EventGeek moves to Santa Fe and becomes Circa

The common line since March is business won’t be the same on the other side of the coronavirus pandemic.

For Berkeley, Calif.-based event management platform EventGeek, that happened immediately in midMarch, as just about every meeting on the planet was canceled and reconvened in a virtual format.

EventGeek founder Alex Patriquin had been wanting to move the company he started in 2016 to Santa Fe for a couple of years after visiting the City Different. That wasn’t practical with constant investor meetings in the Bay Area.

Then all meetings went to Zoom. By early April, Patriquin saw he could relocate, rebrand and relaunch EventGeek in Santa Fe with a new name: Circa.

Circa went live Aug. 3 with event management shifted entirely from conference centers to the internet with Patriquin now essentially heading a new startup. EventGeek had three employees in Berkeley and 20 working remotely, and now Patriquin is the sole staffer for Circa in Santa Fe.

“Ultimately, I would like to grow a really big company here and hire locally,” he said.

Circa provides consolidated calendar services for companies that typically stage hundreds and thousands of events, and the company also provides marketing services for event planners.

“A lot of companies are trying virtual events, but they are not translating into sales,” Patriquin said. “We are able to help them so it translates into sales. The No. 1 thing people are doing wrong is they are treating it like a webinar and there is no interaction. A virtual event is really a networking event to connect with other attendees.”