The Exchanges

Q down, especially on the engineering hires. But if we start on the financing element, you've raised multiple rounds from, as we said, some of the truly best in the business. How have you seen the process differ from, say, the very early stages with the founder collectives of this world to maybe the much later stages with the excels and the growth rounds that you've seen? How did it differ?

A Yeah, I mean, each round has been pretty meaningfully different. Obviously, at the early stage, someone like David from Founder Collect is very much investing based off of the founders and the idea behind the business and the market opportunity and less on strong multi-year P&L and track record. We've done sort of two larger growth rounds that were really very oriented around customer acquisition and having strong CAC to LTV math where we point to hard data and say, listen, you know, we're acquiring new users at X. They, uh, monetize the lifetime value of Y where Y is greater than X. And the only thing that's constraining us from making that happen more quickly is our balance sheet. So let's fix that, which is really, you know, we resisted raising more money for a long time because we didn't have that story. Um, and I, you know, we didn't want to delude ourselves needlessly, but once the CAC LTV math hits you in the face hard enough, it seemed idiotic not to do that. And then the last round we did was specifically to enable us to do an acquisition. So we acquired a company called Toptics. For fifty six million dollars last year, and we raised a, around, it was almost exactly that amount to, uh, finance the deal.

AI assessment note: “each round has been pretty meaningfully different. Obviously, at the early stage”

Q Can I ask, are there elements where you've really struggled with the embracing of the commercial side where, where you might kind of, uh, caution founders to maybe be more hazardous and wary of where learning does have to occur?

A God knows. I mean, yeah, look back sometimes at old emails and just cackle at myself. I think one kind of a classic observation, but, but one area we struggled early on was just not knowing what we didn't know. So particularly, I'll give you one specific example, we waited forever to hire a full-time finance person. I think we'd raised almost a hundred million dollars before we hired anyone full-time in finance, which we justified by saying, you know, we kind of have it under control, and it's unclear what leverage they would bring, and that was, you know, in retrospect, just sort of an ignorant decision. We brought in the VP of finance, who's now our CFO, who's totally world-class, and really just honestly changed the way we look at the business and our growth prospects. And I think that's a decision just made out of a lack of experience where we hadn't had the ability to work with, you know, great finance leaders. We didn't know what we were missing.

AI assessment note: “we waited forever to hire a full-time finance person”

Q Yeah, no, absolutely. In terms of raising the rounds and hiring the stellar teams, preparing for growth and scaling, as you have done, I do want to touch on the elements of the acquisition that you mentioned earlier, top ticks. I spoke to John in Excel about it, and I'd love to hear, as would he, how was that acquisition process for you?

A Yeah, you know, I'm always one of those people that never really saw myself leading a big M&A event, and it's not something we ever aspire to. We've always tried to grow organically, so it was, uh, you know, I won't bore you with all the background, but basically, we had a licensing partnership with a company, a company, Toptics, that was based in Israel that was going so well, and just there was so much synergy that we felt like, We, we'd be idiots to not try to make that happen. The big scary thing was just sort of the risk to culture and the risk to SeatGeek and everything we'd built. We, at the time, were about a 140 folks. Topics at the time was about a 110. So it's nearly doubling the company in size and also geographically meant a lot of expansion for us. So, you know, it was a bit of a leap of faith moment where we, we believed in the huge value we could create. We brought the companies together. We also really loved the founders of Topics and wanted to work with them. We didn't have the chance to meet with everyone on the Topics team, but we decided that, you know, ultimately as a calculated risk,

AI assessment note: “it was a bit of a leap of faith moment”

Q Can I ask, are there elements where you've really struggled with the embracing of the commercial side where, where you might kind of, uh, caution founders to maybe be more hazardous and wary of where learning does have to occur?

A God knows. I mean, yeah, look back sometimes at old emails and just cackle at myself. I think one kind of a classic observation, but, but one area we struggled early on was just not knowing what we didn't know. So particularly, I'll give you one specific example, we waited forever to hire a full-time finance person. I think we'd raised almost a hundred million dollars before we hired anyone full-time in finance, which we justified by saying, you know, we kind of have it under control, and it's unclear what leverage they would bring, and that was, you know, in retrospect, just sort of an ignorant decision. We brought in the VP of finance, who's now our CFO, who's totally world-class, and really just honestly changed the way we look at the business and our growth prospects. And I think that's a decision just made out of a lack of experience where we hadn't had the ability to work with, you know, great finance leaders. We didn't know what we were missing.

AI assessment note: “we waited forever to hire a full-time finance person.”

Q Can I ask, is that not where a board really interject themselves and show you what you don't know, so to speak?

A Yeah. So that's a great example of a case where I wish I had taken advice from my board more readily. And you know, it's funny because one thing I love about the board we have at SeatGeek is that they're not authoritarian or dictating that we must do X or Y. They'll suggest and then they'll sort of ultimately let us make the decision. Which usually is a good thing, but in a lot of ways, because it's the fastest way to get, you know, a founder to do what you want, but that's a great case where, you know, they suggested we hire a finance leader, and we did eventually, but we took much longer than we should have.

AI assessment note: “that's a great example of a case where I wish I had taken advice”

Q Yeah, no, I completely agree on the MPS kind of grassroots style. I'm intrigued though. Do you see kind of particular hotspots where other startups around you could be found a friend where they particularly make mistakes with their hiring programs?

A People, you know, and we certainly fall into this too. I think people tend to be a little bit myopic and not invest in sort of employer brand building stuff that can actually be really impactful. So, you know, a few examples of that are blogging about the things that you're doing, open sourcing software, Both of those things can seem like really distracting and sort of poor uses of time when you're in the heat of it, and you just really need to fill a role, or you really need to ship something. But they're really force multiplying, I think, such that if you can, you can build a bit of a distinguished, differentiated employer brand is, okay, you know, Seeky or Company X is really an unusual, great place to work, and they can pay dividends many times over. Like, we get a ton of engineering applicants who will specifically reference having checked out our open source work When their interview was.

AI assessment note: “people tend to be a little bit myopic and not invest in sort of employer brand”

Q Yeah, no, absolutely. In terms of raising the rounds and hiring the stellar teams, preparing for growth and scaling, as you have done, I do want to touch on the elements of the acquisition that you mentioned earlier, top ticks. I spoke to John in Excel about it, and I'd love to hear, as would he, how was that acquisition process for you?

A Yeah, you know, I'm always one of those people that never really saw myself leading a big M&A event, and it's not something we ever aspire to. We've always tried to grow organically, so it was, uh, you know, I won't bore you with all the background, but basically, we had a licensing partnership with a company, a company, Toptics, that was based in Israel that was going so well, and just there was so much synergy that we felt like, We, we'd be idiots to not try to make that happen. The big scary thing was just sort of the risk to culture and the risk to SeatGeek and everything we'd built. We, at the time, were about a 140 folks. Topics at the time was about a 110. So it's nearly doubling the company in size and also geographically meant a lot of expansion for us. So, you know, it was a bit of a leap of faith moment where we, we believed in the huge value we could create. We brought the companies together. We also really loved the founders of Topics and wanted to work with them. We didn't have the chance to meet with everyone on the Topics team, but we decided that, you know, ultimately as a calculated risk,

AI assessment note: “it was a bit of a leap of faith moment where we believed”

Q We mentioned the board there and their lack of kind of authoritarianism. Was that board management a really challenging skill for you to learn alongside the commercial and the tech element?

A No, you know, I've been super lucky to have a great board historically, and particularly now just a really outstanding board, and they've made it easy on me because it doesn't Feel like adversarial lines. Then it just feels like a bunch of smart people in a room who all want to make the same company successful. And I, you know, as I look back at the places we've gotten lucky, I think that's one huge one because it's really, I don't think I fully realized when you, um, agree to take someone out of your board and raise a bunch of money from someone, just how long-term sort of immutable the commitment is. I think if a lot of founders realized that fully, they would do more work and more diligence and spend more, more time with the counterpart. And I know in Russia, I don't expect it should have, but got very lucky in it. We were just an incredible group of people at CQ. You mentioned two of them, uh, David from Brown and Collective and Jonathan Excel.

AI assessment note: “No, you know, I've been super lucky to have a great board historically”

Q Absolutely. You mentioned the kind of the importance of OKRs and aligning people and kind of setting that ambition. How does one create that culture of ambition in attaining those OKRs without maybe a fear of not hitting them and kind of the disincentive that comes with that?

A Yeah, you know, that's something we talk about in OKRs internally. We try to just over-communicate time and time again, where the idea is that if you're doing it right, then on average, you're averaging about 70% accomplishment as a company. And if you're getting close to a hundred, it means that you're really sandbagging and that you're not setting aggressive enough goals. It's tricky because there's inherent heterogeneity in outcomes, and you can't just look at one person's OKRs for one quarter and say, well, you got a hundred percent, you know, clearly you didn't try hard enough. Because it might be that they actually just did truly world-class work and an incredible accomplishment. What we try to do is sort of look in aggregate across broader teams, across the whole company, and make sure that we're around that 70% level. And if we're not, try to push people in one direction or the other to get closer to that.

AI assessment note: “if you're doing it right, then on average, you're averaging about 70% accomplishment”

Q Today, actually on you and on the theme of skills and hiring, really, and I was lucky enough to chat to both John at Excel and David at Founder Collective before the show, and they both mentioned a certain element to me. David in particular asked, how do you think about the combination of tech versus commercial skill set for you as the founder? I'd love to start on that.

A Yeah, you know, I think for anyone founding a startup, being technical is far and away the most important criterion that sort of drives success. Basically, you can't have too many technical people On a founding team. And then there's this notion that business or being commercial is a learned skill that takes a lot of practice, maybe takes an MBA, which I think from my experience pretty clearly is not the case, such that the best founding teams are really technical people who just wanted to build something great for the world that was inherently useful. And then as that gets a bit of traction and there's some commercial leverage, you know, I think it's the sort of thing that a smart person can figure out and can learn and grow as you go. Whereas you don't really just sort of happen upon figuring out being technically to be a much more concerted thing that you learn and bring to the table.

AI assessment note: “being technical is far and away the most important criterion that sort of drives success”

Q But before we dive into the quick fire round, I do want to touch on the element of growth given the incredible nine-year scaling journey with SeatGeek. David Frankel asks a fantastic culminating question. What would you have done differently in terms of growth within the journey And why?

A I think I would have been, you know, sort of even more aggressive when it came to growth and user acquisition and building the brand. You know, like I mentioned before, we, we waited a long time to raise money until we were really sort of irrefutable and controvertible evidence that the CAC LTV math was heavily in our favor and would be idiots not to raise more money. I think, you know, the benefit of hindsight would have preferred to have skated a bit where the puck is going and And realized that there were a lot of secular trends, you know, 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.

AI assessment note: “I think I would have been, you know, sort of even more aggressive when it came to growth”

Q Absolutely. You mentioned the kind of the importance of OKRs and aligning people and kind of setting that ambition. How does one create that culture of ambition in attaining those OKRs without maybe a fear of not hitting them and kind of the disincentive that comes with that?

A Yeah, you know, that's something we talk about in OKRs internally. We try to just over-communicate time and time again, where the idea is that if you're doing it right, then on average, you're averaging about 70% accomplishment as a company. And if you're getting close to a hundred, it means that you're really sandbagging and that you're not setting aggressive enough goals. It's tricky because there's inherent heterogeneity in outcomes, and you can't just look at one person's OKRs for one quarter and say, well, you got a hundred percent, you know, clearly you didn't try hard enough. Because it might be that they actually just did truly world-class work and an incredible accomplishment. What we try to do is sort of look in aggregate across broader teams, across the whole company, and make sure that we're around that 70% level. And if we're not, try to push people in one direction or the other to get closer to that.

AI assessment note: “if you're doing it right, then on average, you're averaging about 70% accomplishment”

Q You mentioned the scaling of the team there in, you know, some numbers like 300. I'm intrigued. Have you seen inflection points where company culture starts to maybe fragment or show cracks, so to speak, and how does one look to rectify that with the scaling?

A Yeah, you know, I think the classic answer would be around, um, mid-one hundreds to reach that point where not everyone knows each other anymore, and we definitely hit that. I think it happened more gradually. The reality that, you know, happened for us is that individual teams almost begin to operate at sort of the unit level that the company did before. So, yeah, you might not know, you know, we've got a 380 people at SeatGeek. I don't think anyone here knows every other, you know, all of their 379 people, but many people do know very personally and closely everyone on their team, and that sort of becomes, you know, the immediate support structure that everyone has, and then you've got obviously broader web of people at SeatGeek.

AI assessment note: “individual teams almost begin to operate at sort of the unit level”

Q Yeah, no, I completely agree on the MPS kind of grassroots style. I'm intrigued though. Do you see kind of particular hotspots where other startups around you could be found a friend where they particularly make mistakes with their hiring programs?

A People, you know, and we certainly fall into this too. I think people tend to be a little bit myopic and not invest in sort of employer brand building stuff that can actually be really impactful. So, you know, a few examples of that are blogging about the things that you're doing, open sourcing software, Both of those things can seem like really distracting and sort of poor uses of time when you're in the heat of it, and you just really need to fill a role, or you really need to ship something. But they're really force multiplying, I think, such that if you can, you can build a bit of a distinguished, differentiated employer brand is, okay, you know, Seeky or Company X is really an unusual, great place to work, and they can pay dividends many times over. Like, we get a ton of engineering applicants who will specifically reference having checked out our open source work When their interview was.

AI assessment note: “people tend to be a little bit myopic and not invest in sort of employer brand building”

Q the schedule, so I'm sorry for this. I'm too interested. It's always a concern for me, especially kind of on the customer acquisition channels, that really the CAC is being so priced out for even companies with SeatGeeks financing by the mega incumbents of today. How do you think about that kind of lack of Free and open customer acquisition channel availability today. And is that a concern for you?

A Yeah, I mean, if I were to, I think it's a great question. If I were to totally simplify how I think about it is it really all comes down to repeat usage. So, you know, our competitors make a bit more than us per sale that they transact. So, you know, if you buy tickets for 200 dollars on one of our competitors versus Seiki, competitor will make a bit more. Where we hopefully have an advantage as around creating a differentiated product experience that people want to come back to many times over. And that way you can really compete in an advantage way against someone who is really just buying a single transaction. So whereas competitors might be buying a single transaction, we hope to buy a user that is repeating many times over and is using Seeky for Life.

AI assessment note: “it really all comes down to repeat usage”

Q For sure. And from that experience, have there been any kind of best practices that you can share with regards to buying something that's really credibly large?

A Uh, good question. I think, you know, we've gotten a lot of things right. We've got, we've got a few things wrong. Overall, it's, it's exceeded our expectations really meaningfully. We've spent a lot of the first year integrating all systems and sort of getting everyone to truly be part of the same company. And that was painful and annoying. And it's not the sort of fun work that you look forward to, but really, really, Essential in terms of getting everyone communicating on the same platforms and working together efficiently. We also over-invested perhaps in just flying people across offices, forcing, or at least strongly suggesting, a lot of culture sharing. Sort of like a marriage, right? Where you get to meet the spouse's family for the first time.

AI assessment note: “integrating all systems and sort of getting everyone to truly be part of the same company”

Q Today, actually on you and on the theme of skills and hiring, really, and I was lucky enough to chat to both John at Excel and David at Founder Collective before the show, and they both mentioned a certain element to me. David in particular asked, how do you think about the combination of tech versus commercial skill set for you as the founder? I'd love to start on that.

A Yeah, you know, I think for anyone founding a startup, being technical is far and away the most important criterion that sort of drives success. Basically, you can't have too many technical people On a founding team. And then there's this notion that business or being commercial is a learned skill that takes a lot of practice, maybe takes an MBA, which I think from my experience pretty clearly is not the case, such that the best founding teams are really technical people who just wanted to build something great for the world that was inherently useful. And then as that gets a bit of traction and there's some commercial leverage, you know, I think it's the sort of thing that a smart person can figure out and can learn and grow as you go. Whereas you don't really just sort of happen upon figuring out being technically to be a much more concerted thing that you learn and bring to the table.

AI assessment note: “being technical is far and away the most important criterion that sort of drives success”

Q I have to say that's a very exciting answer, because most people say books that I've never read, but I actually read that book. I loved it. So I'm a big fan of Patty's, and I thought it was brilliant. So yes, a must read for sure. Rebranding. Why startups will leave the Fail or rebrand? A statement you've said before. Discuss. God, that sounds like a university essay.

A Yeah, you know, 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. And then, lo and behold, you get some traction, and you're starting to spend real marketing dollars behind a brand that you never focused on too much early on, um, and the brand starts to hold you back. So, we at C-Geek have now gone through three separate rebrands, not all of the consumer product, but Our enterprise product as well. I think if you're doing particularly a consumer web startup, you have to look at it. It's just a matter of when, not if, because every company rebrands at some point, unless you fail. And it's something that, you know, it can be kind of scary and daunting, but, but it can also be a huge force multiplier. It can mean that every dollar you spend in marketing is more effective. And that's a really exciting thing.

AI assessment note: “every company rebrands at some point, unless you fail.”

Q We mentioned the board there and their lack of kind of authoritarianism. Was that board management a really challenging skill for you to learn alongside the commercial and the tech element?

A No, you know, I've been super lucky to have a great board historically, and particularly now just a really outstanding board, and they've made it easy on me because it doesn't Feel like adversarial lines. Then it just feels like a bunch of smart people in a room who all want to make the same company successful. And I, you know, as I look back at the places we've gotten lucky, I think that's one huge one because it's really, I don't think I fully realized when you, um, agree to take someone out of your board and raise a bunch of money from someone, just how long-term sort of immutable the commitment is. I think if a lot of founders realized that fully, they would do more work and more diligence and spend more, more time with the counterpart. And I know in Russia, I don't expect it should have, but got very lucky in it. We were just an incredible group of people at CQ. You mentioned two of them, uh, David from Brown and Collective and Jonathan Excel.

AI assessment note: “No, you know, I've been super lucky to have a great board”

Q the schedule, so I'm sorry for this. I'm too interested. It's always a concern for me, especially kind of on the customer acquisition channels, that really the CAC is being so priced out for even companies with SeatGeeks financing by the mega incumbents of today. How do you think about that kind of lack of Free and open customer acquisition channel availability today. And is that a concern for you?

A Yeah, I mean, if I were to, I think it's a great question. If I were to totally simplify how I think about it is it really all comes down to repeat usage. So, you know, our competitors make a bit more than us per sale that they transact. So, you know, if you buy tickets for 200 dollars on one of our competitors versus Seiki, competitor will make a bit more. Where we hopefully have an advantage as around creating a differentiated product experience that people want to come back to many times over. And that way you can really compete in an advantage way against someone who is really just buying a single transaction. So whereas competitors might be buying a single transaction, we hope to buy a user that is repeating many times over and is using Seeky for Life.

AI assessment note: “how I think about it is it really all comes down to repeat usage”

Q had no board flame outs, you are not a Silicon Valley company. Which takes me to the element of the location. As we said, the financing and then ecosystem are kind of inherently important to access the talent. So New York and HQ'd in New York. With that in mind, David Frankloss, what are the biggest challenges to building a massive tech firm in New York? Let's start with that.

A Yeah, I mean, one thing I love about New York is that despite it being the very biggest cities overall, the tech ecosystem is tighter and smaller. It's more manageable than SF. Which means that if we want to build a differentiated brand as we want to be the best place for an engineer to work in New York, that would be sort of a ludicrous, probably overambitious thing for us to say if we were based in San Francisco. There's just so many iconic technology companies there. Whereas in New York, it's actually, you know, a bit more credible and something we can really aspire to. The challenge, of course, the flip side of that is just the total pool of people is smaller. Even more specifically, there haven't been that many really big liquidity events, you know, sort of Google-style companies. Equity events that spin off a bunch of people with a lot of capital other than doing their own startups, which definitely constrains things a bit here in New York.

AI assessment note: “The challenge, of course, the flip side of that is just the total pool”

Q Love it. Tell me, what do you think is the right way to view competition? Is it kind of row your own race, or is it a continuous analysis of the competitive market?

A We don't see our competition as some of the obvious companies in our space, but rather the thing which is preventing us from From getting to where we want to be, which is having love entertainment instantly available and viable on your phone for everyone everywhere. The main things that are getting in between us and achieving that are not company X or company Y. It's a lot of the ecosystem itself and the infrastructure of how tickets are delivered. So we actually launched a whole product designed fixing that. And ultimately, if we're successful, it's not going to be because we took 10% of share from current competitor, but because we changed the way that tickets are distributed and how people can buy and see.

AI assessment note: “We don't see our competition as some of the obvious companies in our space”

Q You mentioned the scaling of the team there in, you know, some numbers like 300. I'm intrigued. Have you seen inflection points where company culture starts to maybe fragment or show cracks, so to speak, and how does one look to rectify that with the scaling?

A Yeah, you know, I think the classic answer would be around, um, mid-one hundreds to reach that point where not everyone knows each other anymore, and we definitely hit that. I think it happened more gradually. The reality that, you know, happened for us is that individual teams almost begin to operate at sort of the unit level that the company did before. So, yeah, you might not know, you know, we've got a 380 people at SeatGeek. I don't think anyone here knows every other, you know, all of their 379 people, but many people do know very personally and closely everyone on their team, and that sort of becomes, you know, the immediate support structure that everyone has, and then you've got obviously broader web of people at SeatGeek.

AI assessment note: “mid-one hundreds to reach that point where not everyone knows each other anymore”

Q investors a couple of times there earlier. John Locke told me before the show that particularly a segment in the team that you've nailed is this unique approach you have to a hiring program for engineers. I'd love to hear what this looks like. So many founders I speak to struggle with this in particular. So what does this look like, and what's that kind of hiring structure for engineers?

A Yeah, I wish we had it quite as figured out as John says we do, but I think that one of the most frustrating things about hiring when you talk to other founders and other people doing tech startups is that there really is no magic bullet. There's no, you know, 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, and I think, you know, coming in as someone who had never Built a meaningful team before. I was just initially blown away by the sheer time you have to spend to hire one good person. So we, A, just, you know, we're in the whole team around, like, this is a major part of your job. You know, we're trying to build an iconic company, and we need a great team to do that. And then also really put data behind that. So 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, making sure that we're giving them the best candidate experience possible, so that even if we don't end up hiring someone, hopefully they'll go tell their friends about Seeky, you know, A positive way, not a negative way.

AI assessment note: “we treat it sort of like a web funnel, where at each stage”

Q had no board flame outs, you are not a Silicon Valley company. Which takes me to the element of the location. As we said, the financing and then ecosystem are kind of inherently important to access the talent. So New York and HQ'd in New York. With that in mind, David Frankloss, what are the biggest challenges to building a massive tech firm in New York? Let's start with that.

A Yeah, I mean, one thing I love about New York is that despite it being the very biggest cities overall, the tech ecosystem is tighter and smaller. It's more manageable than SF. Which means that if we want to build a differentiated brand as we want to be the best place for an engineer to work in New York, that would be sort of a ludicrous, probably overambitious thing for us to say if we were based in San Francisco. There's just so many iconic technology companies there. Whereas in New York, it's actually, you know, a bit more credible and something we can really aspire to. The challenge, of course, the flip side of that is just the total pool of people is smaller. Even more specifically, there haven't been that many really big liquidity events, you know, sort of Google-style companies. Equity events that spin off a bunch of people with a lot of capital other than doing their own startups, which definitely constrains things a bit here in New York.

AI assessment note: “The challenge, of course, the flip side of that is just the total pool”

Q investors a couple of times there earlier. John Locke told me before the show that particularly a segment in the team that you've nailed is this unique approach you have to a hiring program for engineers. I'd love to hear what this looks like. So many founders I speak to struggle with this in particular. So what does this look like, and what's that kind of hiring structure for engineers?

A Yeah, I wish we had it quite as figured out as John says we do, but I think that one of the most frustrating things about hiring when you talk to other founders and other people doing tech startups is that there really is no magic bullet. There's no, you know, 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, and I think, you know, coming in as someone who had never Built a meaningful team before. I was just initially blown away by the sheer time you have to spend to hire one good person. So we, A, just, you know, we're in the whole team around, like, this is a major part of your job. You know, we're trying to build an iconic company, and we need a great team to do that. And then also really put data behind that. So 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, making sure that we're giving them the best candidate experience possible, so that even if we don't end up hiring someone, hopefully they'll go tell their friends about Seeky, you know, A positive way, not a negative way.

AI assessment note: “we treat it sort of like a web funnel, where at each stage”

Q No, absolutely. It's a marriage for sure, but a lot of the board meetings are centered around often OKRs and kind of company progression through OKRs. You've spoken to me before about the power of OKRs. Tell me, why are you so bullish on OKRs as this kind of measurement metric, and how does one think about constructing the right OKRs to focus on?

A Yeah, so, you know, OKRs are sort of this alignment framework that was Pioneered by Andy Grove, and then made popular by Google. I love them because I think, you know, you sort of think about a prodigal startup, but just a few people hacking around a table. That's sort of an extremely efficient arrangement to create something in terms of, you know, if you just have three guys building something around a table, they're all going to be very much on the same page and sort of aligned in what they're building. And when you begin to scale a company, you go from three to 30 to 300, you run into this problem of making sure that everyone is aligned and on the same page. And the reality is that there's Diminishing marginal returns to adding people to a company. You know, the, the 300th person is not as additive. Fourth was. And 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. So that if you're doing it right, you have a little bit of the best of both worlds where you have 300 people all rowing in the same direction towards the same goals, but working almost as if they're each little individual startups of one.

AI assessment note: “I see OKRs as really a way of addressing that problem so that you can”

Q Absolutely. I mean, I think an always really interesting time to really measure board dynamics is when there's maybe a point of friction. You mentioned slightly earlier about listening to your board earlier with the finance hire. Can you tell us about a time when maybe you've gone against a board decision, and how did you communicate this?

A Yeah, I mean, that's one where, the one I mentioned earlier is a good one, where we, you know, sort of didn't make the hire we needed to early enough, and, you know, tried to justify it at the time. I think great board members will sort of realize the mistakes that are irreversible versus reversible, and that's a good example of one that, if we're making that decision, you know, maybe not a good decision, but it's pretty reversible. So they, they won't get in your way. We've been lucky in that we've had, you know, honestly, I can think of no moments of, you know, sort of serious word friction where people were meeting late odds. And I think that's because we've tried to present decisions, not as sort of, but we are doing this my way or the highway, but rather just collaboratively all discussing, uh, any given topic until we kind of arrive at a conclusion.

AI assessment note: “honestly, I can think of no moments of, you know, sort of serious”

Q Absolutely. I mean, I think an always really interesting time to really measure board dynamics is when there's maybe a point of friction. You mentioned slightly earlier about listening to your board earlier with the finance hire. Can you tell us about a time when maybe you've gone against a board decision, and how did you communicate this?

A Yeah, I mean, that's one where, the one I mentioned earlier is a good one, where we, you know, sort of didn't make the hire we needed to early enough, and, you know, tried to justify it at the time. I think great board members will sort of realize the mistakes that are irreversible versus reversible, and that's a good example of one that, if we're making that decision, you know, maybe not a good decision, but it's pretty reversible. So they, they won't get in your way. We've been lucky in that we've had, you know, honestly, I can think of no moments of, you know, sort of serious word friction where people were meeting late odds. And I think that's because we've tried to present decisions, not as sort of, but we are doing this my way or the highway, but rather just collaboratively all discussing, uh, any given topic until we kind of arrive at a conclusion.

AI assessment note: “honestly, I can think of no moments of, you know, sort of serious word friction”

Q And then I do want to finish on the next five years for you and for SeatGeek. What's the exciting roadmap ahead, Jack?

A Yeah, you know, I'm a big believer in sort of the power of live entertainment. It's a classic first-world problem, but once you've got your basic needs, I think going and seeing something live with your friends Is transformative thing that for many people is, you know, the best thing they do all year. 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, people doing more than they otherwise would have specifically by changing the way that people are able to buy things. So, so ticketing is an industry that was really, you know, historically created pre-internet world where little pieces of paper were shipped around, sometimes on planes, sometimes sold at record stores.

AI assessment note: “It's to enable new live experiences, people doing more than they otherwise would have”