How events.com CEO Mitch Thrower grew 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 raising capital and let's say raising 10 million you may only be able to use that 10 million when you get it to 10 million if you do a rolling raise you get the first million you can use it and grow and invest the second million use it and grow and invest higher more engineers more engineers you know and so that that's that's the the baseline of kind of a rolling close which i would encourage entrepreneurs to follow because it allows them to you know the dog years right you know tech is dog years things are moving really fast in technology so you want to move really fast as well yeah let's build up to covet here pre pre covered so wrapping out 2019 what did you guys finish with in terms of whatever you want to share revenue or customer count or whatever yeah i mean i'll take you through the combined entity so combined entities were for 19 about 16.8 okay um and one six yes 16 16.8 million and then if you look at 2020 precovid you know both contracted and otherwise recurring revenues should have been uh in the 25 million range but obviously covid was just a crushing blow to the event industry you know there's three billion dollar drop out of the event management software business it's uh you know it's kind of uh the black swan if you will but um i think it's chervin who said from virgin hyperloop unicorns are born when black swans take flight so we decided to go out and focus on acquisitions and expanding into different geographic regions because indeed the world will respond differently and different parts of the world will react to vaccinations and emerging from this faster than other parts of the world so that's 2019 2020 when you closed out just whatever that was three months ago what did you close out there so in terms of capital or in terms of no in terms of revenue 16.8 million in 2019 went down to what in 2020 because of covet good question so that would be one thing i'd want to hold back as well um in terms of the covet drop but i will share with you it was significant um the great thing is a lot of our partners right a lot of our partners are museums that we power the technology for churches um you know uh temples synagogues um we do registration for festivals and galas and uh all of the events a lot of which aren't happening currently although a lot of them are also using our virtual event technologies um but it's it's a it's a fraction of what it would be uh and a lot of those and some we expect around five up to eight percent of the event organizers globally will actually just not make it not make it through uh but the demand the demand that we're tracking on the other end of this and the other end of the nightmare is significant when new zealand opened up again after their first lockdown which was abbreviated compared to the rest of the world they broke 16-year attendance records at their events and have maintained like a 20 to 30 increase in the people that are going to out and experiencing events in the real world did you have a video tech stack already built in events.com so you could quickly pivot to hosting virtual events or did you not have that tech build when covet hit yeah so from a video tech stack we actually we we refer folks and integrate with other video tech stacks so when people are powering their event from a virtual perspective they will use our system to do everything from registration sponsorship management marketing analytics crm customers refund you know whatever it might be and they can pick because you know events that are using video really have two goals right they either want to broadcast to as many people as possible in which case they're going to want to type it out over instagram and youtube and vimeo and so a host of you know that's one dimension of a virtual event another one is someone who wants restricted access right that's really where uh groups are trying to say well you have to buy a ticket to get access to what you're watching or what you're interacting with so we took a step back and said let's sit on top of that because each organization is going to want to do it slightly differently and there's been so much has been a lot of chaos we just wanted to be the you know we wanted to be the levi's i guess in that situation but so i mean with that in mind i mean just to cite some you know historical data points here in the space right visibo grows in 2019 from 10 million run rate to 22 million run rate at the end of 2020 hopping grows from 3 million in arr to almost 20 million in arr pre pre stream art acquisition with their video text deck v fares bootstrapped goes from 3 million to 30 million in ar during this period why did you shrink if you had this capability yeah so remember the capability we are not doing video the way hoppin or zoom or youtube or um you know if you're if you're having someone who's been getting access our primary activity is really for the event organizers to be able to use any of those platforms we didn't want to limit any of our event organizers for example if it's your you know your local organization or a national group they may have a specific tendency to use a zoom or to use a hop-in although hoppin is in some ways a significant competitor um impressed with what they're doing found is a great guy but i think ultimately for what we're trying to do it really is you know attack tackle that mid market and allow people to use any video integrations that they would like so we focused on integrating with the various video platforms so that when people are running their um apps for you know experiencing the back and forth connectivity check-in sponsorship marketing that event also doing ticketing for that event for really the commercial enterprise arrangements sorry i don't mean to call you off but there so there was no go to market for virtual only events is that what i'm hearing you say that's correct that's correct why not though i'm saying isn't this a massive opportunity you missed i mean you have the perfect domain name why wasn't this like the number one priority the second you heard about a virus shutting down the economy yeah and and i i will share with you that one of the reasons is i'm editing out because of the acquisition that there's a there's an edit there you you i think uncovered something that uh we will be talking about probably not for three months but there is uh there's something there in the space that we are targeting so i'm is it you you got a great way of of uh cutting through but that that is correct we we at events.com we were focused kind of sitting on the gateway to the video experiences people are still having those video experiences on multiple platforms and when you look at capacity for people to interact at an event there's a lot of things emerging right i mean you've got the whole event dynamic world of clubhouse i'm sure i think you had a huge clubhouse event at one point right like thousands of people attending it and if you look at the way the patterns of human behavior are shifting now pre-pandemic and then of course post-pandemic one of the things that we've been analyzing is what is the sustainability and the time line around what people are going to do in that hybrid environment when you're going to the wonderful festival but you're experiencing it digitally from milan or if you're experiencing in san diego in the real world so we've spent a lot of time looking at that space and we have a pretty big announcement i think coming up about that uh got it um go back to pre-pandemic real quick 16.8 million in 2019 how many customers were you serving that year do you remember yeah let me go back here and see you're talking 2019 correct what tool are you looking at a tool right now on your computer what tool do you use to track all this yeah we've actually built our own um tool uh internally that brings stuff together and obviously there's a lot of pieces for the event organizer and we've looked at different ones i mean everything from tableau to you know you name it in terms of just outputting different activities but if you look at [Music] there we go okay so um about 52 000. okay got it and were they paying subscription plans or is it one time per event sort of deals yeah so if you look at the event industry right you've got the contract with the event organizer and then the customers for the most top most part pay the fees there's some organizations that use our platform and we'll just license it as an api like prudential to come and just use our program to build what they want on top of similar to like a shopify model um but for the majority it's folks that are coming in and then the event organizers contract with us and the participants end up paying a percentage of their registration or the ancillary revenues or the sponsorships generated et cetera yeah so it's a couple less yeah a couple last questions just because we're out of time team size today how many folks on the team total 50 50 people and how many engineers um we have on our engineering team combining them all 21 21 that's interesting okay very cool and then like usually i would ask about like churning things like that but again you're in such an industry that's changing so quick it sounds like you're really potentially betting the farm here on a couple of three or four maybe acquisitions that you're going to be announcing here shortly you raised another 25 ish million i guess to fuel some of those so we'll look forward to those announcements anything else you want to touch on before we wrap up i mean i think just uh you know as a as a you know you do a great great job by the way in what you do for all the folks that are out there in the stats industry and you know truly appreciate the contributions you make to uh software i appreciate that you listen to the show a little bit you catch an episode every now and then yes every now and then catch up now and we've been we've been busy this year with the acquisition and helping customers we help events i mean we're in over 155 countries now multiple languages multiple currencies so you can imagine we've been we've been pretty busy we're rooting for you man let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite business book oh that's got to be venture deals number two adventure deals it is that brad felt a good book uh number two is there a ceo you're following her studying abby eric eric yan yep zoom number three what's your favorite online tool for building your business black number four how many hours of sleep every night five to eight depending on whether or not we're in the middle of negotiations on something fair and what's your situation married single kids married married to the love of my life we have one son who is keeping us uh keeping us busy how old are you mitch what's that how old are you i'm uh 54. 54. last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 oh let's see i think that that whole concept of do what you love and the money will follow is wrong it's find what in the area that you love where value is moving from point a to b and insert yourself in the middle and help facilitate the process as opposed to just going out and randomly saying hey it's an area that i love i'm going to do something like find the value study the world that you love and where value is going and how money and value is being exchanged and then put yourself in the middle of that that's more important guys events.com started off as a venture studio back in 2012 said let's go on events in 2015 they did 1.5 million dollars of revenue their first year in business raised 17 million bucks let that bad boy roll grew about 16.8 million bucks in revenue the year after in 2019 pre-code but raised another 34 million now between now and back in 2019 they've done some very exciting things which mitch will be announcing here shortly but it definitely involves acquisitions and another about 25 million dollars raised we'll see what happens mitch thanks for taking us to the top thanks nathan good luck one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1pm central 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