In this episode of "20 minutes VC," host Harry Stebbings interviews Jack Gretzinger, founder and CEO of SeatGeek, a leading ticket platform. Jack shares his entrepreneurial journey, starting with his ticket resale ventures during Boston's sports peak, to creating SeatGeek, which has raised over $160 million in VC funding. He emphasizes the importance of a technical founding team, learning commercial skills on the go, and the challenges of hiring, particularly for engineers. Jack also reflects on the necessity of rebranding, the strategic use of OKRs for company alignment, and the significance of culture in scaling a business. The discussion also covers the calculated risk of acquiring Toptix, the impact of location on building a tech firm, and the role of luck in startup success. Jack's vision for SeatGeek is to revolutionize ticket distribution, enabling more live experiences through a modern, API-driven model.
"Hello and welcome back to the 20 minutes VC and a very special founders Friday with me, Harry Stebbings."
This quote is Harry Stebbings introducing the podcast episode and encouraging listener interaction on Instagram.
"Now Jack is the founder and CEO at Seatgeek, the world's largest ticket inventory on the web, serving more than 500,000 artists and teams in over 380,000 venues."
The quote summarizes Jack Groetzinger's current role at SeatGeek and the scale of the platform.
"Recently named one of Fast Company's most innovative companies of 2018, high five simplifies business collaboration with a conferencing platform that builds connected cultures."
This quote highlights High Five's conferencing platform and its recognition for innovation.
"Culture amp is the platform that makes it easy to collect, understand and act on employee feedback."
The quote explains the purpose and benefits of using Culture Amp's platform for managing employee feedback.
"We began to scrape a bunch of ticket data because we thought it might be an interesting market."
This quote details the early stages of Jack Groetzinger's journey into the ticket market and the data scraping that led to the creation of SeatGeek.
"I think for anyone founding a startup, being technical is far and away most important criterion that sort of drives success."
The quote emphasizes the importance Jack places on technical skills for founding a successful startup.
"God knows I may look back sometimes at old emails and just cackle at myself."
This quote shows Jack's self-awareness and ability to learn from past mistakes regarding the commercial side of business.
"It just feels like a bunch of smart people in a room who all want to make the same company successful."
The quote reflects Jack's positive experience with his board, highlighting the collaborative nature of their relationship.## OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)
"OKRs are sort of this alignment framework that was pioneered by Andy Grove and then really made popular by Google."
This quote explains the origin of OKRs and highlights their significance in company alignment and progression.
"I see OKRs as really a way of addressing that problem so that you can get everyone aligned on the same page and then let them go individually, do great work without being constrained."
This quote emphasizes the role of OKRs in balancing individual autonomy with organizational alignment, ensuring that all employees contribute effectively towards common objectives.
"I think the classic answer would be around mid one hundred s to reach that point where not everyone knows each other anymore."
This quote identifies a common scaling milestone where company culture begins to change due to the increasing number of employees.
"Individual teams almost begin to operate at sort of the unit level that the company did before."
This quote explains how smaller teams within a growing company can maintain a sense of community and support, mirroring the earlier stages of the company culture.
"If you're doing it right, then on average you're averaging about 70% accomplishment as a company."
This quote suggests that not fully achieving OKRs is acceptable and part of setting ambitious goals.
"You can't just look at one person's okrs for one quarter and say, well, you got 100%. Clearly you didn't try hard enough."
This quote cautions against judging individual performance solely on OKR completion rates, acknowledging that exceptional work can lead to full achievement of OKRs.
"There's no one weird trick you can do to hire really effectively. It's just a ton of sweat and a ton of work and a ton of hours."
This quote dispels the myth of a simple solution to hiring, emphasizing the effort required.
"We treat it sort of like a web funnel, where at each stage of the funnel, looking at the quality of people we're talking to and how quickly we're moving them through."
This quote explains the systematic and analytical approach to hiring, likening it to a marketing funnel.
"People tend to be a little bit myopic and not invest in sort of employer brand building stuff that can actually be really impactful."
This quote highlights the common oversight of investing in employer branding and its potential benefits.
"We get a ton of engineering applicants who will specifically reference having checked out our open source work when they're interviewing with us."
This quote provides evidence of the positive effects of employer branding on attracting talent.
"We've done sort of two larger growth rounds that were really very oriented around customer acquisition and having strong CAC to LTV math."
This quote describes the focus on customer acquisition costs and lifetime value during later funding rounds.
"We acquired a company called Toptix for $56 million last year, and we raised around, it was almost exactly that amount to finance the deal."
This quote illustrates the strategic use of funding for growth through acquisitions.
"Our competitors make a bit more than us per sale that they transact... where we hopefully have an advantage as around creating a differentiated product experience that people want to come back to many times over."
This quote discusses the strategy of focusing on repeat usage and product differentiation to compete in the market despite competitors' higher per-sale earnings.## Customer Acquisition Strategy
"So whereas competitors might be buying a single transaction, we hope to buy a user that is repeating many times over and is using CEK for life."
This quote emphasizes the long-term strategy of customer retention over one-time sales, suggesting a focus on building lasting customer relationships.
"The other element that I always think also is kind of the mortality of customer acquisition channels and how absolutely you can achieve repeatability in the Cat twelve tv stakes, but then for some reason it tails off."
The quote discusses the concept of 'mortality' in customer acquisition channels, acknowledging that channels may lose effectiveness, necessitating a strategy that allows for repeatability and diversification.
"Yeah, empathy matters. I would say even more than that. What I value most from the guys in our board is just having hyper intelligent people who are thinking about your business a lot."
The quote suggests that while empathy is important, the speaker values the intelligence and engagement of board members more, especially during critical strategic decisions.
"We've been lucky in that we've said, honestly, I can think of no moments of sort of serious board friction where people were meeting played odds."
This quote reflects on the speaker's experience with the board, highlighting the absence of serious friction due to a collaborative decision-making process.
"The challenge, of course, at the flip side of that is just the total pool of people is smaller."
The quote addresses the challenge of a smaller talent pool in New York compared to tech hubs like San Francisco, which can impact the growth of a tech firm.
"The biggest challenge sort of sorting through the data science pool is filtering the people who are sort of very serious quantitative professionals versus folks who did a boot camp for three months and are now trying to become a data scientist."
This quote discusses the difficulty in identifying highly qualified data science professionals amongst a large number of applicants with varying levels of experience and training.
"We at the time were about 140 folks. Tops at the time was about 110. So it's nearly doubling the company in size and also geographically meant a lot of expansion for us."
The quote highlights the significant impact of the Toptix acquisition on the company's size and geographic reach, emphasizing the scale of the integration challenge.
"We also overinvested, perhaps in just flying people across offices, forcing, or at least strongly suggesting a lot of culture sharing."
This quote suggests that proactive measures were taken to integrate the cultures of the two companies post-acquisition, recognizing the importance of cultural cohesion.
"I think I would have know sort of even more aggressive when it came to growth and user acquisition and building the brand."
The quote reveals a retrospective desire to have pursued a more aggressive growth and branding strategy, indicating a lesson learned about the timing and assertiveness of scaling efforts.## Secular Trends and Competitive Growth
I realized that there were a lot of secular trends, most notably mobile, that were really converging in our favor, and that we could get an even bigger leap on the competition if we've been a bit more aggressive with growth early on.
The quote emphasizes the importance of acknowledging and utilizing secular trends to outpace competitors. The speaker reflects on the missed opportunity to be more aggressive in growth strategies to leverage these trends.
So I'm not sure it's my favorite of all time, but I'm reading a great book right now, which is called powerful by Patty McCord.
Jack shares his current reading choice, highlighting its relevance to understanding Netflix's successful HR practices, which he admires.
It's such a typical cycle where early on you're starting a consumer company, you don't make a big investment in brand because it would be responsible to do so.
The quote discusses the common trajectory of startups underinvesting in branding initially and the eventual need to rebrand as the company scales.
Yeah, that's a great example of why you should never tell a reporter anything you don't want people to repeat, ever.
Jack reflects on the lasting impact of sharing personal routines with the media, suggesting discretion in what is shared publicly.
We don't see our competition as some of the obvious companies in our space, but rather the thing which is preventing us from getting to where we want to be.
The quote outlines Jack's perspective on competition, emphasizing strategic innovation over direct rivalry with other companies.
The merger we did with top ticks last year was a huge risk because we felt this thing that we loved dearly and our souls, this company and all the people within it.
Jack identifies the merger as the most substantial risk taken, indicating the emotional and strategic stakes involved in such a decision.
I think there's this huge underappreciation of the element of luck in doing startups.
The quote challenges the notion of meritocracy in startups, acknowledging the significant role of luck in achieving success.
Our goal is, like I was talking about earlier, it's not to take share from our competitors, it's to enable new live experiences.
Jack describes SeatGeek's mission to revolutionize the live entertainment industry by improving how tickets are bought and distributed.
What a fantastic guest Jack was to have on the show. And a huge thanks to him for giving up the time today. And to John at Excel and David and Michael at founder Collective for the fantastic questions.
This concluding statement expresses gratitude to Jack and the partners for their contributions, emphasizing the importance of collaboration and support in the podcast's success.