Congrats to EventBrite on choosing to go public, but I think a congratulations is in order for their 2017 sales team.
> 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.
Keep in mind that Eventbrite doesn't charge anything to host free events, which is all many of their organic customers ever host. That said, the amount of revenue you can get from music festivals and venues, which require a sales team to make the deals, dwarfs what you can get from most other customers. There's a reason Eventbrite bought Ticketfly. For that same reason, Live Nation has bought some of Eventbrite's customers and moved their ticketing to Ticketmaster.
It's not just the sales team. Eventbrite has a fantastic user interface and features that really work for people with complex ticketing requirements, better than any other ticketing platform I've ever used.
I chuckled when I read "For example, we previously experienced interruptions in performance of our platform because of a hardware error that AWS experienced" on page 26.
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/...
Funny story is my company at the time looked at acquiring EventBrite about 10? years ago, and as part of the integration eval, I happened to run the ab command against their endpoint. Few minutes later VP ran to my office and told me to stop as EventBrite called saying we were DDOSing them.
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."
suggestion - throw up a "isbufgoneyet" site that tracks % of original buf code no longer in master (according to git blame or whatever is the best way to do it). would be a fun afternoon project.
In the summer of 2012, I rewrote literally every line of the front end to prep for international launches in the sense that every line had me as the git blame author. I'm actually pretty curious how much is left.
I always wondered how the stock exercising process feels like for an early employee who has left company few years before the IPO. Is there any feeling of lost opportunities amidst all the happiness of the exit?
I hope Eventbrite and Brown Paper Tickets are successful in stealing some business from their nasty competitors like Ticketmaster whose fees can be 50% of the ticket price.
Edit: their fees can be over 100% of the ticket price.
Eventbrite are still expensive in my view and their business model perpetuates the 'booking fee' mentality of the industry.
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].
Doesn't make a difference. Maybe it's an industry problem, because it doesn't make sense to advertise the ticket price but hide a bunch of fees to be found at checkout. (I'm looking at you, airlines). Might as well advertise everything as $1 and everything else is fees.
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.
Doesn't make sense? Sure it does. Ticketmaster's sales team gets to go to venue and say "if you go with us, you can charge outrageous fees, pocket most of it, and we'll take all the blame".
Go to eventbrite.com, search (blank) your local area "today" and events are not in chronological order. I appreciate that they show the 'best' events first, but when I just want something to do, it kills me that such a simple search is not available.
As someone launching a coding camp for kids, Eventbrite has been instrumental for us. We do free classes to generate leads and the free offering of EB has been more than enough to accomplish this. Good to see them succeed.
Network effect could solve gaps and make Eventbrite emerge as №1 player vs. LiveNation. But only in the ticketing for the entertainment segment. This is further challenged due to Top 5 wants a pie of every tech-driven business: Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and even Apple. They own the network.
Not likely - Eventbrite ate Meetup's lunch a long time ago and the sale to WeWork was about surviving Facebook's stated plans to own 'groups'. I didn't read the S-1 but I believe Eventbrite is in a league of it's own.
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.
Not a single profitable company in the world has to increase revenue to achieve profitability. By definition, they are already there. The risk faced by all companies is that poor strategic decisions will cause a decrease in revenue, eventually leading to a loss of profitability. But that is a totally different statement.
Eventbrite has gotten close to profitable which I assume made them feel comfortable stepping back up the investment into growth (which achieved 61% 1H17 to 1H18). Probably will be awhile before it makes its way into indexes so I wouldn't worry about that now.
Hyman Minsky argues that "hot messes of unprofitability" tend to be a common phenomenon after long periods of economic success. Stability breeds instability. Tech didn't introduce this behavior.
> 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.
> For Ponzi units, the cash flows from operations are not sufficient to fulfill either the repayment of principle or the interest due on outstanding debts by their cash flows from operations. Such units can sell assets or borrow. Borrowing to pay interest or selling assets to pay interest (and even dividends) on common stock lowers the equity of a unit, even as it increases liabilities and the prior commitment of future incomes. A unit that Ponzi finances lowers the margin of safety that it offers the holders of its debts.
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.
I think that really just means that the market has changed and you're no longer for this market, rather than that new companies are not for public market.
Market is literally made up of the companies and people that participate in it.
You really should do both.
A small amount of your funds should go in to high growth.
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.
Most individual investors, including younger, should have little or no money in individual stocks but instead in something like a Vanguard diversified portfolio of cheap index funds/ETFs. If you want to take 5% or 10% of your worth to the stock casino, sure (after paying off all your credit cards and maxing your 401k/IRA).
I do both. I have about 20% of my net worth in individual stocks, the rest in low cost index funds/ETFs.
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!)
> You really should do both. A small amount of your funds should go in to high growth.
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.
Spot on. Everyone's investing goals and risk tolerance levels are different. It'd be criminal to put my 87 year old grandmother in high growth, unprofitable equities.
FWIW, that would have had your index fund missing AMZN and NFLX runs that have been pretty incredible. Zero interest rate policy has created a new, confusing market environment.
Right, but don't most people use index funds exactly because of their assured stability? Assured in the "5 decades" sense of the word? i.e. the retirees in the above thread?
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.
That's a different definition of 'general public'.
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?
>300k income joint, >200k income single, or >1m excl. primary residence in any event.
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.
Considering their competitor is LYV(Live Nation) at a market cap of 10 Billion... Who wouldn't want a piece of that pie? Hopefully they will be able to raise enough capital to bring lawsuits against LYV for their anti-competitive and monopolistic practices.
I'm sure you can rebuild most of the site in a week, but who's going to buy from you? The simplest business models can become major companies moving lots of money because business operations has nothing to do with technical complexity. You should focus on that.
I think the main flaw with your supposition is that being on the market requires rocket science
FIRST, lets talk about history since you know about it. Going public wasn't as coveted and rare of an event as it is today. So people like you had no expectation of being wowed by the rocket science presented in S-1 registration statements.
SECOND, revenue from selling tickets. Ticket selling websites have a monopoly on extra fees which can practically double the price over the face value of a ticket. Consumers have no other way to get tickets to these events. The market likes that. If you want to share in the profits of this money printing operation, then you buy the shares and hope they start giving dividends.
Thats all the market cares about.
High regulations have prevented companies from considering to go public via an IPO, or go public at all. So therefore companies go public via an IPO as the LAST round of equity financing at their peak growth, which they and their bankers think they can sell to the gullible investing public. When the market is frothy like today and the investing public is excluded from most of the growth, they will buy. IF ALL GOES WELL, the company can use that new IPO money and expand into further growth, but it isn't that important anymore.
> It is a website selling tickets. It's not rocket science
"It's just people sending shirt messages. It's not rocket science."
"It's just syncing some files. It's not rocket science."
It's extremely short sighted to think that everything is easy and simple. There are real-world engineering issues that come when you have influxes of people attempting to buy specific, limited items at the same time.
(Also, rocket science isn't that hard. Rocket engineering and manufacturing is the hard part.)
Eventbrite probably wants to sell tickets to every event on the planet [and take a cut]. That doesn't sound so un-sexy from a business perspective. (I don't know anything about their numbers, just saying.)
Yeah, of course companies are for-profit. I struggle to see how selling tickets should cover return for investors, return for shareholders, employee salaries and fancy offices?
> I'd be curious what type of business would be attractive to you.
Businesses that create value in physical world with stuff customers can touch i.e.: architecture, civil engineering, car companies or even weapon industry for sake of argument.
I still believe that physical objects have more value than "virtual stuff".
> 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.