live-events
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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.
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.
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.
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.