as someone who lived through/participated in phase one of the "ticket disruption" to include secondary markets, i'm skeptical this is relevant and really i think the vc dudes just flushed a bunch of money down the toilet. TM owns this market and frankly, the issue has nothing to do with tech, and everything to do with the way professional sports and concert marketing works from a biz perspective. then there's the whole regulatory issue.
wish them good luck, but this is one of those domains that just sucks...
as someone who lived through/participated in phase one of the "ticket disruption" to include secondary markets, i'm skeptical this is relevant and really i think the vc dudes just flushed a bunch of money down the toilet. TM owns this market and frankly, the issue has nothing to do with tech, and everything to do with the way professional sports and concert marketing works from a biz perspective. then there's the who…
They are not going against TM in the ticket market though. Putting the entire ticket market in one place is really nice from a ticket buyers perspective. How much TM and the whole ticket market sucks though, is another story.
as someone who lived through/participated in phase one of the "ticket disruption" to include secondary markets, i'm skeptical this is relevant and really i think the vc dudes just flushed a bunch of money down the toilet. TM owns this market and frankly, the issue has nothing to do with tech, and everything to do with the way professional sports and concert marketing works from a biz perspective. then there's the who…
seatgeek has an amazing ui, maybe the best ui for finding tickets. That alone is very valuable. The problem is that with this round total raised is $100M. VC's expect to double or triple their money, as par. That sets a simplified expected exit valuation of $300M for this to be a success. Ticketmaster was last sold for $400MM in 2009. The bar for success is now extremely high. Anything below the high expectations generally means that this fantastic product will be considered a failure and most likely sold for scrap. What a horrible situation, why create these artificial expectations?
SeatGeek has a wonderful product but I feel we're positioned in the market a lot better because of the access to a large number of primary tickets. We can uniquely do some things (like giving fans early access to onsales). Our products are currently lacking but we have many things internally going on that will change that.
(If you are in LA and would be interested in helping, email me)
I interviewed at SeatGeek five years ago when they were a very small team. I was super intimidated at my first "startup" interview. No need to be; Jack and Russ were some of the nicest guys and interviewers. I remember after the interview they spent a bunch of time talking about the ways they had scripted Adobe Illustrator (I believe) to make the then very awesome, but now quite rudimentary, seat maps. Really thought…
I also remember interviewing when there were around ten people, and also being rather intimidated by just how much they cared about getting seating maps right. I've been a fan—and user—ever since.
as someone who lived through/participated in phase one of the "ticket disruption" to include secondary markets, i'm skeptical this is relevant and really i think the vc dudes just flushed a bunch of money down the toilet. TM owns this market and frankly, the issue has nothing to do with tech, and everything to do with the way professional sports and concert marketing works from a biz perspective. then there's the who…
seatgeek has an amazing ui, maybe the best ui for finding tickets. That alone is very valuable. The problem is that with this round total raised is $100M. VC's expect to double or triple their money, as par. That sets a simplified expected exit valuation of $300M for this to be a success. Ticketmaster was last sold for $400MM in 2009. The bar for success is now extremely high. Anything below the high expectations gen…
You didn't really counter any of the OPs points, though. A great UI is cool, but not if you don't have any tickets to sell because Ticketmaster already owns the entire market.