Events.com and the Companies It Acquired Did $16.8M in Combined 2019 Revenue, With Over $50M Raised (Interview with Co-Founder and CEO Mitch Thrower)

Introduction and Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Hello everyone, my guest today is Mitch Thrower. He's co founder and CEO of events.com. Also co founder of active.com and former chairman and owner of Triathlete magazine. He was a tax producer, chairman of Loyola 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 before selling to Vista for 1,050,000,000 and then eventually sold several divisions like Global Payments for 1,200,000,000 and also is

00:28a 22X Ironman Triathlete. Mitch, I'm gonna try and keep up here. Are you ready to take us to the top?

Mitch Thrower

00:33I'm ready, I'm just older.

What Events.com Does and Its Origins

Nathan Latka

00:37Fair enough. Look, the event space has seen some change over the past twelve to twenty four months. Let's go pre COVID for a second. What was events.com pre COVID? Software or something else?

Mitch Thrower

00:48Yeah, 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.

Nathan Latka

01:01And help me understand the backstory there. When did you launch that business?

Mitch Thrower

01:05So 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? So, you know, figure out which one's gonna work.

Nathan Latka

01:14You've read the book,

Mitch Thrower

01:16Yeah. Well, actually, I think it was an interview, so I confess Nice. Haven't yet read the book. Nice. I will. And I think ultimately we dabbled in the Civic space. We bought a company called Civico which we sold to Granicus which then sold to Vista. 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

01:39know, started code in like end of fifteen, sixteen 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 '17, '18.

Nathan Latka

01:52Okay. 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 2,300,000 back in, like, 2012 time frame. What was going on back then?

Mitch Thrower

02:02Yeah. So those are the acquisitions. So that was when we acquired a company in the civic space. That was all, even though the entity is events.com, that was the kind of in and out of the incubator.

Nathan Latka

02:12I 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?

Mitch Thrower

02:20Yeah, 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 catch fire and really have an enormous opportunity to scale, 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 Idealab Bill Gross. Oh, wow. So What year was that? Oh, goodness. I don't

02:50know the exact year but that I can find out. It probably was '13, '14.

Nathan Latka

02:55So 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?

Mitch Thrower

03:02Correct.

Nathan Latka

03:03I see. Okay. So this is... I mean, is that what it was? It was basically a venture studio model. You guys were hunting for the next big thing to build?

Mitch Thrower

03:10We didn't call it at that point, but yes, that was exactly it. That's I exactly it. It's really which of these will catch fire and where can we really develop a working thesis that will be scalable?

Nathan Latka

03:21Okay. 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.

Mitch Thrower

03:27You know, the event industry has transformed not just in the last year, but prior to that as technologies emerged for the event industry, event organizers were faced. 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 get some person in the corner with a spreadsheet trying to sell sponsorship but they get recruited away because they're good with

03:51people. And so all of these different things that were happening was pulling value away from event organizers. And we operate primarily in the sort of the mid tier, although we have Wonderfront 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. And so we looked at these event organizers. There's just a better way, you know, an absolutely better way for them to

04:17get access to something that helps them make more money and save 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 too. So kind of bringing that centralized hub together. That was the problem that emerged. That

04:39was kind of the pain point that we really wanted to address. And it's actually... It's gotten worse with more event related businesses popping up all the time even with the virtual, 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

Revenue in the First Twelve Months

Nathan Latka

05:01to that first twelve months? 2015 total revenue came out to what? Do you remember?

Mitch Thrower

05:06Okay. Let me see. 2015 total revenue. And I'll I'll share it to you contextually. The 2015 total revenue is gonna be blurred because we've also just gone out and done some acquisitions. Some companies that have been around for ten years plus, some companies for four years plus. So when I talk in numbers, I just wanna contextualize that there's kind of the pre acquisition and then there's the companies and their trailing historical actual

Nathan Latka

05:29Ignore the trailing stuff.

Mitch Thrower

05:31Yeah. 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 4. 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

05:53do their online banks because they're watching their transactions, they're communicating with their customers, they're utilizing it for a part of their CRM. And when that happens, you really wanna 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

06:18market. And then, of course, the pandemic happened and so we said, let's go do some acquisitions to scale during a pandemic. But that's what we started on and, 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.

Funding Strategy and Rolling Raises

Nathan Latka

06:38And so with that 1,500,000 in sort of year history, right, just again ignoring the acquisitions you've done now and they're trailing revenue. You also went out and I think raised a round of capital that year. How much did you raise in in 2015?

Mitch Thrower

06:49Correct. 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 50,000,000 and we're about to announce a round that takes us over 70,000,000 and that includes the acquisitions, 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. And so that's an

07:14exciting time, but it's about 70,000,000 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 in the year.

Nathan Latka

07:26The Form D stuff, just my team does crazy research for these interviews, but the Form D stuff said 17,000,000 in 2015, 34,500,000 in 2019. And if now you're gonna about to announce and go over 70, that means you're raised about 25,000,000 ish in the past six to twelve months. Is that about right?

Mitch Thrower

07:39You nailed it.

How Rolling Raises Work for Founders

Nathan Latka

07:40Okay, cool. So 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 raised the first 17,000,000 in 2015, what valuation did you raise at and how did the valuation change if you let the thing roll?

Mitch Thrower

07:55Yeah, so what I'd prefer to do rather than discussing valuations only because we are in the middle of closing that last round and I'd wanna get clearance first before sharing that. So maybe in the 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

08:16make sure to 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 10,000,000, you may only be able to use that 10,000,000 when you get it to 10,000,000. If you do a rolling raise, you get the first million, you can use

08:41it and grow and invest. The second million, use it and grow and invest. Hire more engineers, more engineers, you know? And so that's the baseline of kind of a rolling close which I would encourage entrepreneurs to follow. 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 wanna move really fast as well.

2019 Revenue and COVID Impact

Nathan Latka

09:01Yep. Let's build up to COVID here. Pre COVID. So wrapping out 2019, what did you guys finish with in terms of whatever you wanna share revenue or customer count or whatever?

Mitch Thrower

09:10Yeah. Mean, I'll take you through the combined entity. So combined entities were for '19 about 16.8. Okay.

Nathan Latka

09:19'1 six, right?

Mitch Thrower

09:20$1.06? Yes, 16,800,000. And then if you look at 2020 pre COVID, both contracted and otherwise recurring revenues should have been in the 25,000,000 range. But obviously COVID was just a crushing blow to the event industry. You know, there's a $3,000,000,000 drop out of the event management software business. It's, you know, it's kind of the black swan if you will. But I think it's Shervin who said from Virgin Hyperloop unicorns are born when black swans take flight.

09:48So 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.

Nathan Latka

10:03So that's 2019, 2020 when you closed out, just whatever that was three months ago, what did you close out there?

Mitch Thrower

10:11So in terms of capital or in terms of

Nathan Latka

10:13No, in terms of revenue. 16,800,000 in 2019 went down to what in 2020 because of COVID?

Mitch Thrower

10:18Good question. So that would be one thing I'd wanna hold back as well in terms of the COVID drop but I will share with you it was significant. The great thing is a lot of our partners, right? A lot of our partners are museums that we power the technology for churches,

10:37temples, synagogues. We do registration for festivals and galas and all of the events, a lot of which aren't happening currently, although a lot of them are also using our virtual event technologies. But it's a fraction of what it would be in a lot of those. And some, we expect around five up to 8% of the event organizers globally will actually just not make it through. But the demand that we're tracking on the other end of this,

11:07on 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 sixteen 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.

Virtual Events Strategy and Competitors

Nathan Latka

11:25Did 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 COVID hit?

Mitch Thrower

11:34Yeah, 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

12:04as possible, in which case they're going want to pipe it out over Instagram and YouTube and Vimeo. And so a host of, that's one dimension of a virtual event. Another one is someone who wants restricted access, right? That's really where 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

12:34because each organization is gonna wanna do it slightly differently. And there's been so much, there's been a lot of chaos. Just wanted to be the Levi's I guess in that situation.

Nathan Latka

12:45So I mean, with that in mind, I mean, just to cite some historical data points here in this space, right? Bizzabo grows in 2019 from 10,000,000 run rate to 22,000,000 run rate at the end of twenty twenty. Hopin grows from 3,000,000 in ARR to almost 20,000,000 in ARR pre StreamYard acquisition with their video tech stack. vFairs bootstrapped goes from 3,000,000 to 30,000,000 in ARR during this period. Why did you shrink if you had this capability?

Mitch Thrower

13:14Yeah. So remember the capability, we are not doing video the way Hopin or Zoom or YouTube or, you know, if you're having someone who's 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

13:42to use a Hopin. Although Hopin is in some ways a significant competitor, impressed with what they're doing, Founder is a great guy. But I think ultimately for what we're trying to do, it really is, you know, 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 apps for, you know, experiencing the back and forth

14:09connectivity, check-in, sponsorship, marketing that event, also doing ticketing for that event for really the commercial enterprise around the Sorry.

Why Events.com Did Not Go All-In on Virtual

Nathan Latka

14:19I don't mean to cut you off, there... So there was no go to market for virtual only events. Is that what I'm hearing you say?

Mitch Thrower

14:25That's correct. That's correct.

Nathan Latka

14:27Why not though? My percent is like, 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?

Mitch Thrower

14:36Yeah, I will share with you that one of the reasons is I'm editing out because of the acquisition that there's an edit there. You, I think, uncovered something that we will be talking about, probably not for three months, but something there in the space that we are targeting. You got a great way of cutting through, but is correct. At events.com, we were focused kind of sitting on the gateway to the video experiences. People are still having

15:06those 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,

15:29one of the things that we've been analyzing is what is the sustainability and the time line around what people are gonna do in that hybrid environment. When you're going to the Wonderfront Festival, but you're experiencing it digitally from Milan or if you're experiencing in San Diego in the real world. So we spent a lot of time looking at that space and we have a pretty big announcement I think coming up about that.

Customers in 2019 and the Business Model

Nathan Latka

15:50Got it. Go back to pre pandemic real quick, sixteen point eight million in 2019. How many customers were you serving that year? Do you remember?

Mitch Thrower

15:57Yeah, let me go back here.

16:01And so you're talking 2019, correct? What

Nathan Latka

16:07tool are you, you're looking at a tool right now on your computer. What tool do use to track all this?

Mitch Thrower

16:11We've actually built our own tool 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 you name it in terms of just outputting different activities. But if you look at... There

16:36we go.

16:41Okay, so about 52,000.

Nathan Latka

16:45Okay, got it. And were they paying subscription plans or is it one time per event sort of deals?

Mitch Thrower

16:50Yeah, so if you look at the event industry, you've got the contract with the event organizer and then the customers for the most part pay the fees. There's some organizations that use our platform and we'll just license it as an API like Prudential where they come in and just use our program to build what they want on top of similar to like a Shopify model. But for the majority, it's folks that are coming in and then

17:12the event organizers contract with us and the participants end up paying a percentage of their registration or the ancillary revenues or the sponsorships generated, etcetera. So it's couple last...

Team Size, Engineers and Global Reach

Nathan Latka

17:26Yeah. Couple last questions here since we're out of time. A team... Teams, I say, how many folks on the team total?

Mitch Thrower

17:32Fifty fifty people.

Nathan Latka

17:33And how many engineers?

Mitch Thrower

17:36We have on our engineering team combining them all,

Nathan Latka

17:4421. 21. That's interesting. Okay. Very cool. And then like, usually I would ask about like churn and things like that, 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 gonna 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

18:02wanna touch on before we wrap up?

Mitch Thrower

18:04I mean, I think just, you as a... You know, you know, do a great great job by the way in what you do for all the folks that are out there in the SaaS industry and, you know, truly appreciate the contributions you make to software.

Nathan Latka

18:17No. I appreciate that. When you listen to the show a little bit, you catch an episode every now and then?

Mitch Thrower

18:21Yes. Every now and then. Catch up now and then. 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 pretty busy.

Famous Five: Books, Tools, and Life Lessons

Nathan Latka

18:34We're rooting for you, man. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.

Mitch Thrower

18:39Oh, that's gotta be Venture Deals.

Nathan Latka

18:40Two. Don't know if you've read Venture Deals?

Mitch Thrower

18:43It is. Brad Feld, good book.

Nathan Latka

18:44Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Mitch Thrower

18:47That'd be Eric. Eric Yuan.

Nathan Latka

18:49Yep, Zoom.

18:50Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building your business?

Mitch Thrower

18:53Slack.

Nathan Latka

18:54Number four, how many hours of sleep every night?

Mitch Thrower

18:56Five to eight, depending on whether or not we're in the middle of negotiations on something.

Nathan Latka

19:00Fair, and what's your situation, married, single kids?

Mitch Thrower

19:03Married. Married to the love of my life. We have one son who is keeping us, keeping us busy.

Nathan Latka

19:10How old are you, Mitch?

Mitch Thrower

19:12What's that?

Nathan Latka

19:12How old are you?

Mitch Thrower

19:14I'm, 54.

Nathan Latka

19:1554.

19:16Last question. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20?

Mitch Thrower

19:18Oh, let's see.

19:22I 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 gonna do something like find the value, study the world that you love and where value

19:48is going and how money and value is being exchanged. And then put yourself in the middle of that. That's more important.

Nathan Latka

19:53Guys, events.com started off as a venture studio back in 2012 said, let's go all in on Events. In 2015, they did $1,500,000 of revenue, the first year in business raised $17,000,000. Let that bad boy roll, grew to about $16,800,000 in revenue the year after in 2019 pre COVID raised another 34,000,000. 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

20:17$25,000,000 raised. We'll see what happens. Mitch, thanks for taking us to the top.

Mitch Thrower

20:21Thanks, Nathan. Good luck.

Nathan Latka

20:23One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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

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