Jack Groetzinger

Co-Founder & CEO, SeatGeek · 1 appearance on the record.

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founderexecutiveinvestor@jackgretz ↗LinkedIn ↗

Jack Groetzinger is the co-founder and CEO of SeatGeek, a live entertainment ticketing platform launched in 2009. Prior to building SeatGeek, he co-founded the blog discovery service Scribnia and currently invests in early-stage startups with Founder Collective.

15statements → 3claims → 1claims resolved → 3.93/5average certainty → 2.07/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 7said about them ↓

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 3 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

3 assertions · 1 opinion · 7 insights · 4 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 3 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Jack argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported

SeatGeek acquired TopTix for $56M using an equal-sized funding round

“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 finance the deal.”

Jack Groetzinger Jun 1, 2018 ▶ 13:37 20VC: Why Every Startup Will Either Fail or Rebrand, How To Do OKRs The Right Way & How To Know The Reversible From the Irreversible Mistakes with Jack Groetzinger, Founder & CEO @ SeatGeek

How they sound: speaking style how? →

263 words/min while actually speaking · 4.2 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Jack Groetzinger: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 30 exchanges on the produced feed is ≈4.5/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small and produced tape scores higher.

Measured by listening to 4,273 words across 1 episode, but every recording we have of Jack Groetzinger is the aired feed, and an editor cleaned that audio before release. Some of the hesitation was cut before we ever heard it, so read these as floors: the true rates are at least this high. These are measurements of speaking style, not scores. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 2/10

pushed back at the host ▾ 1/10

setup questions received 55%

host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 5:04“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 hazardou…” ▶ 5:58“Can I ask, is that not where a board really interject themselves and show you what you don't know, so to speak?” ▶ 14:03“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?”

when Jack pushed back ▶ 24:32“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 lo…” ▶ 24:13“So I'll say in my defense, 15 egg whites is actually not that many egg whites if you, if you look at it all, uh, all at once.”

What they said15 What others said7 Episodes1

Everything Jack Groetzinger said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight

Technical skill is the most important factor for startup founders

“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.”

Jack Groetzinger Jun 1, 2018 ▶ 4:23 20VC: Why Every Startup Will Either Fail or Rebrand, How To Do OKRs The Right Way & How To Know The Reversible From the Irreversible Mistakes with Jack Groetzinger, Founder & CEO @ SeatGeek

Disclosure

SeatGeek raised nearly $100M before hiring its first finance employee

“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”

Jack Groetzinger Jun 1, 2018 ▶ 5:25 20VC: Why Every Startup Will Either Fail or Rebrand, How To Do OKRs The Right Way & How To Know The Reversible From the Irreversible Mistakes with Jack Groetzinger, Founder & CEO @ SeatGeek

Opinion

SeatGeek can realistically be NYC's top employer brand, unlike in SF

“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 technol…”

Jack Groetzinger Jun 1, 2018 ▶ 17:41 20VC: Why Every Startup Will Either Fail or Rebrand, How To Do OKRs The Right Way & How To Know The Reversible From the Irreversible Mistakes with Jack Groetzinger, Founder & CEO @ SeatGeek

Disclosure

SeatGeek prefers PhDs and quant traders over bootcamp data science grads

“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. And there's ab…”

Jack Groetzinger Jun 1, 2018 ▶ 18:22 20VC: Why Every Startup Will Either Fail or Rebrand, How To Do OKRs The Right Way & How To Know The Reversible From the Irreversible Mistakes with Jack Groetzinger, Founder & CEO @ SeatGeek

Insight

Every consumer web startup will eventually either rebrand or fail

“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.”

Jack Groetzinger Jun 1, 2018 ▶ 23:19 20VC: Why Every Startup Will Either Fail or Rebrand, How To Do OKRs The Right Way & How To Know The Reversible From the Irreversible Mistakes with Jack Groetzinger, Founder & CEO @ SeatGeek

Insight

Board seats are immutable commitments requiring extensive founder diligence

“When you 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 …”

Jack Groetzinger Jun 1, 2018 ▶ 6:53 20VC: Why Every Startup Will Either Fail or Rebrand, How To Do OKRs The Right Way & How To Know The Reversible From the Irreversible Mistakes with Jack Groetzinger, Founder & CEO @ SeatGeek

Insight

Achieving 100% of OKRs indicates sandbagging and conservative goal-setting

“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.”

Jack Groetzinger Jun 1, 2018 ▶ 9:35 20VC: Why Every Startup Will Either Fail or Rebrand, How To Do OKRs The Right Way & How To Know The Reversible From the Irreversible Mistakes with Jack Groetzinger, Founder & CEO @ SeatGeek

Insight

Blogging and open-sourcing code act as force multipliers in recruiting

“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 t…”

Jack Groetzinger Jun 1, 2018 ▶ 11:40 20VC: Why Every Startup Will Either Fail or Rebrand, How To Do OKRs The Right Way & How To Know The Reversible From the Irreversible Mistakes with Jack Groetzinger, Founder & CEO @ SeatGeek

Assertion Supported

SeatGeek acquired TopTix for $56M using an equal-sized funding round

“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 finance the deal.”

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Twitter fell from SeatGeek's top acquisition channel to tenth

“For us, for example, the channel that was our very biggest driver back in 2013, Twitter, mobile acquisition has become probably number 10 on the list right now.”

Jack Groetzinger Jun 1, 2018 ▶ 15:17 20VC: Why Every Startup Will Either Fail or Rebrand, How To Do OKRs The Right Way & How To Know The Reversible From the Irreversible Mistakes with Jack Groetzinger, Founder & CEO @ SeatGeek

Insight

Startups face at most two or three major strategic decisions yearly

“Each company maybe has two to three sort of major strategic moments per year at most, but they're incredibly important to get right and can be company champion.”

Jack Groetzinger Jun 1, 2018 ▶ 16:01 20VC: Why Every Startup Will Either Fail or Rebrand, How To Do OKRs The Right Way & How To Know The Reversible From the Irreversible Mistakes with Jack Groetzinger, Founder & CEO @ SeatGeek

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Lack of major liquidity events constrains the New York tech ecosystem

“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 peop…”

Jack Groetzinger Jun 1, 2018 ▶ 17:57 20VC: Why Every Startup Will Either Fail or Rebrand, How To Do OKRs The Right Way & How To Know The Reversible From the Irreversible Mistakes with Jack Groetzinger, Founder & CEO @ SeatGeek

Disclosure

SeatGeek delayed fundraising until unit economics proved highly favorable

“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.”

Jack Groetzinger Jun 1, 2018 ▶ 21:35 20VC: Why Every Startup Will Either Fail or Rebrand, How To Do OKRs The Right Way & How To Know The Reversible From the Irreversible Mistakes with Jack Groetzinger, Founder & CEO @ SeatGeek

Disclosure

SeatGeek spent $5M-$10M yearly on marketing before rebranding

“For us, there was a point where we were spending multiple millions of dollars a year, five to ten million dollars a year in marketing, and we felt like our brand was an inhibitor success rather than an accelerant.”

Jack Groetzinger Jun 1, 2018 ▶ 23:49 20VC: Why Every Startup Will Either Fail or Rebrand, How To Do OKRs The Right Way & How To Know The Reversible From the Irreversible Mistakes with Jack Groetzinger, Founder & CEO @ SeatGeek

Insight

Ticket buyers wanted actionable recommendations over raw data

“Pretty early on, we realized, thanks to user feedback, that people didn't just want data. They actually wanted us to help them suggest what tickets to buy and sort of push them through that process.”

Jack Groetzinger Jun 1, 2018 ▶ 3:41 20VC: Why Every Startup Will Either Fail or Rebrand, How To Do OKRs The Right Way & How To Know The Reversible From the Irreversible Mistakes with Jack Groetzinger, Founder & CEO @ SeatGeek

The other half of the tape: Jack Groetzinger's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 7 times in 4 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 4 David Frankel 3