Tiki Barber and Jared Augustine Want to Help Plan Your Next Event

According to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the everyday life we enjoyed prior to COVID-19 won't begin to return to normal until 2021.

This kind of news may be disheartening to people who live for interactive events such as concerts, day parties, and sports, but it's not stopping two entrepreneurs from "rolling with the punches" and making something from nothing. 

Jared Augustine and Tiki Barber, the co-founders of Thuzio, understand that people still want to enjoy live events and have a plan to tackle the issue. Augustine is a veteran of the startup game as he led market expansions for SeamlessWeb. Meanwhile, Tiki retired as one of the New York Giants' greatest running backs of all time—racking up nearly 10,000 yards and scoring over 50 touchdowns en route to becoming a three-time NFL Pro Bowler in his nine-year career.

So when the two teamed up to launch Thuzio, it was a match made in heaven. Thuzio was created to give "members-only access" to some of sports and entertainment's most prominent personalities, and helping them make appearances at events.

The pair recently sat with Associate Editor Omari White to talk about their exclusive Virtual Business Subscription Program that caters to some pretty big names. They aim to help you join in on the fun of creating a unique virtual vibe for every sports and pop culture fan.

Omari: How does the theme of these events work?

Tiki: The custom events that Jared was alluding to the client can choose whatever type of event they want and our expertise is finding the right individual. We look for the right athlete, entertainer, celebrity chef, whoever it may be for what they're looking for specifically, but with this product that we're talking about, with our Thuzio membership we are curating the events.

So for instance, this evening, we're doing an event with David Wright, the former New York Met great who has just written a book. So the idea behind the event is I'm going to sit down and have a conversation, virtually of course, with David, talking about his experiences as a Met and what we're going to find in this book. It's beneficial for David because he's obviously exposing, you know, this new memoir project to our membership base. But it's also great for any of the Mets fans who want to hear from one of their great legends. So for our virtual membership, we curate specifically what we want to do, but for the bespoke type of events, Jared was talking about earlier. The client can choose whatever they want. It's why this new virtual realm has been so great for our business because we're so nimble and we can do so many different things.