Geeks Sell Seats

THE 2007-08 SEASON WAS A BANNER ONE FOR Boston sports teams, and Groetzinger and D’Souza, having left their consulting jobs, were trying their hands as amateur ticket resellers. Returns were great, but the two were struck by “how difficult and painful it was to buy tickets on the Internet,” Groetzinger says. “So we figured, let’s try to start a company that uses transparency to help people figure out exactly what they’re buying and feel good about it.”

The resulting ticket search platform, SeatGeek, featured detailed maps of live entertainment venues that showed exactly where seats were located and used an algorithm to rate prices on a spectrum from “Amazing Deal” to “Awful Deal.” SeatGeek was actually the pair’s third startup: At Dartmouth they’d founded and sold Evolving Vox, a student furniture rental service still in operation. And the self-taught coders had used the profits from Scribnia, a blog recommendation platform they designed and sold, to get SeatGeek off the ground.

Now based in New York, SeatGeek has since raised $100 million in funding and attracted celebrity investors such as NFL quarterbacks Eli and Peyton Manning and rapper and producer Nas. In addition to offering tickets from more than 500 resellers, it features inventory from primary ticket brokers for the NCAA, Broadway and other major live events. Steve Hafner ’91, cofounder and CEO of the travel site Kayak, whose model helped inspire SeatGeek, recently joined the board. Mobile browsing and apps, added in 2013, have set the company apart from the desktop-focused competition, allowing users—many of them planning-averse millenials—to make last-minute purchases with a few taps and use their phones as tickets. The company recently added a feature to let individual users list, sell and transfer tickets themselves. SeatGeek, D’Souza says, is now racing “to be the dominant platform to buy tickets and sell tickets.”