Wildgoose Founder Jonny Edser on Building a Team Building Company for Hybrid Teams

Wildgoose has been getting teams out from behind their desks for over 20 years, from GPS treasure hunts through city streets to virtual escape rooms connecting offices on different continents. In that time the company has built its own technology from scratch, rebuilt its entire offer during a pandemic in a matter of weeks, and gone on to work with brands like Amazon, Google, and Nike.

We sat down with founder Jonny Edser to talk about how Wildgoose started, why the company builds its own tech rather than buying off the shelf, and where team building is headed as more teams go hybrid.

An accidental start

Wildgoose wasn't the plan. Edser set up a general events business in 2004, intending to do a bit of everything: dinners, parties, team building. On day three, a call came in from someone at T-Mobile asking if the company did treasure hunts.

"To which I said 'of course,'" he says.

That April he ran his first treasure hunt, paper-based, using digital cameras. By the end of the year he'd run 12 of them and spotted the opportunity: a corporate team building company that specialised in city centre treasure hunts. "I loved writing and delivering them," he says, "and since we were sending people on wild goose chases, the name Wildgoose felt right."

Building the tech in-house

Wildgoose's app, its instant pricing, and its booking flow all came out of a problem Edser was trying to solve nearly 15 years ago. Back in 2010, players were using Google to cheat on the paper-based treasure hunts. He had an idea for GPS-activated questions that would stop that, but nothing on the market could do it, so a friend built it for him.

"When we launched the app in 2011, it was pretty unique, with only a couple of other operators doing anything similar," he says. The company has kept developing it ever since, bringing the tech team in-house and giving itself the flexibility to adapt quickly as new opportunities come up. That flexibility is also what's allowed Wildgoose to license its technology to partners around the world, part of a new strategy this year to roll out Wildgoose Operating Partners internationally.

Rebuilding for remote teams overnight

Before March 2020, Wildgoose had never delivered a virtual event. Then Covid hit, the entire order book was cancelled, and the company had to adapt fast.

"We had some great indoor solutions that we felt we could tweak to work virtually," Edser says. "We were literally building the plane as it was flying." Because Wildgoose owned its app outright, the team could change how it worked in real time, adding the ability for multiple players to join the same team and play together from breakout rooms. What followed, he says, was "an extraordinary roller coaster" over the next two years, as virtual and hybrid events became a core part of the business rather than a stopgap.

Years on, with so many teams now working hybrid or fully remote as standard, that shift has proven far more than a pandemic-era fix. Bringing distributed colleagues together for a shared experience is still one of the harder problems facing modern workplaces, and it's exactly what these formats were built to solve.

What Amazon wants versus what a five-person team wants

Working with household names like Amazon, Google, and Nike alongside much smaller teams, Edser says the differences are smaller than you'd expect. "We actually find a lot of similarities across the board," he says. Larger brands are more likely to pay for extras like game branding and customisation, and more likely to need a multi-city activity spanning several global offices. But the underlying ask is the same: a great experience that rewards the team and fulfils the objectives behind it.

That's borne out in one of the case studies he still points to as Wildgoose at its best: an event for Amazon connecting offices in Luxembourg, Madrid, and London. The teams were already holding an all-hands with senior leadership presentations over video call, so a Wildgoose host joined afterwards to brief everyone together before the activity began. The first event was a GPS treasure hunt, with teams competing outdoors across all three cities on one combined leaderboard. The second was Wildgoose's indoor activity, Level Up, run the same way. Amazon has since booked the format twice.

"It's a great example of how we can deliver a strong solution in almost any situation," Edser says.

Where team building goes from here

Wildgoose's strapline is that it offers team building experiences for modern teams, and Edser says that's deliberate: there's no longer a one-size-fits-all answer. In-person connection still matters, but it isn't always practical, and it comes at a real cost in time and money.

"Companies are having fewer in-person connections, mixed with other formats," he says. Virtual events still make up around 20% of Wildgoose's volume, but hybrid and in-person work remain central. Multi-city, in-person events are growing too, as organisations bring together teams across office hubs on one continent while making sure everyone is still part of the same experience.

"Technology makes so many of these formats possible, and that's the exciting part of what we do," he says. "Almost nothing is impossible."