Eventbrite S-1
sec.gov
sec.gov
> More than 95% of creators who used our platform in 2017 signed themselves up for Eventbrite. In 2017, we derived 54% of our net revenue from these creators.
Selling to about 35,000 creators (700,000 total) for 46% of the profit is no small chore, and, in my mind, speaks to a highly effective sales strategy. It also partially explains why LiveNation is not taking a "create your own event online" approach: direct sales can be more profitable.
I never expected one of the mishaps I dealt with while I worked there to appear in an SEC filing! If you want to learn a lot at the expense of a few gray hairs, I can highly recommend working in ops in the ticketing industry. I've spoken about some of the things it taught me at https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa17/conference-program/...
Congrats to EventBrite on going public. Am glad you stayed independent, as my company would have ruined them, like many other acquisitions..
I imagine the conversation in the back "Do you believe it? Gedy's megacorp tried to ddos us!" "Accidentally! they were trying to run ab" "Well, even so, we don't want to sell to them anymore."
And now they are going public.
Good to see you're still around. :fist-bump:
Thanks for that mobile work all those years ago! :D
Edit: their fees can be over 100% of the ticket price.
To sell 250 tickets for $10 each would cost the event organiser (or ticket buyers) $560, excluding payment processing. That's a hefty chunk of cash for relatively little work.
I don't think it's a fair model so I set up Ticket Tailor for this reason - https://www.tickettailor.com. The same event would cost $25/mo, with no contracts or commitment. We have facilitated 8M ticket sales for savvy event organisers who are fed up with [Eventbrite | any other ticketing company].
It reminds me of Centurylink's "Internet Cost Recovery Fee" for $3.99 a month. It's a bullshit sneaky way to advertise one price but the actual price is "below the fold". I think this kind of pricing should be illegal.
here is my detailed thought post: https://medium.com/@santoshpanda/my-thoughts-on-eventbrites-...
This is one of the few specific companies I'd actually be interested in investing in, rather than throwing all my money into indexes.
though meetup and eventbrite are definitely different.
That simply isn't true.
There is validity to scaling while incurring losses, and requiring funding to do so. But that doesn't mean that all companies are in that boat. Certainly not all companies that are publicly traded. So the statement is a reasonable description of where the company is at, allowing potential investors to judge for themselves whether that meshes well with their own risk profile.
VCs are for gambling, public markets are for profitable businesses.
> In particular, over a protracted period of good times, capitalist economies tend to move from a financial structure dominated by hedge finance units to a structure in which there is large weight to units engaged in speculative and Ponzi finance. Furthermore, if an economy with a sizeable body of speculative financial units is in an inflationary state, and the authorities attempt to exorcise inflation by monetary constraint, then speculative units will become Ponzi units and the net worth of previously Ponzi units will quickly evaporate. Consequently, units with cash flow shortfalls will be forced to try to make position by selling out position. This is likely to lead to a collapse of asset values.
"The Financial Instability Hypothesis", p. 8 [1]
Hedge units, in contrast:
> Hedge financing units are those which can fulfill all of their contractual payment obligations by their cash flows: the greater the weight of equity financing in the liability structure, the greater the likelihood that the unit is a hedge financing unit. Speculative finance units are units that can meet their payment commitments on "income account" on their liabilities, even as they cannot repay the principle out of income cash flows. Such units need to "roll over" their liabilities: (e.g. issue new debt to meet commitments on maturing debt). Governments with floating debts, corporations with floating issues of commercial paper, and banks are typically hedge units.
Market is literally made up of the companies and people that participate in it.
One of my gambling portfolios is full of high growth semi-conductor stocks like AMD and MU, and SaaS stocks like CRM and HUBS. I have triple digit returns for the past couple years.
The biggest gains and losses, of course, obviously come from individual stocks (and options, if you're feeling brave.) You're not going to see triple digit yearly returns with a mutual fund. You might find it on the next SaaS growth stock.
When you're young, you should absolutely take on some risk. (That includes working at startups!)
Projecting your subjective investing preferences, risk vs return, onto someone else doesn't work. If someone is only comfortable investing in very low risk assets that will always produce a low return, there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. It strictly comes down to what you personally want out of the total equation.
So I wouldn't want AMZN or NFLX in my index funds. NFLX just dropped dramatically in price, yea? So I bought it outright. I still have the bulk of my investment in index funds, though.
How much did professional investors lose on Theranos alone (answer: Somewhere between $600-$800 million)?
Most of the public you're referring to are not pouring their savings into these IPOs.
Even so, the SEC shouldn't require companies to be profitable in order to be publicly traded - could you imagine if we took every non-profitable company private because the public needed to be protected?
I wonder if someone actually does the accrediting.
Paraphrasing an attorney from years ago: The risk of lying to invest in something only open to accredited investors is colossal both to the entity raising funds as well as to the investor, and it can/does get caught during diligence, so it's not so much an honor system as it is something that inevitably gets audited/managed either down the road or especially when something goes wrong.
This may have changed and my recollection may not be accurate. Lastly, this isn't legal advice given that I'm not a lawyer.