Marco's journey has unfolded in several distinct chapters over the last five years.
Now, as we prepare to share what we’ve been quietly working on for the past 18 months—what we’re calling Marco 2.0—we wanted to take a moment to reflect on how we got here.
Marco has taken many forms over the years. But through every iteration, one core problem has remained at the center:
How do we help teams feel connected through shared experiences?
Our formats have evolved—from virtual events to in-person dinners to full-scale offsites—but the mission hasn’t.
We’ve always believed that when teams experience something together—something real, memorable, and a little out of the ordinary—it strengthens everything else: trust, alignment, performance, and retention.
And in a world where work is 1) a huge portion of your life, and 2) increasingly distributed, that kind of connection is more valuable than ever.
Marco 1.0 | Virtual Experiences
In 2020, with no end to COVID lockdowns in sight, we started experimenting with virtual events.
A friend at a large tech company mentioned they hadn’t seen their coworkers in months—and asked if we could help host a virtual wine tasting. That first request opened the floodgates.
We began finding and onboarding incredible experience hosts—everything from painters to sommeliers to magicians. Sometimes we even trained them ourselves.
I still remember biking across San Francisco, delivering paint kits to attendees’ doorsteps.
We offered Zoom happy hours, virtual magic shows, coffee tastings, breathwork sessions—you name it, we ran it.
At one point, a magician on our platform booked over $500K in events through Marco.
We started with a PDF of a dozen hosts and scaled it into an Airbnb experience level marketplace, tailored towards groups, onboarding hundreds of hosts, and bringing together thousands of employees.
The virtual experiences business is still live today—if your team wants to do an orange wine tasting or a mindfulness workshop, you can still book it on Marco.
Marco 1.1 | In-Person Experiences & Venues
As we emerged from COVID, people began to crave in-person experiences.
The Marco team expanded to in-person experiences, launching highly curated group experiences for companies in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
These experiences ranged from a private Omakase dinner for execs, to a sandwich tour around Brooklyn for teams, to full company picnics on Governors island.
We also began helping companies bring their people together in larger events at hand-picked venues in our 3 anchor cities for holiday parties, private dinners, conferences, and more.
Marco 1.2 | Offsites & Retreats
As we built more in-person experiences, one need stood out above the rest: helping companies bring their teams together through offsites and retreats.
In fact, seeing the value ourselves, we planned a number of retreats with the Marco team before we even considered building a business in the space.
With hybrid work now the norm—52% of U.S. employees, according to Gallup—companies needed intentional moments to bring people together. Offsites, retreats, and onsites became the most powerful way to build alignment and connection.
Booking and planning offsites turned out to be a massive amount of work. EAs, people, and ops teams were left managing venues, vendors, budgets, and timelines without the right tools, technology, or experience. So we built them.
Our offsites business began to grow, and quickly became the focus of our business. We planned everything from start-to-finish, booking hotels, onsite and offsite vendors, creating microsites for employees, and more.
Our full-service retreats offering continues to be core to our business at Marco, and we are extremely proud of it. But as we began to think about how to solve the problem of group travel at scale, and how to leverage advances in AI to better help our customers and hotel partners, a broader vision for Marco began to emerge.
Marco 2.0 | Instant Offsites
While we continue to plan company offsites and retreats for big moments—like full-company gatherings, sales kickoffs, and more—we realized many teams need help with smaller, more frequent travel needs.
We’re excited to share what’s coming and will be launching soon. Stay tuned.
