This $500,000 Corporate Retreat to Honduras Went Horribly Wrong. ‘We Had to Eat a Dead Tarantula’
Plex flew 120 employees to a tropical paradise for team building. What followed was a comedy of errors and the CEO hospitalized with E. coli.
Keith Valory, CEO of streaming platform Plex, had big plans for his company’s 2017 corporate retreat: a weeklong ‘Survivor’-themed bonding experience in Honduras for 120 remote employees. What could go wrong?
Everything, according to . Three weeks before arrival, the hotel’s general manager and head chef quit. Just as the first bus arrived, Valory was in his bathroom with E. coli from a salad. A former Navy SEAL made the “not super fit” tech workers do military drills in 100-degree heat until people passed out. One employee landed on a fire ant hill and needed a shot to the butt. A porcupine fell through another employee’s ceiling into his shower.
Corporate retreats are having a moment as remote work becomes permanent and companies struggle to build culture from a distance. The new series “Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat” even spoofs the trend — but Plex’s real-life disaster still beats anything on TV.
Keith Valory, CEO of streaming platform Plex, had big plans for his company’s 2017 corporate retreat: a weeklong ‘Survivor’-themed bonding experience in Honduras for 120 remote employees. What could go wrong?
Everything, according to . Three weeks before arrival, the hotel’s general manager and head chef quit. Just as the first bus arrived, Valory was in his bathroom with E. coli from a salad. A former Navy SEAL made the “not super fit” tech workers do military drills in 100-degree heat until people passed out. One employee landed on a fire ant hill and needed a shot to the butt. A porcupine fell through another employee’s ceiling into his shower.
Corporate retreats are having a moment as remote work becomes permanent and companies struggle to build culture from a distance. The new series “Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat” even spoofs the trend — but Plex’s real-life disaster still beats anything on TV.
