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Jack Groetzinger

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26
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2018-06-01
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2018-06-01
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  1. “I'm a big believer in sort of the power of live entertainment. It's like 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 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 ticketing is an industry that was really historically created pre-internet world where little pieces of paper were shipped around sometimes on planes, sometimes sold at record stores, and we're trying to create a model that brings it into the modern area by distributing things via Reclaim API. And in the process, just enable a lot more people across the world to go do more stuff and have more fun.”

    2018-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I'm not sure if it's advice, but I think there's this huge underappreciation of the element of luck in doing startups, particularly technology companies, where someone has success in sort of build a cultural personality behind them, but there's just tremendous amount of luck and randomness when you're building something that is trying to get consumer traction. So I think if 80% of startups fail, then maybe a really exceptional founder can get that number down to 50%, but it's hard to get it much lower than that.”

    2018-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Question. You know, I think it definitely wasn't starting a company because when you're 22, just graduate from college, it's not a terribly risky thing. For us, honestly, I referenced it earlier, but the merger we did with topics last year was a huge risk because we felt this thing that we love dearly in our souls, this company and all the people within it. And we put it a bit on the line because we thought the opportunity was so big, but we knew that we were exposing ourselves to some risk if things didn't work out culturally or we weren't buying what we thought we were. And thank God we got very lucky and tremendously fortunate. It's been successful, but it was really scary.”

    2018-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Don't see our competition as some of the obvious companies in our space, but rather the thing which is preventing us from getting to where we want to be, which is having level 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 at 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 combine seek.”

    2018-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “It's a great example of why you should never tell a reporter or anything you don't want people to repeat ever because we're never going to live that one down. So I'll say in my defense, 15 megwites is actually not that many egg whites if you look at it all at once.”

    2018-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “That should kind of feel sort of thing. But I think insofar as I can answer with a gut feel answer, I think it's when you feel like your brand is holding you back versus pushing you forward. For us, there was a point where we were spending multiple millions of dollars a year, $5 to $10 million a year in marketing. And we felt like our brand was an inhibited success rather than an accelerant”

    2018-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “So, I'm not sure it's my favorite of all time, but I'm reading a great book right now, which is called Powerful by Patty McCord, pioneered the Netflix HR philosophy, which I've always been an admirer of. I think a lot of people are. And this is a cool look under the covers beyond the Netflix HR deck, which a lot of people have read into a lot of the detail about how they”

    2018-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I think I would have been sort of even more aggressive when it came to growth and user acquisition and building the brand. Like I mentioned before, we waited a long time to raise money until we had really sort of irrefutable and controvertible evidence that the CACL TV math was heavily in our favor and would be idiots not to raise more money. I think the benefit of hindsight would have preferred to have skate a bit where the puck is going and realized that there were a lot of secular trends, most notably mobile, that were really converging in our favor that we could get an even bigger leap on the competition if we've been a bit more aggressive with growth early on.”

    2018-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I wouldn't either, but I can guess. But honestly, there's a bit of luck involved too, because I think the thing I worry about most is culture and the wrist to culture. And culture is something that's very fragile and in etheral, and it's hard to prescribe. We got very lucky and that top techs had a very similar culture to SeaGeek and does a lot of things worked out very easily, whereas they very much wouldn't have if that wasn't the case”

    2018-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Good question. I think we've gotten a lot of things right. We've got a few things wrong. Overall, it succeeded 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 essential in terms of getting everyone communicating on the same platforms and working together efficiently. We also overinvested 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 spouses family for the first time.”

    2018-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “You know, I've always one of those people that never really saw myself leading big and MA event and it's not something we ever aspire to. We've always tried to grow organically. So it was, you know, bore you with all the background. But basically we had a licensing partnership with a company, a company Toptix that was based in Israel that was going so well and just there was so much synergy that we felt like 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 Seekeek and everything we built because ultimately it's so deeply destabilizing event. We at the time were about 140 folks on top at the time was about 110. So it's nearly doubling the company in size and also geographically and a lot of expansion for us. So it was a bit of a leap of faith moment where we believed in the huge value we could grant if we brought the companies together. We also really loved the founders of Toptics and wanted to work with them. We didn't have the chance to meet with everyone on the Zoptics team, but we decided that ultimately”

    2018-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “That's such a new field that 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 absolutely nothing wrong with that, but we'd very much prefer to hire career, a quantitative professional, whether it needs me at a PhD or career doing quantum trading. So I think for any of these sort of new ascendant roles, there's a lot of noise in the applicant pool, and we definitely see that.”

    2018-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, I mean, one thing I love about New York is that despite it being very biggest cities overall, the tech ecosystem is tighter and smaller and sort of 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 a bit more credible. And some of you can really aspire to. The challenge, of course, on 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 liquidity events that spin off a bunch of people with a lot of capital that are then doing their own startups, which definitely constrains things a bit here in New York.”

    2018-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, I mean, that's one where one I mentioned earlier is a good one where we didn't make the hire we needed to early enough and try 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 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 serious board friction where people were meaningfully at odds. And I think that's because try to present decisions not as sort of that we are doing this my way or the highway, but rather just collaboratively all discussing any given topic until we kind of arrive at a conclusion.”

    2018-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Matters, I would say even more than that, what I value most from the guys in our board is just having hyperintelligent people who are thinking about your business a lot. 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. I think our board has been most valuable when we're facing those moments and we can get great advice and have a great discussion versus just sort of being stuck in our own heads as we try to decide”

    2018-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “And we certainly fall into this too. I think people tend to. Actually, be really impactful. So, you know, a few examples of that Heat of it, and you just really need to fill a Really force Or Company X is”

    2018-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I wish we had it quite as figured out as John says we do. But I think one of the most frustrating things about hiring when you talk to”

    2018-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “That's something we talk about. The idea is that if you're doing it As a company. And if you're getting It's trick Try to do And if we're”

    2018-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I think the classic answer would be around And we definitely hit that. I think it happened more gradually. The reality that happened for us is that individual teams almost begin to operate. Before, so yeah, you might not know Anyone here Many people do know very personally”

    2018-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah, so OK, there's a sort of this alignment framework that was pioneered by Andy Grove and then made popular by Google. I love them because I think you sort of think about the 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, Individual startups”

    2018-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Now, 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 lions den. It just feels like a bunch of smart people in a room who all want to make the same company successful. And 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 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. Think if a lot of founders realize that fully they would do more work and more diligence and spend more time with the counterpart. And I know in retrospect I should have, but got very lucky in that we work with just an incredible group of people at CK. You mentioned two of them, David and Cronic collected and junk.”

    2018-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “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 Seakeek is that they're not authoritarian or dictating that we must do X or Y. They'll suggest and then they'll ultimately let us make a decision, which usually is a good thing, but in a lot of ways, because it's the fastest way to get a founder to do what you want. But that's a great case where they suggested we hire a finance leader. When we did eventually, but we took much longer than we should have.”

    2018-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I mean, you look back sometimes at old emails and just cackle it myself. I think one kind of a classic observation, but one area we struggled early on was just not knowing what we didn't know. So particularly, to give you one specific example, we waited forever to hire a full-time finance person. I think we'd raised almost $100 million 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 ignorance decision. We brought in the 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 a great finance leader, so we didn't know what we were missing.”

    2018-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Yeah, I think for anyone founding a startup, being technical is, or in a way, most important criterion that sort of drives success. You basically 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 in 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, 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 technology to be a much more concerted thing that you learn and bring to the table.”

    2018-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Different sellers with really goal of just showing a user all the inventory out there and helping them find the very best value possible.”

    2018-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Yeah, I was living in Boston at the time with one of my co founders, Russ, and this was back in 2008, 2009, when, as any Boston sports fan will remember, every Boston team was winning everything. So we honestly just kind of for fun began to buy and sell some sports tickets. We were thinking about it. Consumer wants to start up at the time, so we're scraping a lot of data across different verticals and began to scrape a bunch of ticket data because we thought it might be an interesting market. And we were just blown away by how inefficient the market was, by how there was just huge disparities between what people were actually paying and what they should have been paying and a lot of opacity about how prices moved. So we initially set out to create almost sort of like a Bloomberg terminal for tickets where we wanted to ingest all this data and just show it to people and help them make better buying decisions. And 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. So we began to aggregate tickets from lots of”

    2018-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source