How events.com CEO Mitch Thrower grew events.com to $34.2M revenue and 52K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is mitch thrower he's co-founder and ceo of events.com also co-founder of activegot.com and former chairman and owner of triathlete magazine he was a tedx producer chairman of the foundation and co-founder of active.com the active network prior to that he was co-founder ceo of active europe and active went public uh before selling uh to vista for 1.5 1.05 billion and then eventually sold several divisions like global payments for 1.2 billion and also is a 22x ironman triathlete mitch i'm gonna try and keep up here are you ready to take us to the top i'm ready i'm just i'm just older fair enough look the event space has seen some change over the past 12 to 24 months let's go pre-code for a second what was events.com pre coveted software or something else yeah software and services primarily software for event organizers to make more money and save time by bringing the disparate point systems and event organizers are faced with today onto one platform and help me understand the back story there when did you launch that business so interestingly enough we launched an incubator where we had several different projects going on kind of you know one of your philosophies don't work on one thing right you know figure out which one's going to work you've read you've read the book huh yeah well actually i think it was an interview so i confess i read the book um but i will and i i think ultimately we you know we dabbled in the civic space we bought a company called civico which we sold to granicus which then sold the vista um and then we looked at the connected car and then we were really looking at getting back into the event industry and this sort of emerged in that process so though we you know started code in like end of 1516 as one of the projects in the incubator it really became kind of a core focus to really pour our code and launch and build an enterprise platform for events really around 1718. okay and so well just to be clear so what was like i mean i know you did around like a series b like for a million and 2.3 million back in like 2012 time frame what was going on back then yeah so those are the acquisitions so that was when we acquired a company in the civic space that was all uh even though the entity is events.com that was the kind of in and out of the incubator i see i see okay got it so when you say this was structured as an incubator was this just you financing this sort of incubation with your own personal capital or was it something else yeah it was myself a gentleman named steven partridge and some people that we'd worked with before taking a look at different ventures that could you know catch fire and uh really have an enormous opportunity to scale you know build something big and the events.com domain name is one that we acquired from cbs believe it or not it was originally owned by bill gross not pimco bill gross but ideal advil gross oh wow and um so what year was that oh goodness um i i don't know the exact year but that uh i can i can find out it probably was 1314. so you were sitting on the in the venture studio model you got the domain you were sitting on it then you started writing code for events.com in 2015. correct i see okay so so this is i mean is is that what it was it was basically a venture studio model you guys were hunting for the next big thing to build we didn't call it at that point but yes that was exactly it nice that's exactly it it's really what which of these will catch fire and where can we really um develop a working thesis that will be scalable okay so what signals were you seeing in 2015 that gave you the confidence to say you know what let's go all in on events.com you know the event industry is has transformed not just in the last year but prior to that as technologies emerged for the event industry event organizers were faced you know if there was like the nathan festival you would be using up to 15 different platforms you'd have one for ticketing one for marketing one for analytics and you got some person in the corner with a spreadsheet trying to sell sponsorship but they're getting recruited away because they're good with people and so all of these different things that were happening was pulling value away from event organizers um and we operate primarily in the the sort of the mid-tier although we have you know wonder fun festival with 56 000 attendees and the rise festival and you know we have big clients but our focus is really kind of the mid-market um and so we looked at these event organizations there's just a better way you know an absolutely better way for them to get access to something that helps them make money it helps them make more money in the same time because it's just a nightmare none of the systems they were using were talking to each other so you know the app that they hired someone to build for check-in didn't match with their registration app which didn't match with their analytics app which they had trouble doing their email marketing to so kind of bringing that centralized hub together that was the problem that emerged that was kind of the pain point that we really wanted to address and it is actually it's gotten worse with more event related businesses popping up all the time even with the virtual um you know and the hybrid things that we're seeing coming out now so i think we're in a really good space to you know focus on you know a single platform for events to manage what they're dealing with so what what were you able to grow to that first 12 months 2015 total revenue came out to what do you remember okay let me see 2015 total revenue and i'll i'll share too contextually the 2015 total revenue is going to be blurred because we've also just gone out and done some acquisitions some companies that have been around for 10 years plus some companies for four years plus so when i talk in numbers i just want to contextualize that there's kind of the pre-acquisition and then there's the companies and they're trailing historical actually ignore the trailing stuff yeah yeah yeah so i mean in the first 12 we were probably in the maybe million and a half range somewhere in there million four you know the great thing is you know we were in i would call it a beta although we didn't necessarily call it a beta but when you're building a platform for events where they're trusting you with their capital i mean many event organizers log in more to to our systems than they do their online banks because they're watching their transactions they're communicating with their customers or utilizing it for a part of their crm and when that happens you really want to have a great place for people to live so our scale our buttons on scale and organic growth and marketing we have not yet really pushed those because we wanted to get to where we were about a year ago when we were ready to really push it out to market and then of course the pandemic happened and so we said let's go do some acquisitions to scale during a pandemic but um that that's that's that's what we started on in you know taking one or two of the systems that people were using bringing it onto one and then adding fourth and a fifth and sixth and you know 12 however many different features that they're using elsewhere under one platform and so with that 1.5 million and sort of year one history right just again ignoring the acquisitions you've done now in their trailing revenue you also went out and i think raised a round of capital that year how much did you raise in 2015 correct so i think collectively and and we did it as a rolling raise so i'm going to you know let you know we've raised over 50 million and we're about to announce a round that takes us over 70 million and that includes the acquisitions um one of which we did in 19 and didn't announce one of which actually the other three which we're about to announce i would say within the next two or three quarters um and so that's that's an exciting time but it's uh it's about 70 million cumulatively and because we did rolling raises i can't give you the specific time of what came in unless i opened up a bunch of files and tell you what came in and what point what point in the year the form d stuff just my team does crazy research for these interviews but the 4md stuff said 17 million in 2015 34 and a half million in 2019 and if now you're gonna about to announce and go over 70 that means you're raised about 25 million ish in the past six to 12 months is that about right you nailed it okay cool so we a lot of people don't understand how to use rolling funds founders don't know how to use rolling raises to their advantage can you just quickly talk about like when you raise the first 17 million 2015 what valuation did you raise that and how does the valuation change if you let the thing roll yeah so what i'd prefer to do rather than discussing evaluations only because we are in the middle of closing that last round um and i want to get clearance first before sharing that so maybe in a future interview because i know how important that is but i will share with you kind of some context around rolling raises for founders you know one of the interesting things that i suggest for people that are out there raising capital is to make sure to uh authorize more than you may actually need and allow yourself to raise additional capital if you need it on the same terms of that round should you need to and if you do a rolling raise the difference is if you're...