live-events
(25)
Fanatics Wants Every Fan Moment - and Every Transaction Around It
The jersey seller has become a sports operating system, linking 100 million-plus fans to merchandise, cards, wagers, events and media. Its next contest is proving that one account can hold all of fandom without flattening what makes fans care.
The Dallas Mavericks Are Building a Business Bigger Than Basketball
Dallas has one NBA team, but the company behind it now sells far more than a seat and a score. Its next act connects local television, direct streaming, hospitality, retail and a proposed 104-acre arena district.
The NWSL Is Building the League Women’s Soccer Was Always Told to Wait For
Sixteen clubs, four major media partners and one newly liberated player market have turned the NWSL into a revealing test of what happens when women’s soccer is treated as a durable business, not a charitable cause.
The Blue Jackets Built a Hockey Town. Now They Have to Win It.
Columbus has proved it will show up - 94,751 fans did so at Ohio Stadium. The Blue Jackets' harder business is turning civic affection, a loud cannon and a deep local network into the durable habit of winning.
The AV Company That Moved Into the Hotel
Pinnacle Live’s wager is that the best event crew is already in the building - fluent in the ballroom, aligned with the hotel and accountable for more than the gear. Four years, one merger and one acquisition turned that operating idea into a network of more than 200 venue partnerships.
The Miami HEAT Turned Two Words Into a Business System
Miami sells basketball, tickets, media, merchandise and access. The unusual part is the operating doctrine behind all of it - a thirty-year effort to turn standards, conditioning and a sense of place into a product fans can recognize.
The Padres Turned a Ballpark Into San Diego's Town Square
San Diego has no other team in the four traditional major leagues. The Padres have turned that scarcity - and a downtown ballpark that refuses to sit idle - into a year-round business with record crowds, bilingual reach and unfinished ambitions.
The Team That Sells You Its Enemies' Teeth
How a franchise named after a kids' movie became a $1.4 billion bet on live sports, youth hockey, and 100 acres of Orange County real estate.
Live Nation Entertainment
It books the band, owns the room, prints the ticket and sells the beer sponsorship. Inside the $23-billion machine that moves 150 million concertgoers a year - and the antitrust fight over whether one company should do all of that.
4Wall Entertainment
From Las Vegas warehouses to West End stages, 4Wall grew by buying its rivals and renting the live-event industry the one thing it can't tour without - equipment that works the moment the show starts.
National Hockey League (NHL)
The NHL sells a scarce live spectacle, then makes it abundant across television, streaming, merchandise, data products and 32 local markets. Its century-old advantage is not merely hockey - it is the system that turns every puck drop into rights, reach and ritual.
Audience Republic
Unleash your event's full potential with our all-in-one audience CRM and marketing platform.
Palm Tree Crew Holdings
Palm Tree Crew is a Miami-based entertainment, hospitality and investment holding company founded by Norwegian DJ and producer Kygo (Kyrre Gorvell-Dahll) and his manager Myles Shear. Built around the globe-trotting Palm Tree Music Festival, the company spans four lines of business - live events, hospitality venues and beach clubs, a consumer lifestyle and apparel brand, and a multi-product investment platform. In September 2025 it raised a $20 million Series B led by WME Group at a $215 million valuation to fund international festival expansion, new clubs and hotels, and early-stage bets in beverages and consumer goods.
SeatGeek
SeatGeek is a New York-based ticketing company that runs a mobile-first marketplace for live sports, concerts and theater alongside an enterprise platform that powers primary ticketing for teams, leagues and venues. It is best known for Deal Score, an algorithm that rates every listing by price and seat value, and it competes with Ticketmaster and StubHub across both the primary and secondary ticket markets.
Jack Groetzinger
Jack Groetzinger is the co-founder and CEO of SeatGeek, the mobile-first ticketing platform he started in 2009 to make buying and selling tickets for sports, concerts and theater simpler and more transparent. Under his leadership SeatGeek has raised roughly $400 million, reached a valuation above $1 billion, and won primary-ticketing deals with Major League Soccer, the Dallas Cowboys, the Brooklyn Nets and dozens of Broadway theaters. A Dartmouth economics graduate and serial entrepreneur, Groetzinger has become one of the most vocal challengers to Ticketmaster's dominance, testifying before the U.S. Senate on competition in live-event ticketing.
Linklabs
Linklabs (branded 'Remix The Web') is a Sao Paulo-based software platform that helps brands, publishers and agencies collect, moderate, display and analyze social content from across the web. It aggregates user-generated content from 15+ social networks, review sites and messaging apps into curated social walls, website hubs, event projections and ad units - with built-in content-rights management and campaign analytics to turn peer recommendations into measurable marketing conversions.
Michael Diaz
Michael Diaz is the CEO of Palm Tree Crew Holdings, the diversified lifestyle, live-events, and investment company Kygo and Myles Shear founded in 2020. A former Duke undergrad who spent his early career in investment banking at UBS and as a Managing Director at LionTree, Diaz now runs a business that in 2025 raised a $20M Series B led by WME Group at a $215M valuation, opened four Palm Tree Club hospitality venues in under a year, and expanded its festival footprint from Oahu and West Palm Beach to Saint-Tropez and Sardinia.
Sara Providence
Sara Providence is Vice President and Chief of Staff to the CEO at SeatGeek, the New York-based ticketing marketplace. She arrived from McKinsey & Company in 2023, bringing an unusual triple-degree background - a BA from Harvard, a JD from Columbia Law, and an MBA from Columbia Business School - to the corner office of a company whose product is essentially the trust that a stranger's PDF will get you into a stadium.
CrowdVolt
CrowdVolt is a New York-based, Y Combinator-backed marketplace that lets fans buy and sell tickets to live events - starting with raves and EDM concerts - through a bid-ask model similar to StockX. Buyers name the price they are willing to pay, sellers set an ask, and trades clear automatically when the two meet. The platform handles secure payments and automated ticket transfers to cut fraud, inflated fees, and the opacity of the traditional resale market.
Max Hammer
Max Hammer is the co-founder and CEO of CrowdVolt, a Y Combinator (W24) startup building a bid-ask marketplace for live event tickets - pitched as 'what StockX did for sneakers, for tickets.' A Westport, Connecticut native and University of Pennsylvania graduate, he left an investment banking career at UBS to chase the rave-ticket resale problem he and his co-founders kept hitting after attending 80-plus shows in a single year. CrowdVolt launched in Brooklyn in early 2024, raised $1.4 million in seed funding from Brickyard VC, Goodwater Capital, Pioneer Fund and YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, and is expanding from EDM into broader live-events infrastructure.
StubHub International
StubHub International is the non-North American arm of the StubHub ticketing brand, operating online secondary marketplaces where fans buy and sell tickets to concerts, sports, theatre and festivals across the UK, Germany, Spain, France and dozens of other markets. Carved out of viagogo's StubHub acquisition by a 2021 UK regulator-mandated divestiture and now owned by Boston-based Digital Fuel Capital, the company runs from operational hubs in London, Madrid, Bilbao and Berlin, backing every transaction with its FanProtect guarantee.
Combate Global
Combate Global is the leading Hispanic mixed martial arts promotion, founded in 2011 by UFC co-creator Campbell McLaren. Built around the conviction that Latino fight fans were underserved, it produces live events, reality television and streaming content showcasing emerging Hispanic fighters, broadcasting across the United States, Latin America and Spanish-speaking markets worldwide.
FEVO
FEVO is a New York-based social commerce and ticketing company that turns the lonely online checkout into a group activity. Its Social Checkout lets fans buy tickets together, split payments, mix inventory, and share events across their networks - generating extra sales through built-in virality. Since 2016 it has helped 750+ blue-chip brands in sports, music, and live entertainment sell more than 15 million tickets to roughly 4 million consumers.
Ari Daie
Ari Daie is the founder, CEO and president of FEVO, a New York social-commerce platform that turns the lonely online checkout into a group activity. After a career that ran through Goldman Sachs, two startups he built and sold, and a senior dealmaking seat at Ticketmaster/Live Nation, Daie built FEVO on a simple bet: people would rather buy tickets and merchandise together than alone. The platform now powers more than 750 partners across the NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL, MLS and Formula 1, and FEVO has reported scaling past a billion dollars in sales while raising tens of millions in venture funding.
Bob Kupbens
Bob Kupbens is the Chief Executive Officer of StubHub International, the world's largest ticket marketplace, a role he assumed in January 2024. A seasoned digital commerce executive with an MIT engineering pedigree and Michigan MBA, Kupbens has spent three decades reshaping how consumers interact with major brands - from launching the Fly Delta mobile app at Delta Air Lines to running Apple's global online retail operation to orchestrating the ADT-Google partnership. Now based in Madrid while living in Millbrae, California, he is focused on deploying AI-driven customer experience improvements and defending StubHub International's position in key markets like the UK.