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February 2004 Hot Ticket Venue
"We've had to be very Darwinistic" Eric Baker, MBA '01, says of the Internet business he and classmate Jeffrey Fluhr founded as students just after the NASDAQ's fall from its heights in 2000. Baker says he recalls Professor Chuck Holloway advising the audience at the Business School's entrepreneurship conference that spring to "get back to monitoring the cash flow," while Professor Irving Grousbeck urged would-be entrepreneurs to always be thinking about ways to extend their business. Baker and Fluhr have done both with StubHub.com, formerly LiquidSeats, which provides a way for people to resell tickets to sporting events and concerts without standing outside the venue on the day of the event. Thirty-eight states, including California, have no legal restriction on secondary sale of tickets, said Baker, the company president. Organizations as varied as the Seattle Mariners and the Stanford Athletics Department have signed agreements with StubHub to facilitate their fans' resale of tickets. StubHub also helps the cash flow by spreading the information about its service through 70 online partners, and it has expanded into the side business of helping celebrities such as singer Christina Aguilera run charity auctions for special tickets, including backstage passes. The service charges a 15 percent fee to sellers and 10 percent to buyers. Sporting teams like it because it helps keeps the seats full and the concession stands busy. "It also helps the teams sell more season tickets when they can help people resell the seats they can't use," Baker says. |
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