YAP Global had its first-ever global team off-site in Spain at the end of April 2022. 23 Yappers gathered at a stunning villa in the town of Sant Pere De Ribes, located just 30 minutes away from Barcelona.
Our goals
Ahead of our offsite, we set out some goals for the team to accomplish during our week-long period of sharing sessions, workshops, brainstorming sessions, and team-building games. They are:
- to build team culture and grow stronger bonds
- to plan ahead for what we want to achieve in the next financial year
- to refine our PR quality
Eat, sleep, learn, repeat
Imagine 23 people in a 14-bedroom villa that came with a pool and a hot tub, for a week, in Spain, a famous gastronomical hub.
We had endless opportunities to bond with each other over meal preps, in-person meetings (this is rare given that our team is all across the globe!), and impeccable dining experiences in Sitges and Barcelona. Lots of conversations and laughter happened over platters of tapas and charcuterie boards (Bonus: we even had 2 private chefs come in to prepare paella for one of our dinners! Talk about luxury).
Goody bags for the team
Shoutout to Niroshini, our Operations Exec, and Becky, Samantha’s PA for sourcing a swag pack worthy of the rich & famous. We were spoilt with an entire bag of goodies – from travel pouches, adaptors, Moleskin journals, caps, jumpers, high-quality ballpoint pens, T-shirts to water bottles – we had it all! P.S.: True to our crypto-native form, we were all gifted a copy of The Cryptopians (by Laura Shin) or The Infinite Machine (by Camila Russo).
YAP Global – Truly Global
A decentralised team, for a decentralised industry: this is how we are able to serve our clients with the highest quality of service. We had Yappers flying in from cities including London, San Francisco, Cape Town, Singapore, Melbourne, and Kuala Lumpur. Meeting everyone in-person was a surreal experience for all, as most of us had been collaborating with each other on-screen. The energy was buzzing, and it was an absolute joy to finally have in-person meetings (which are usually done virtually)!
Our diversity in backgrounds is one of our strongest pillars. To celebrate our backgrounds, we were asked to bring our favourite snack from home, and do a ‘show-and-tell(-and snack!)’. We had facts about Jacob’s Marmite Twiglets from the UK, Mamee from Malaysia, and crisps/chips from America, to name a few.
Shoot for the moon
Being an ambitious team, our Goals underpin our growth strategies and steer what we do as part of our day-to-day. It was important that we set goals as a collective whole, and we made sure that we did so during our offsite. We incorporated feedback from every member of the team, across all levels. Our goal-setting spanned from areas of growth, finance as well as PR-related goals.
Learning from each other
We recognise that we all bring something to the table and that the best people to learn from, are each other. Every Yapper had been assigned a task to prepare a workshop. This spanned from journalism, pitching, marketing and DeFi (decentralised finance) knowledge.
Some of our workshop highlights include:
- Advancing Crypto Narratives Samantha Yap (CEO and founder of YAP Global) shared tips on shaping news surrounding the Crypto/DeFi/Web3 space and reminded everyone that as PR professionals, it is important that we put ourselves in the shoes of journalists
- 🎙Powerpoint Karaoke aka Powerpoint Roulette Martyna Borys (Account Director) and Judith Ugwumadu (Account Manager) led a team-building game where teams are to conduct a presentation based on Powerpoint slides that they have not seen prior to the session
- Getting to the Bottom of a Story What makes a story? In this workshop, Sam Howard (Senior Account Manager) and Sam O’Donohoe (Account Executive) ran a session on how to turn crypto projects into compelling stories for the mainstream
- The Meaning of Decentralization, according to Vitalik Buterin Mia Grodsky (Account Manager) led a group discussion of Vitalik Buterin’s essay titled “The Meaning of Decentralization” in order to understand what decentralisation means to us as individuals, why it matters, and how to frame decentralisation for different audiences
- Why Strategy Matters: What to Pitch, When and How Best to Do It Leila Stein (Senior Account Executive), Debra Nita (Senior Account Executive) and Ruby Wu (Senior Account Executive) shared why a pitching strategy needs to go beyond the announcement and how to make sure we stick the landing
- Finding your Twitter Voice CJ Cheong (Senior Account Executive) and Delon (Marketing Executive) explained why it’s important that we build our own Twitter Voice and how the network effects of honing our Voices will not only help us as individuals but also strengthen YAP Global’s branding.
- Speed Dating Pitch-off Saad Qureshi (Senior Account Manager), Judith Ugwumadu (Account Manager), and Sam Howard (Senior Account Manager) facilitated a session where everyone was given a short 1-2 minutes to pitch a client to different audiences – including “to a parent”, “to a tech journalist”, “to a podcaster”, amongst others.
Path of the Degen
One special workshop was George Harrap’s (Co-Founder of Step Finance and Head of DeFi at YAP Global) Path of the Degen workshop. This challenge was designed for us to utilise our learnings from our weekly DeFi syncs with George, in a competitive setting. Everyone was provided with some SOL tokens and tasked to grow our assets by the end of the week. Winning categories include:
- Best wallet performance (Debra Nita)
- Most interesting asset mix (Sam O’Donohoe)
- Best explanation of their portfolio (CJ Cheong)
Sam O’ Donohoe, winner of “Most interesting asset mix” writes about his experience with the Path of the Degen session here.
Scavenging For Glory
On our last day, all of us participated in a scavenger hunt around the charming town of Sitges. Split into 4 teams and armed with an iPad per team, we clocked in some serious step counts while completing tasks at checkpoints scattered all across town. Two hours later, Team 2, led by our ever-competitive CFO Otto Jacobsson, emerged as winners.
Scavenger-hunt stats:
- Average of 7km walked per team
- 5 churros eaten
- 10 virtual bombs detonated
- 1 Cava won
What’s Next?
Our team is our greatest strength. Our time in Barcelona allowed us to not only align on our goals for the year, but also learn from each other during our workshops. The week-long offsite was truly memorable as it was our first time congregating as a team in-person, with teammates flying in from all across the globe.
We left our offsite refreshed, clear-headed, laser-focused for the year to come, and excited for our next offsite.
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