13 Years, One Very Big Next Chapter

I’ve rewritten the first sentence of this post more times than I’d like to admit.

Partly because I’m a writer, and I want the words to be right.

Mostly because I don’t think there are perfect words for this.

There are 13 years behind this announcement. Thirteen years of ideas, pivots, wins, mistakes, late nights, very early mornings, impossible problems, incredible people, customers who took chances on us, vendors who grew alongside us, and a team that kept believing in what Confetti could become.

So I’m not going to try to perfectly summarize 13 years in one blog post.

I’m just going to start with the news:

Stadium has acquired Confetti.

And perhaps the most important sentence I can write after that is this:

Confetti is coming with us.

Our team is coming with us.
Our host and vendor community is coming with us.
Our customers are coming with us.
The product, the experiences, the relationships and the weird, colorful, deeply human personality we spent all these years building are coming with us too.

Confetti isn’t disappearing into another company.

It’s getting a bigger home.

Why Stadium

If you’ve followed Confetti for any amount of time, you know we’ve always believed that work should feel more human.

Our entire business was built around a relatively simple idea: people need moments together. Not another message in Slack. Not another company-wide memo. Not another piece of software quietly running in the background.

Actual moments.

Moments where people laugh. Compete. Celebrate. Learn something about each other. Get a little weird together. Feel like they belong somewhere.

Over the years, Confetti grew into a platform used by more than 11,000 organizations, with hundreds of live-hosted and self-guided experiences designed to bring people together.

But our customers were increasingly telling us something else, too:

Connection doesn’t happen in one format.

Sometimes it’s an experience.

Sometimes it’s recognizing someone publicly for great work.

Sometimes it’s sending a new employee something thoughtful on their first day.

Sometimes it’s a box of snacks arriving before an event.

Sometimes it’s great swag people actually want to wear.

And companies have historically had to stitch all of those things together through a ridiculous number of vendors, budgets, logins, contracts and workflows.

That is where this combination gets really exciting.

Stadium has spent years building the infrastructure behind global recognition, rewards, gifting and engagement. It also powers Snackmagic, which makes it possible to send customizable snacks and treats around the world, and Swagmagic, which handles branded merchandise and global swag fulfillment. Stadium's infrastructure reaches 170+ countries through a massive network of partners and products.

Now Confetti adds experiences to that ecosystem.

Recognition.
Rewards.
Gifting.
Snacks.
Swag.
And now, the moments where people actually come together.

That combination makes a tremendous amount of sense to me.

What this means for Confetti customers

The thing I cared about most throughout this process was very simple:

This needed to make Confetti better for the people who already love Confetti.

Not theoretically better someday.

Actually better.

And importantly, there isn't a giant switch being flipped underneath our customers.

Confetti remains Confetti. Existing customers keep their relationships, pricing, contracts and points of contact, and Confetti remains available as its own customer-facing brand.

What changes is what we can now put around a Confetti experience.

Imagine booking an incredible team event and being able to send everyone a Snackmagic box to enjoy during it.

Imagine pairing an employee celebration with beautiful, personalized Swagmagic merchandise.

Imagine someone receiving recognition in Stadium, being rewarded with something meaningful, and then having their entire team brought together for an experience.

Imagine doing all of this globally without HR or People teams having to coordinate five different vendors.

That “before, during and after” of an experience is something Confetti customers have been asking us for for years.

We can finally do so much more of it.

And the reverse is true too: Stadium customers now have access to Confetti's live experiences and ways to connect, while Confetti customers gain access to Stadium's recognition, gifting, SnackMagic and SwagMagic ecosystem.

AI can make work faster. Humans still make it meaningful.

There’s also something about the timing of this that feels important.

We’re living through a massive shift in how work gets done.

AI is going to automate things. It already is.

It will remove friction. It will make us faster. It will make things possible that would have sounded absurd only a few years ago.

But I keep coming back to a belief I shared when Shaunak and I recently talked about this acquisition:

AI makes work faster. Humans make it meaningful.

As technology becomes better at doing the work around us, I think the human layer becomes more important, not less.

The celebration.

The thank-you.

The inside joke.

The gift that says, someone thought about me.

The hour where twelve coworkers forget about their inboxes and laugh until someone cries.

The feeling that the people you spend an enormous percentage of your waking life with actually know you.

That's the business Confetti has always been in.

And it turns out, it is very much the business Stadium wants to be in too.

Stadium's vision is to create what it calls Global Engagement Infrastructure: one ecosystem companies can use to recognize, reward, gift to and bring together their employees and customers.

When I understood that vision, I could see where Confetti belonged inside of it.

The part that's harder to put into a press release

Acquisitions get announced in very neat sentences.

“Company X acquires Company Y.”

A quote from one CEO.

A quote from the other.

A few statistics.

Maybe a paragraph about market opportunity.

But building a company isn't neat.

Confetti has been part of my life for 13 years.

There are people reading this who knew versions of me that barely resemble the person writing it today.

There were versions of Confetti that barely resemble Confetti today.

There were times I was certain we were going to change the world.

There were times I was pretty sure we were going to die.

There were people who joined for a chapter and people who stayed for what felt like the entire book.

There were customers who bought from us before we deserved their trust.

There were vendors who took our calls before we had meaningful volume to offer them.

There were hosts who somehow took something we designed on a computer and turned it into an experience that made thousands, and eventually millions, of real humans laugh together.

And there was a team that kept showing up through every version of this company.

When you're a founder, your company becomes tangled up with your identity in ways you're probably not capable of understanding when you're starting it.

So yes, this is a business transaction.

But for me, it is also deeply personal.

And one of the things that gave me the most comfort throughout the process was knowing that we weren't simply handing over an asset and walking away.

The same people who built Confetti are continuing forward. The same network, product and experiences continue forward, now with Stadium's much larger infrastructure and distribution behind them.

That's very different from an ending.

It feels much more like expansion.

To everyone who got us here

To our team:

You built this.

Every impossible customer request you solved. Every event you rescued. Every product decision you fought for. Every bug you fixed. Every experience you created. Every host you trained. Every sales call. Every support ticket. Every moment where “this probably isn't possible” somehow became “okay, it's live.”

There is no Confetti without you.

To our hosts and vendors:

You are not a supply chain to me.

You are Confetti.

Our customers may book through our platform, but you are the people who actually deliver the magic.

Thank you for trusting us with your businesses, your talents and your livelihoods.

To our customers:

There are more than 11,000 organizations that have booked Confetti over the years. That number is incredible to me, but it also hides what actually matters.

Behind every “organization” was a person.

Someone in HR who needed their remote team to feel less remote.

Someone trying to celebrate people after a hard quarter or layoff.

Someone who just wanted their team to have fun on a Thursday afternoon.

You trusted us with those moments.

Thank you.

And to every investor, advisor, partner, friend, family member, former employee, cheerleader, critic, early adopter and person who ever told someone, “You should try Confetti”:

Thank you.

Truly.

I have enough stories from the last 13 years to write a book, not a blog post. Maybe one day I will.

For today, I'm mostly sitting in the strange combination of pride, relief, nostalgia and excitement that comes with getting to say:

We built something worth carrying forward.

And now we get to see how much bigger it can become.

Welcome to the next chapter of Confetti.

And welcome, Confetti, to Stadium. 🎉

For the formal announcement and the conversation with Shaunak Amin and me about why we did the deal, what it means for customers and where we believe employee engagement is heading next, visit WorkTech / 1WorkTech. The WorkTech conversation announcing the deal features both CEOs discussing the acquisition and its strategy.

To our customers, our team, our hosts, our vendors and everyone who gave this company a chance over the last 13 years:

Thank you for throwing Confetti with us.

There is so much more of it ahead.