one year kind of turned into two years, then five years. I lived at home until I was 33 years old. 

Q – I think I read a Business Insider feature article about a decade ago. The headline was “From a 33-year-old living with his parents, but to a millionaire.” 

A – That’s what you have to do as an entrepreneur. You have to make sacrifices. People don’t talk about that, but I saved a lot of money and then put a ton of money on my credit card. My parents both liquidated their 401Ks and that’s how I got the initial funding for CVENT.

Q – Parents, friends and family are always the start of businesses. And your parents have a great story. They emigrated to the US. 

A – Both my parents were engineers. Education was always important. But you know, I think they were very disappointed because back then you had two choices: to be a doctor or engineer. And when I became a lawyer, my mom cried. 

Q – You have this saying about always acting like a startup. At 5,000 employees, how do you instill a startup mentality in a culture that big? How do you do it in a culture over time and keep it fresh? 

A – We learned when starting the company, that you need everyone to think like a CEO, and run it like their own business. As examples, make your own decisions, do the right thing by the customer, and have a lot of agility. I surrounded myself with some great entrepreneurial people, and then we built a very entrepreneurial culture. 

As we grow and scale, with over 5,000 employees, to keep that culture isn’t easy. How many of you have heard of what an intrapreneur is?  An intrapreneur is an entrepreneur who doesn’t have to make a sacrifice living at home until they’re 30-something years old. I didn’t take a salary for three years, I put everything I had into the company, half a million dollars of debt on my credit cards, these are all the kind of things that you have to do. For some people, that’s not what they want to do. And I’ll be honest with you, 99% of people should not be entrepreneurs. Not everyone is built that way. 

But you can be an intrapreneur, which is what we stress at CVENT. An intrapreneur is someone who’s an entrepreneur at a large organization. The way that works is: your value system isn’t judged by rules, but by what’s right. You treat the company money like it’s your money. And, you punch above your weight. You’re bold, you’re aggressive, and you communicate a lot. 

If you look at a lot of successful organizations, that’s a hallmark of scaling —having people that have a decentralized decision making.

Q – You mentioned punching above your weight – let’s talk a little bit more about that.

A – Here’s what classically happens when you start a business. The entrepreneur says ‘the current process isn’t done right. I can do it better.’ Entrepreneurs are people who like to improve things and like to give feedback. 

When they punch above their weight, they’re vocal about things. At our company, anyone can come to me with an idea. The reality is everyone has a different lens, and it could be based on age or some other difference.
So have confidence in yourself, give ideas. That’s how you grow. And any good company will recognize that because very few people do it. Punching above your weight essentially means to have confidence in yourself. 

Q – What’s your favorite way to communicate with colleagues and family?  You’ve talked about young people in the workplace must learn from others, and we must learn from them when they come in. 

A – I have three kids. My youngest is a senior in high school and she texts everything. But she doesn’t like getting on the phone. My advice to people would be, as a leader, understand how different groups communicate. The advice I would give if you’re younger in your career is learn what your customer wants. And your “customer” might also be your boss or your executives. 

Be flexible to learn. I’ll tell you one example. When I call someone, I expect them to pick up. If I’m calling you, it’s probably important. If you’re on a call with someone, you should immediately text me, I’m on a call, can I call you back? It’s being responsive. And when someone calls me, I always look at the phone. When they email me, I don’t see it.  Learn how to communicate and be flexible with how different generations communicate. 

Q – That’s a really good point about how communications modes change, and we all have different preferences. At CVENT, you weathered two extraordinary events  first 9/11, and then the pandemic. Were there any similarities or differences on how you led through each event?  What lessons were learned? 

A – In 2001, about 90% of tech companies went bankrupt. It was Armageddon for technology. It was difficult for the world, but specifically the technology industry. The internet just came out. A lot of money was raised and companies were growing like crazy. Then funding went away, and about 90% to 95% of all companies failed in that 18-month period. 

The lessons learned were a little different — we grew to about 120 people, raised $17 million, blew through all that money, and we were about to go bankrupt. I had to cut 80% of my staff. 

It was difficult for two reasons. First, you’re letting great people go. The reality is almost every company did it. When you let that many people go, you learn a lot of lessons. The most difficult thing was figuring out the question, did we even have something that works? Clearly, after running through $17 million, I’m not clear that it was working because we couldn’t build a business that made sense. You can lose confidence. 

There’s a Japanese proverb that says, “Fall down seven times, get up eight times.” That’s what you have to do. You have to have resilience. You’re going to get knocked down, you just got to keep getting up. Too many people give up. You must be persistent and consistent. 

Number two, don’t break fundamentals. It could be your relationships or starting a business. Fundamentals never shift. It doesn’t mean you can’t be disruptive. Every dotcom back then was chasing market share. You can lose unlimited money doing that. Many companies went bankrupt because they were going against fundamentals. Also, you have to be agile. If the world changes, you have to change, too.  The last piece of advice is to remember that it’s all about the people. It is getting the right team together. You can’t accomplish anything by yourself.

Q – You maintained this company throughout a pandemic. When faced with self-doubt what advice would you give? 

A – JP Morgan just increased the chance of recession from 40% to 60%, and the markets have been crazy recently. How do you handle these events? I’m going back to fundamentals first, and persistency and consistency. Things will get better over time. They just do. When you go through difficult times, it makes you stronger. You learn more on the way down than you do on the way up.

Q – For those of us who are in this industry, we know it’s the most resilient industry. People need to travel. People want to be together. There’s something just in human nature about travel and meeting other places and seeing other destinations. It’s always about people. What advice do you have about starting, maintaining and nurturing relationships in this disconnected world? 

A – The human connection is what drives us. I can give you 100 examples of how relationships shift business. The world goes around because of relationships. You don’t have to be the smartest in the world, but if you have relationships that will accomplish a lot. 

When I started the business, my networking group understood that I knew something about events and I threw the best events in town. Investing groups invest in people not in ideas. There’s a saying that an A idea with B people will be a C company, and a company with A people with a B idea will be an A company. It’s all about the people. 

During the pandemic, 98% of our revenue was in person events and that just went away. We had about 23,000 customers, and out of those 23,000, about 15,000, were on the event side. We had 11,000 calls in three weeks to cancel contracts to cut costs.  It was a very difficult time, but we go back to the fundamentals, and we knew this would pass because again, fundamentally, people need to get together. They will get together. That was our guiding principle. 

Eric Yuan was the most famous person on the planet in 2020. When he started Zoom, he would park at CVENT and organize events in our conference rooms for his customers. We got to know Eric and we were an early Zoom customer. And then when our time came because of that relationship, we called up Eric and said, we’d love to have your name behind us. Eric ended up getting $100 million in CMA. He did it because of our relationship. 

Relationships matter throughout your life. Invest in relationships. It takes work. You get what you put into it. If you’re part of an organization, if you put time into it, you’ll get something out. You must give and don’t expect anything back. And it’ll always come back, always. Networking is not a one-way street and it’s worth investing in. 

Q – What advice would you have today to “young” Reggie, before law school, maybe sitting where our students are sitting today? 

A – I have recruited and interviewed people straight out of college. It’s amazing how unprepared people are for interviews. They will spend more time planning their spring break, and they don’t know anything about the company that’s interviewing them. How many people that interview with us even saw a 20-minute free webinar? Like, nobody. It’s just shocking. Out prepare for the interview, which is a very easy, very low standard. 

The second thing is close the interview. When you finish the interview, close it. Don’t just say thank you. Say, “You’re interviewing a lot of people. Let me tell you why I’m different.” And then give reasons and close them. 

Lastly, choose the city, not the job. you want to be in a city you want to be in, because there’s plenty of jobs.

That would probably be the other piece of advice, I would say is make a long-term investment decision. Of course, salary matters but think of the long term. Don’t focus one or two years. You’re going to be working 45 to 50 years. 

Q – Reggie, of all the times that you came to Penn State and recruited, I don’t think you did as good a job as you have tonight. One last question, what motivated you? 

A – If you’re not good at something, find what you’re good at and put all your energy in that. No one cares what you’re weak at. I have lots of weaknesses and I recognize them and hire other people who have those as strengths. Focus on your strengths. Find what you love and focus on your strengths. 

Penn State School of Hospitality Management