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.
In a world where work is a huge portion of your life and increasingly distributed, that kind of connection is more valuable than ever. Here's the story of how Marco got here.
Marco 1.0: Virtual Experiences (2020)
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. In those early days, our founder was 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 single magician on our platform booked over $500,000 in events through Marco.
What started with a PDF of a dozen hosts scaled into an Airbnb-style marketplace for group experiences. We onboarded hundreds of hosts and brought together thousands of employees from companies like Apple, Netflix, and Meta.
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 and Venues
As the world emerged from COVID, people craved in-person connection. Marco expanded into highly curated group experiences for companies in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
These ranged from private omakase dinners for executive teams, to sandwich tours around Brooklyn, to full company picnics on Governors Island. Each experience was hand-selected for the specific group - not a generic activity, but something that matched the team's culture and goals.
We also began helping companies find venues in our anchor cities for holiday parties, private dinners, conferences, and team events. The same curatorial approach that worked for experiences - deeply vetted, tailored to the client - translated perfectly to venue sourcing.
Marco 1.2: Offsites and 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.
With hybrid work now the norm - 52% of U.S. employees work in a hybrid arrangement, 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 across distributed teams.
But planning offsites turned out to be a massive operational challenge. EAs, People Ops teams, and Chiefs of Staff were managing venues, vendors, budgets, and timelines without the right tools or experience. They were spending 40-60 hours per offsite on logistics that should have been simple. So we built the infrastructure to solve that.
Our offsites business grew rapidly. We planned everything end-to-end: sourcing hotels with negotiated group rates, booking activities and team-building experiences, creating guest experience portals for attendees, coordinating on-the-ground logistics, and more.
The results spoke for themselves:
- 3,000+ curated properties in our venue network
- 20-30% average savings on hotel group rates vs. direct booking
- 500+ offsites planned across every major U.S. destination
- Clients including Apple, Netflix, Meta, Hampton, Gem, K18, Axiom Cloud, and hundreds more
Full-service retreat planning remains core to Marco's business, and we're extremely proud of it. Teams come to us with a budget, a headcount, and a vague sense of what they want - and we deliver an experience their people remember for years.
Marco 2.0: Instant Offsites
While we continue to plan company offsites and retreats for big moments - full-company gatherings, sales kickoffs, leadership summits, and President's Club events - we realized many teams need help with smaller, more frequent travel needs.
Not every team gathering requires a full-service planner. Sometimes a team lead just needs to book 10 rooms at a great hotel in Nashville for a quarterly sync. Sometimes a VP wants to fly their direct reports to San Francisco for two days of working sessions and a team dinner. These trips happen far more often than annual all-hands retreats - and they're just as painful to plan.
That insight led to Marco 2.0: Instant Offsites. We're building technology that makes it as easy to plan a team trip as it is to book a restaurant reservation. Leveraging our network of 3,000+ properties, our negotiated rates, and advances in AI, Instant Offsites brings Marco's quality and value to every team gathering - not just the big ones.
The vision is straightforward: every team that works together should be able to gather in person without the planning being a barrier. Whether it's a 10-person engineering sprint or a 200-person company retreat, Marco should make it effortless.
We're excited about what's coming. Get in touch if you want early access.
What Hasn't Changed
Through virtual experiences, in-person events, full-service retreats, and now Instant Offsites, one belief has been constant: when teams experience something together, everything gets better.
Trust deepens. Alignment sharpens. People stay longer. Work feels more meaningful. The format changes, but the impact doesn't.
Ready to plan your next team gathering? Take our retreat quiz and we'll help you find the right format for your team.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the difference between Marco's full-service retreats and Instant Offsites?
Full-service retreats are end-to-end planned by Marco's team - we handle venue sourcing, activity booking, guest experience portals, and on-the-ground coordination. Instant Offsites are self-service, giving teams the tools and negotiated rates to plan smaller, more frequent gatherings on their own.
Does Marco still offer virtual experiences?
Yes. Our virtual experiences marketplace is still active with hundreds of hosts. Teams can book virtual wine tastings, cooking classes, mindfulness workshops, and more for remote team building.
What types of companies use Marco?
Marco works with companies ranging from 20-person startups to Fortune 500 enterprises. Our clients include tech companies, financial services firms, healthcare organizations, and professional services firms. The common thread is that they value in-person connection and want to invest in it intentionally.
How do I know which Marco service is right for my team?
Start with our retreat quiz. It takes 2 minutes and helps our team understand your needs, budget, and timeline. From there, we'll recommend the right approach - whether that's full-service planning, group booking, or Instant Offsites.