The drawer was full of baseball tickets. Not old stubs kept for sentimental reasons, but unused Mets tickets - expensive little rectangles ending their season in a CBS executive's office. It was 2006. Tony Knopp had come to sell StubHub's marketplace. The executive, Charlie, interrupted the pitch, opened the bottom drawer of his desk and offered a better problem: solve this waste, and perhaps he would buy more.
A separate customer had supplied the other half of the idea. Noah, an executive at financial printer Bowne, wanted a monthly report showing what his salespeople bought and whether the spending corresponded with business won. One company had inventory it could not use. Another wanted evidence that its inventory worked. Knopp heard a product in the overlap.
It is an origin story with almost no mythology in it. No garage. No lightning bolt. Just a lunch, a desk drawer and two buyers describing tedious administrative pain. In an industry designed to make people cheer, Knopp noticed the paperwork.
Learning the whole gate
Knopp arrived at that drawer by taking the scenic route through Los Angeles sports. He graduated from the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business in 2001, where he had played varsity volleyball. He has written that he had $1,100 in the bank and no obvious path into the career he wanted. His first job involved selling newspaper coupons and grocery-store shelf advertising for News America Marketing. Then he took a job selling Dodgers season tickets for $10 an hour.
By 2002 he was at AEG, selling tickets connected with the Los Angeles Kings and later corporate sponsorships. The 2004-05 hockey lockout made the economics personal: commissions shrank, the season disappeared and an early startup named StubHub called. Knopp joined in 2005, commuting from Los Angeles to San Francisco and helping create its corporate sales operation.
Those jobs gave him a useful, unglamorous map. He knew what a team needed to sell, what a corporate buyer struggled to administer and what a secondary marketplace could recover. He also knew the ticket itself was only the visible artifact. Behind it sat approval, allocation, delivery, attendance, resale, compliance and the awkward question that arrives after the client has gone home: did any of this help?
“The best ideas are in the wild.”Tony Knopp, on TicketManager's origin
A company for the morning after
Knopp and colleagues Aric and Joe had been looking for a business to start. On September 27, 2007, the company that became TicketManager began operating. Its early names included Corporate Events Group and Spotlight Ticket Management. The timing had comic cruelty: a company built around corporate entertaining launched just before a recession made luxury suites look like the first line a finance department might cross out.
The team survived by making the case that hospitality was not merely a perk. Used deliberately, a ticket could open time with a customer, reward an employee or deepen a partnership. Used carelessly, it could become expensive wallpaper. The software helped companies distribute seats, record recipients, handle unused inventory and compare activity with business results. It turned the morning after an event into something more rigorous than a fond anecdote.
TicketManager eventually expanded beyond ticket allocation. Its platform came to cover guest invitations, registration, mobile delivery, check-in, reporting, CRM connections and controlled resale. The 2021 acquisition of Sports Systems added credentialing, guest management and sponsorship asset capabilities. The business was following its founding logic outward: every missing handoff around an event was a place for value to leak away.
When the founder was the broken workflow
The product story is neat. The leadership story is not, and Knopp seems to prefer it that way. In 2012, after a bad quarter and missed growth targets, his board told him he was a poor leader. He has since described their verdict with little varnish: they were right.
He began reading. More than 150 books on leadership, development and self-help followed. The episode became more than private scar tissue. For over a decade, he has opened final interviews at TicketManager by telling candidates about it. A founder admitting error in an interview is not decorative humility. It establishes the rules of the room: performance matters, feedback can travel upward and the person with the largest title is still expected to revise.
Knopp's public writing works in the same register. His newsletter and podcast, Three Things I Learned in SaaS, Sports, Tech & Live Events, regularly turn mistakes, awkward decisions and operating lessons into short field notes. He writes like someone leaving trail markers for the next person, including the places where he walked into a branch.
There is play in the operating system, too. A 2015 description of TicketManager's office included no dress code, games, snacks and a CEO who sometimes walked the halls barefoot. Away from work, Knopp has called surfing the one pursuit that clears business from his mind. In a 2016 weekend diary, he was an early riser, a youth baseball coach, a father arranging Friday adventures and a husband protecting a weekly date night. The image is not balance so much as motion. Knopp once explained that he simply does not like sitting around.
The empty-arena test
Then came the event industry's most literal stress test. In March 2020, arenas went quiet and the calendar became a collection of postponements, cancellations and questions nobody could answer cleanly. TicketManager existed to help people use seats. Suddenly, using a seat was impossible.
Knopp's language at the time was characteristically blunt. Games without fans, he said, would have been “the apocalypse” for parts of the ticket business. Postponement at least allowed organizers to hold revenue and keep operating while dates moved. For corporate buyers, however, every move multiplied the administrative mess. Who had been invited? Which ticket had transferred? What happened to the value when an event shifted by months? Which guest should receive the replacement?
The crisis exposed why the backstage system mattered. When everything runs on schedule, a spreadsheet can impersonate infrastructure. When hundreds of events change at once, the impersonation ends. A record of inventory, recipients and status becomes less like office convenience and more like operational memory.
It also complicated the usual return-on-investment story. No software could manufacture the human energy of a full stadium. The value of TicketManager's category rested on live presence, and live presence had vanished. The company had to endure the contradiction while helping customers account for what remained. Knopp had already launched into a recession. Now he was leading through a shutdown of the activity itself. The lesson was severe but clarifying: the software around an experience cannot replace the experience, yet it becomes most useful when the experience stops behaving predictably.
Selling certainty around a night out
In May 2025, Valeas Capital Partners announced it would acquire a majority stake in TicketManager and commit $110 million to its growth. Knopp and chief operating officer Ken Hanscom retained minority interests. Knopp remained chief executive. The company said more than 500 brands, teams and leagues were using its products.
The deal arrived eighteen years after the drawer. It also arrived at a useful moment for Knopp's argument. Corporate hospitality has become both more ambitious and more accountable. Major events are scarce, client attention is scarcer and finance teams quite reasonably dislike mystery. World Cups and the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics promise extraordinary stages, but a stage alone does not prove a return.
TicketManager's wager is that the ticket should be connected to the rest of the company: customer records, permissions, invitations, attendance and outcomes. The emotional event remains emotional. The surrounding operation becomes legible.
That distinction explains Knopp's career. He loves live events enough to inspect their least romantic corners. He took the excitement seriously, which meant taking the spreadsheet seriously too. The result is a company built for the point where a cheer becomes a relationship and a relationship becomes a line in a report.
A ticket can create a memory in three hours. Building the machinery that remembers what it meant took nearly two decades.YesPress
The seat beside the customer
In July 2026, Sports Business Journal named Knopp among its Power Players in ticketing, noting the breadth of his experience across the Dodgers, Kings, AEG, StubHub and TicketManager. The sequence matters. He did not approach the business as a tourist who liked games. He had sold the seat, watched the marketplace price it, listened to companies struggle with it and then built a system around its working life.
The lesson worth borrowing is smaller than the company and more portable. When a prospective customer interrupts a polished pitch with a messy complaint, stop defending the pitch. Open the drawer. Ask what has been piling up. The dullest object in the room may contain the more interesting business.
Knopp's version happened to contain Mets tickets. Every industry has a drawer like it.