Spreecast is a social video platform where you can talk in a public forum about the same topics people are talking about on Facebook -- whether it's the passing of Dick Clark or fashion -- only it's in real time using a webcam and web browser. That figure includes my own investment. The public beta launched in November , and we're starting to see celebrities, politicians, journalists, and others who have a public persona experimenting with us to engage with their fans and followers.
There's been nice growth, month over month. I enjoy the intellectual challenge of building something from nothing and navigating through the challenges of starting a company. I think entrepreneurs look at opportunities and seize them. They don't just talk about them. Challenge the status quo. If you're disrupting the way businesses do things, you'll be told that's not how it works.
But listen to your instincts. Spreecast wants to create a throwback to thousands of years before the Internet, when people had face-to-face interactions. Without face-to-face conversations, people are missing out on learning social skills. Create a team that will mesh well.
The mistakes I made in hiring at StubHub have helped inform my decisions this time around. I'll be treading more carefully in bringing in senior people and look for different qualities. I'll focus less on experience and skill set and be more interested in personality, raw intelligence, and drive to make the person a better fit with the existing team. Encourage your team to speak freely. When you're leading a company, if you work with people you trust, letting them speak their mind allows you to get good ideas on the table, even if they conflict with yours.
How We Got Started. Print Comment. Small Business Videos. This Brooklyn rooftop supplies Whole Foods. The teams got a new sponsor that would not only write a check but also help them deal with a leading complaint from season-ticket holders, who hated eating the cost of unused tickets.
We offered season-ticket holders and buyers a lot more control than they ever had been given. That is the polarizing issue at the heart of this. We marketed StubHub as a service to fans backed by the team, so they could safely do what had never been done before in a platform that is managed. The decision to go from back-end vendor to official status sponsor changed the way that StubHub was perceived in front offices across sports.
Rather than dealing with midlevel executives from ticketing departments about revenue-share arrangements, the company was talking to senior management about midtier sponsorships. We became an official partner with some of the teams and we were doing college sports and pro sports.
As teams have come to better understand how much money is in the resale market, those sponsorship agreements have evolved to include more revenue sharing, along with other components.
Some teams see the consumer and pricing data they get from StubHub as more valuable than the sponsorship revenue. StubHub has become such a well-known brand that 60 percent of its traffic comes from people who go directly to the URL.
It has come to value the ability to cancel and reissue tickets more than the referrals it gets from the team sites. All rights reserved. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Leaders Group.
Weekly Issue Issue Date: By Bill King 9. How did it go from trench coat to entrenched? Think of it in three prongs. Guarantee pays off First, the guarantee was a paragraph. Among dozens of entries, they were named one of six finalists. Fluhr dropped out of school to work on the business with a small team, including Jeff Lawson, who is now the billionaire founder of Twilio. It was risky: The dot-com bubble had just burst. Baker stayed back at Stanford, though he offered input on the side and retained an equity stake.
The site launched in October without him. By , even as business was booming, the founders were clashing. According to a later report in Fortune, Baker wanted to focus on partnerships with major sports leagues, while Fluhr sought to grow StubHub as an independent entity. Baker thought about traveling the world for a year. Then he had a better idea. When he left StubHub, the company had never asked him to sign a noncompete agreement.
That was wrong. Barely a month after getting let go, while planning the first leg of his trip, to London, Baker realized his former colleagues were years away from expanding into Europe. He decided to beat them to it. W earing a powder-blue button-down—no tie, as always—Baker made his grand reveal in Europe in August After a year of stealthy planning, he held a press launch for Viagogo, flanked by executives from Manchester United and Chelsea Football Club, its inaugural partners.
He had little time to revel in his revenge. Outvoted, he pocketed the cash and returned his focus to Europe. Lest he be forced out of yet another company, Baker gave himself supervoting shares that guaranteed him total control.
He kept his share as co-founder and left the company. We became a hot company growing rapidly, but there were still challenges. Ten or 15 states had laws that restricted the amount you could charge to resell a ticket, either citing a fixed dollar amount over face value or a cap on the percentage over face value. We got letters from a few state attorneys general implying that we might not be in compliance. We argued that we weren't the sellers of the tickets, the users were. No attorney general ever filed a claim against the company.
We actually hired some lobbyists and were successful in changing the laws in states like New York, Florida, and Pennsylvania.
Another challenge was Ticketmaster, which didn't like us or our business model. They said we were infringing on their contracts with venues or performing artists by reselling tickets. They never took legal action during my time but sent letters of complaint. The one significant lawsuit we faced was with the New England Patriots, which filed suit when we were in discussions to sell to eBay in They said we were inducing their season ticket holders to violate their agreement with the team.
We sold before the suit was decided, and eBay settled with them. When eBay approached us, I had gotten to the point where I wanted to move on to the next thing. I had gotten married in while StubHub was rising, and my wife was pregnant. I took time off to travel with my family, and we went around the world. I played a lot of golf and tennis, started doing angel investing, and just enjoyed myself.
I'm invested in 40 different companies now. Some are doing well, and some not.
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