Podcast Alert: Robert Davari – Tixr

Transcript

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Robert Davari: [00:00:00] We built this as fans. We’re completely obsessed with the fan experience. That is paramount to what we do. We sell more than tickets. You could do merch packages, hotels. I get to buy my t-shirt and pick it up. I can now have a secure economic hotel option where everything’s taken care of for me. So, I have optionality. And if you’re the, the tee. It’s great for you cause you’re increasing your revenues.

Jeff Nelson: Hello. Welcome to the Navigating Sports Business Podcast. I’m your host today, Jeff Nelson, the President of Navigate. We are a data-driven consulting firm guiding major strategies and decisions in sports and entertainment.

We started this podcast to share the experiences and the stories of some of the amazing people we get to work with. They’re not the star athletes on the field, but they are the most influential people off of it. [00:01:00] Hopefully you learn a little something about them and a little something from them. Over the course of our conversations.

Today, I’m happy to be joined by Robert Davari, the CEO and founder at Tixr. Robert. Thank you for joining us today from Santa Monica.

Robert Davari: Thanks for having me, Jeff.

Jeff Nelson: I want to start at the beginning of Tixr, or even before Tixr, but I think you’ve mentioned that the idea was sparked at Coachella in 2011. My first question is, do you remember the band that was playing or anything about that moment?

Robert Davari: The Coachella story always gets mixed into to the, to the Tixr lore. It was more that my co-founder and I, we’d attend Coachella every year, and he’s our CTO now went to college together. We had a group of friends that would go every year, but the actual idea [00:02:00] for Tixr started a bit before that. So, my dad is an optimization scientist.

Effectively, he worked for NASA for years. At the end of his career, he was doing building software to optimized nuclear power plants. And I was getting frustrated, buying tickets to a variety of events, and I’d always have to end up on the secondary market. It just seemed so inefficient. So we started really analyzing the market dynamics of primary secondary market companies with him and he’s like, look, this is an optimization issue.

And we started just for fun working on algorithms to solve that right to around dynamic pricing and market fluctuations in a way that would be more cohesive for the fan. The Coachella story is where that kind of intersected with Patrick, who’s my co-founder, is I was looking, decided at that point to. I had another company, I had a telecommunications company I was running, and I decided to start the Tixr project.

What became Tixr was originally called Dyna Tickets. You guys could probably tell why ’cause of all the dynamic pricing birth of the company, but I was [00:03:00] with Patrick, and I believe the, the system that was doing Coachella went down back then, like it failed cause there was so much demand. And I was talking to him, I’m like, look, we need to build a system.

I’d like to, I want to really build a system that’s both efficient but also can scale. And his modern and all the good stuff. And he is like, I can do this, right? This is what I do. This is my specialty. And he was at Fox Interactive for years and he built their fantasy sports products. He had a whole team under him.

So the real story is what, probably the birth of it in terms of like our team and what ended up creating the product that did happen and at that festival. But, the project has started a bit before that.

Jeff Nelson: You mentioned you had this telecommunications company Carrier Connect, was it a gradual shift in your attention? Were you able to pay attention to both? How? How did you manage? You already got a company that you’ve founded and now you’re, you have this big idea and [00:04:00] you start to have people who you can do it with, but how do you manage all that?

Robert Davari: Yeah, the big difference between the two businesses was, Hero Connect was like an arbitrage business, so I bootstrapped it, didn’t take in any funding, programmed the first version myself. Then I brought in like a kind of a outsource team to do V two and V three, and it, it just, it was just a, it just made money, right? It wasn’t like a, it wasn’t a huge vision. It was a nice arbitrage business, whereas Tixr, I knew was going to be a, a much larger build. And that we need to bring in a real team of like core architects.

I’d outsourced everything for the telecom company, but I really wanted to build like a really world-class product with Tixr. So, we wanted to keep everything with American engineers and really controlled from a quality perspective. Quality perspective over here. So, I want out and try to raise capital.

Right? And I was unable to do, it was very challenging to raise capital. A lot of it, because of the space that we were in. It just wasn’t. Primary ticketing companies aren’t something that was getting a lot of financing for a variety of [00:05:00] reasons. Yeah. I decided to do what I did with my first business. Just bootstrap it.

So, Patrick and our engineers, they worked for equity and for kind of low salaries at the very beginning. And these are very high-level people. And the, what I’m getting to is I had to run Career Connect in parallel. I had no choice. Right? So, Carrier Connect is, as I was building Tixr, I was also running that, and it was effectively funding Tixr.

So it was like seed funding it, and then as Tixr started to grow, then we eventually raised financing, and we hit profitability and started generating revenues and stuff like that. I basically weaned that company down to zero effectively, and then I’ve been Tixr ever since.

Jeff Nelson: We’re recording this two days after a pretty big announcement before I get to that really a massive client for you. Can you give us the elevator pitch when you walk in and tell somebody who Tixr is and why they should consider you. What does that pitch sound like?

Robert Davari: Yeah, we’re, it’s been [00:06:00] consistent since we started, right? We started the business because we felt that there frankly needed to be something new, or at least at a minimum, new options within the space.

The largest sports teams, musicians name it, the big brands in live entertainment that really touch people’s hearts, and they really feel a great affinity to, they’ve been operated by legacy technology that helps them get into those experiences. For many years, 30, 40 years, some of these companies have been around, so the first thing we always tell people is it’s time for change and here’s a new option.

Right. It’s, you’ve been, there are old cars and there’s a new car now, right? A new car brand. So that’s the beginning of it. And then our entire perspective is different, right? We’re, we’re much more of a white label system, right? So, it’s less about us, it’s much more about them, and that really permeates everything we do.

We’re not a large publicly traded company. We’re not [00:07:00] a company that has a big board and complex decision making. We are at scale. We’re one of the bigger players in this space today, but we operate very boutiquey and very hands-on with that personalization and that knowing you can reach out to a variety of team members, myself included in how accessible we are in solving your problems and needs, that really speaks well to people.

And then once, once you actually show them the product, it’s about design thinking and really heavy emphasis on the fan experience and beautiful design both. On the front end of the backend, it’s about innovation. Things that they, they haven’t seen or done before, perhaps that that open up doors to new revenue opportunities while creating a great fan experience.

And then it’s about just redefining the concept of risk, right? One of the things that has been a challenge in this business is people are generally risk averse, and it’s, there’s a concept of is this don’t, if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it, and no one’s going to get fired. If I go with the larger players. And what we’re really telling [00:08:00] people is the world is changing really quickly, especially in the technology world. And ticketing is your, one of your primary revenue drivers. And not just that, but it’s that first touch point in the fan commercial experience with your brand oftentimes. And the bigger risk we think is not moving forward with modernized technology.

So there’s a, it’s a combination of broad strokes, the conceptual things that we fundamentally believe are true, not just for us, but for any company, right? Like we’re changing tools constantly here to stay up with the times now, especially with the, the emergence of AI technologies, but then there’s also the product, right?

And we really show the product. We, we try not to talk about it. We really show it. And I think when you see the product and how different it is, I think it really, it really speaks to people.

Jeff Nelson: When you talk about the technological advances. For those of us who aren’t behind the scenes or in the weeds and are just used to wanting to go on and be able to buy tickets without a lot of [00:09:00] friction and understand what it’s going to cost and what we’re paying, and then have those tickets and be able to go to the event seamlessly, what are the more practical, tangible, how would somebody like me experience Tixr are in a way that, oh, that this, the technology is better, this is better for me. Or is it more that it’s better for the team, the property, the venue, the, the technology helps them more than me.

Robert Davari: It’s really both, right? We’re a primary ticketing system, meaning our clients are the event producers or creators, right? The sports team, the music festival owner, whatever that is. So they’re the ones that we’re really speaking to. However, we built this as fans, right? So we’re completely obsessed with the fan experience that is paramount to what we do. And we also genuinely believe that if you take good care of the fans, you’re taking good care of your clients, right?

So we really [00:10:00] speak to both the way you experience the technology, though is interesting. So just basic level stuff. From a design and interactions perspective, it’s obviously more modern and. We’d like to think better thought through, right? So it’s less friction, less clicks. It’s a very fast system. It’s stable.

We don’t, we can handle a tremendous amount of simultaneous transactions, so you’re not going to have long waiting rooms and stuff like that. But that’s a really good example is instead of sitting in a queue for a ticket, you can just go and buy, and that’s better for the producer of the event because you’re gonna get a higher conversion rate, right?

You’re gonna have people that are able to transact at a rapid clips so you just straight up make more money and have less drop off. But for the fan you’s a much more pleasurable experience. Right? So that’s a good example of when things are well architected and when well thought out for the producer of the event, you’re yielding because you have an optimal conversion funnel, but also for the fan you just have a [00:11:00] better experience in getting your tickets.

And that’s just, that’s baseline. That was like first thing we really focused on. It solved. But then what also gets interesting is. We sell more than tickets, right? So you can buy, you can do merch packages, hotels, suites, like virtually anything at this point you can buy on Tixr. We’re actually transcending ticketing and moving into a larger e-commerce kind of a company prior to live entertainment.

And again, if you take the fan perspective, I get to buy my t-shirt and pick it up, right? I get to, I’m traveling in as a visitor of a sports team. I can now have a secure economic hotel option where everything’s taken care of for me. So I have optionality that I didn’t necessarily have before in a very elegant way.

And if you’re the team, it’s great for you ’cause you’re increasing your revenues, right? You’re increasing your throughput in terms of what you could sell, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There’s a lot of examples of this, but it’s always a two-sided equation when we’re building products and innovating.

Jeff Nelson: The big [00:12:00] announcement that I alluded to a moment ago. The San Jose Earthquakes announced that they’re partnering with you. I believe that’s your first MLS club. Can you give us a little insight into how that deal came about and also where it fits for you and your growth strategy and how you take a case study like that and build off of it?

Robert Davari: Yeah. It’s a big moment for us, right? Where over a decade into the company ticketing is something that. We’ve learned you have to build brick by brick to build it right. It just takes a long time. It’s a very sophisticated, nuanced, technology. We started in the general admission space, which is great, and we have some great clients, nightclubs and festivals and stuff like that and around COVID. When 2020 hit, we really put our heads down and started. The transition into reserve seating and building at scale reserve seating. But we had always architected the system for [00:13:00] this, right? Patrick and I, when we first started the company, the vision was, again, grand. It was to really build a modern system that could displace or at least give a modern option to legacy systems that are operating in arenas and sports teams and stuff like that’s where, that’s the level where you’re truly a player in the space, but more importantly, where you’re truly making an impact on the industry and on fans. Those are the, those are those big major moments or what really define people’s lives, whether they’re just a Super Bowl or an MLS match against inner Miami, which the Earthquakes had just a couple weeks ago, which was like a big event, but those are the things that people really remember, so we always wanted to get to that point.

So we spent many years in parallel while we’re developing our general admission ticketing system. On top of that, because the infrastructure was so solid now at this point to run ticketing, building the reserve seating infrastructure, and we also started working with teams directly, getting to know them, talking to them about their needs and that that’s been an [00:14:00] iterative multi-year process. MLS, I think because of the nature of the MLS, it’s a younger league, they’re disruptive, really fresh perspectives in that league. I’m much more open to change, we just found a home there, right? It’s somewhere that they were really listening and they, really wanted change, by the way, from the legacies there.

There’s quite a bit of frustration there and, so we really focused on the MLS and we started working with a variety of teams. And the Earthquakes, are interesting because they actually weren’t a team that we’d been working on for a long time or working with for a long time. We met them, our head of sports, Nate Lieberman.

I knew one of the people there, I heard through the grapevine that they were working on a door in the middle of an RFP. We reached out to them. They were actually close to decision, I think, and when they saw Tixr, I think it changed their perspective completely and they really wanted change. They’re just a phenomenal group of people, really world class organization.

We’re super impressed by them. But from the first conversation, what we showed them, I think that really spoke to them was [00:15:00] the fact that we’re not a new flyby night company, we’re transacting. Very high volumes, we’re one of the largest players in ticketing now we have publicly traded companies, not just domestically, but internationally have been using us for years. You’re safe, right? You’re going to be good. This is a stable product, but also, we’re pushing the envelope and we want to push the envelope with you guys, right? And that’s really what they wanted, so it ended up being just a great fit and great timing.

Jeff Nelson: I’m really interested in your patience, if that’s the right word, and you can tell me if it’s not, but I feel like so many startups, so many businesses now, right? It is a crazy sprint to try to build what the end outcome would be. So you could have started this and tried to raise a ton of money and get the reserved seating built. At the start, right off the bat, and it sounds like instead it’s been very intentional, methodical, even [00:16:00] in getting it built with that infrastructure you referred to so that it was incredibly solid before you go to the reserve ticketing and before you go after and win a client like the Earthquakes, a decade plus, you just don’t hear that many stories these days where that patience is part of it. Did you make a decision early on that was the plan and you were gonna have that patience or was it just the byproduct of other factors as you started this?

Robert Davari: That’s a really good question, it’s a combination of both. As an entrepreneur, I’m a bit more old school, right? I’m a, if you look at the trends, bootstrap, my other companies, I didn’t take investors invest in money and part of the, but it is a kind of a two sided, it’s two sides to that. One side is, again, like it was challenging raising capital. Very challenging, right? Primary ticketing. [00:17:00] Is a tough industry to raise in. There’s a perception out there that are, that there are monopolistic players and that the market is heavily limited and venture capital is a winner takes all mindset, right?

And it’s also an older industry, right? So when you have, we’ve gone through multiple cycles. It was vr, then it was crypto, and now it’s AI where all the money flows. The pitch of, Hey, here’s a big business and we want to build something newer and better. That’s not as like sexy or exciting, right? So if you look, a lot of venture capital money has gone into secondary market companies ’cause they can go to market quickly and when the consumer and primary has been pre neglected, the other thing we saw was our competitors, right? The companies that were in the space, that were newer, companies that tried to take a kind of like aggressive approach, they crashed and burned because you just, it’s just not one of those things that you can build overnight.

It is a long, steady burn building a ticketing company cause every single, there’s just a ton of features to build. It’s very nuanced. You have to [00:18:00] really learn. You have to really listen and fix things, and you have to iterate. And that takes time. And it takes time and it takes patience. Part of it is, again, my old school bootstrap mindset.But then the other part was just like the, the realities of the industry, right? I am somebody that you know, and Patrick, my, my co-founder as well, we do take the long view, right? We’re long view guys. I’ve had basically two companies my whole life, right? I’m not jumping from place to place, it’s a very stable, long burn.

I remember listening to interviews with Jeff Bezos where he talked about the long view and how important it is to take the long view. And that really stuck with me. If you look at great founders, they’re obsessive about their product. And this is a product company, and you have obsessive people that are product focused people first and foremost, why we do what we do.We happen to be in ticketing, but we’re really product engineers and designers where we’re just focused on getting it right and that does take time. And for those [00:19:00] reasons, we’ve been patient.

Jeff Nelson: Was there ever a moment where you almost pulled the plug?

Robert Davari: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think, if like any passionate relationship, if you’re not ready to pull the plug, you’re not, you’re not going fast enough or hard enough. Yeah, it does get frustrating. This is a, this is a business where you can lose having a superior product. You don’t see that often, and it is very frustrating as someone who’s heavily focused on technology and really understands the challenges and dynamics and the value of what you’re building.

So that’s probably the most frustrating part of all of it. But, but yeah, anytime you have bad moments, but you come out stronger. And we have a great team that’s been with us since day one for over a decade, which is also very rare. Our founding team has never, no one’s ever left. And that keeps me going.

And also, I love the industry. We’re having fun. We’ve made great friends, have incredible experiences, and that’s, that’s what really defines your life. And it’s just been a, it’s been a real pleasure to be doing it.

Jeff Nelson: You mentioned at one point the challenge of you don’t get [00:20:00] fired. Hiring the legacy players. Ticketmaster is, I don’t know if they’re the Voldemort in this world. You don’t get, you don’t get fired. Usually going with the legacy player, the dominant market share company. I was in a meeting once and I’ll be a little cryptic here, but it was a meeting, it was a team we were working with on other things, but I sat in a meeting where one of the biggest tech players was talking to them about expanding their relationship. And one of the things they were talking about was trying to maybe build a ticketing platform to supplant Ticketmaster. And even with this massive company, very well funded armies of engineers. The team, the switching costs, sort of the fears that ticketing and suck the lifeblood so often of our revenues like, do we really [00:21:00] want to switch? That’s a hard, that’s a hard barrier. Right and so I’d love to know, like with the Earthquakes, how did you break through that fear of switching or not going with the main old school legacy player? How do you think you won there?

Robert Davari: I think it was twofold. Number one, their team is, their mindset is innovation and forward thinking. So it starts with that, right? And they have the right mindset, right? They understand the value of technology and they understand how rapidly it’s changing, especially today, right? 10, 15 years less the case. Anybody that’s following the trends, it’s, we’re going through a period of disruption that’s unlike anything we’ve ever experienced.

They’re a younger team, so they grew up with technology like we did. We find that younger executives and operators in their thirties and forties, bad technology or an antiquated user experience is, is a deal breaker for them. It’s just they see it as something [00:22:00] that’s not. That shouldn’t be the case. Whereas teams that have been around for longer have a more senior leadership is they’re just more conservative, right? So it really starts with the team and the dynamic of the people making the decision. And then what we, again, what we emphasized is, look, here’s our track record, right? And here are all the companies we work with.

And we’ve been doing this for a long time. And even though we haven’t, we didn’t have a tier one pro sports team. We have a large number of sports clients, right? Major, and some that are actually much more complicated than operating a, like an MLS team. Like the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach has been a client of ours for years. Just a grandstands alone or larger than an MLS team. But then they also have general admission. It’s a multi-day event. It’s really complicated. They have to have different price points for every single seat. Like it’s a, it’s really like a challenge to do, and we built a lot of technology to support something of that scale. So we’re like, look, we’re not gonna fail you. This is, we’re not failing. We’ve been around for a long [00:23:00] time. You’re talking directly to us. I’m personally gonna be on it, as is Patrick and the larger engineering team. And I think that really appeased their fears, right? And we showed that they did their diligence. We dug in. We also had the benefit of working with other MLS teams in the R&D capacity for a good 18, 24 months at that point. And they spoke really highly of us and they really spoke to how we listen, how quickly we’re able to develop and how we hit all of our timelines, which is quite rare. It’s a difficult thing to achieve.

But we have a track record of really like building at a rapid clip, and we were quite honest. We’re like, look, if there are product gaps, we’re gonna have time and we are gonna deliver on those product gaps. So I think it was like the. Their mindset tied with our, the, the fact that we are proven and the fact that we also had a proven track record of maneuvering challenges and being flexible when necessary, and they just decided to make the leap.

Jeff Nelson: There will be both the primary and the secondary, right, and they get to control [00:24:00] the secondary. I know we’ve done research in the past in this space that tells us that younger. Fans don’t even really differentiate between the two anymore. It’s meaningless to them. It’s just what are the tickets that I can buy and how much do they cost, and whether it’s the original face value or not, doesn’t really matter all that much to them. When you look at the secondary market, and you mentioned there are. There are a higher volume of players in that space. How much is being able to have both primary and secondary and white label and let the teams control, how much is that a key to your value proposition with all those other secondary players out there?

Robert Davari: It’s a, it’s critical, right? We learned very early on in approaching teams several years ago, you have to have a resale product. You just have to, it’s built into the business model of professional sports today in the u in the United States. It’s a little bit different in [00:25:00] internationally, but here it’s absolutely a must and it’s absolute critical for a variety of reasons that we can get into. But it’s been a real education, learning about it. So in terms of having a secondary market, you had to, and then look, there’s the option of integrating with existing secondary players and we took a hard look at that and there was a real, there was a moment where I didn’t want to overburden our team because it’s such a daunting thing to now build a, basically a company on top of a company.

But I had a talk with my partner, Patrick, and he was like, we’re just gonna build it. I got this. And it’s that kind of like camaraderie and partnership that we’ve had for. A decade plus and the trust I have and the quality of our engineers and our product. And I was like, let’s do it. And we’ve done that traditionally, we, part of a, part of what’s made us successful is we’re able to build things elegantly in one system versus having to plug things in, right? So you get a lot of efficiency outta that. A better fan experience, a better client experience. And the resale. The resale is a really good, a really good example of that.

But, but I’ll [00:26:00] tell you this. You know, much. I think when we first started the interview, I was talking about the, the mindset shift, right? Around being more of a white label versus brand and all that kind of stuff. But we have a mindset shift around resale also at this company, right? We don’t think of resale as a binary thing, right?

So if you look, if you think of, if you look at, legacy companies or even just the way 99% of ticketing transactions are done, there’s, you buy it and then you resell it, right? It’s like those are your two options. It’s either available and it’s not. And if it’s not available, your only hope to get is on the secondary.

Then that’s across all these multiple systems. And it is just not a very great experience for the fan, right? ’cause you’re like shopping across multiple outlets and you have all these tacked on fees and all that kind of stuff. And what we found is fans just really want flexibility, post-transaction flexibility.

So once you’ve bought something, you just want the optionality to do something with it, and they want access to tickets in the first place. They want to be able to interact with the operator. [00:27:00] So resale is just one product we’ve built. We have a variety of products that are all tied to fan flexibility, right?

For example, you can, if you have a seat up in the rafters and you want to go courtside, we have in-app. Upgrades, you could just move. We’re rolling out a refund product where you could refund your ticket if the organizer around allows you to or refund to a credit that you could use your time within the resale product.

There’s innovations like a private resale market and stuff like that. We have a wait list product, which if you’re sold out, you can pre authorize your card and say, if a ticket becomes available, run my credit card. So we’ve built a whole suite of integrated flexibility products. And again, tying back to what we were talking about earlier.

These are really great because they’re transformational for the fan, where now you know they have less risk in buying a ticket and they have a lot of right built in options after the fact on ways to move around and stuff like that. And for the operators it’s great because it’s less customer service for them to have to deal with people.

You’re not gonna have [00:28:00] the issue of having fake tickets and stuff like that, and you’re creating general additional revenue. Right by allowing people to move and transact more within your ecosystem, so we’re really redefining the way we think about resale as a whole.

Jeff Nelson: Last question before some rapid fires close us out. You’re in the process of launching Tixr brands. Can you just share a little bit about that?

Robert Davari: Yeah, no, definitely. It’s, uh, half of what we do, like I said earlier, is the product. The other half is the consulting piece of it, right? We’ve, we found that. If our goal is to improve the fan experience and to be a great partner for these brands that create incredible moments that are important to people’s lives, we need to support them in any way that we possibly can. Over the years, we started out as just tech guys that weren’t from live entertainment, but we’ve really gotten to know these organizations really well and seen their needs, and we’ve built effectively internal agencies to solve those needs. Like we have a digital [00:29:00] marketing practice internally, right? We have a partnerships practice where we network people and consult and stuff like that.

But the Tixr brands concept is we started working with with brands that wanted to sponsor events and we started making connections around that. And sponsorships are a large revenue driver for teams and any live entertainment brand and teams very obviously. It is a large practice internally, and as a matter of fact, ticketing is one of the largest sponsorship categories for professional sports teams, right?

So we started, we’ve been doing sponsorships ourselves for all of our clients, but now in a very big way for professional sports teams. And we really wanna align ourselves and be a, be a strong partner on that front. But on top of that, we’re working on bringing external sponsors in, and that’s really what the Tick two brands practice is. And one of the advantages that we have is we’re such a big data company. We’re very good with data. We capture a lot of data on fans. That data is owned by the team and we believe data [00:30:00] is like the gold of the future. AI is built on data, so you really need to have control and not allow, and this is part of the legacy ticketing mindset as it’s our, it’s their data and the reselling it.

We don’t do any of that. So we use the data to optimally target sponsors that could then funnel money into. Into the event companies that we work with, right? It’s early days, but we’re already having a tremendous amount of success, and we think it’s going to be a great value add for, for a larger book of business.

Jeff Nelson: You’re preaching to the choir on the importance of data. I feel like I should add you to some of our calls that we have when we’re trying to win business, but we got really. Incredible. I think to see and very much admire what you’ve built and the approach you’ve taken at. Well, that’s very cool. I want to ask you a few of those rapid fires just to learn a little bit more about you before we leave.

Jeff Nelson: You mentioned being an AI major, so maybe that was a spoiler for this one, but you went to UCLA and I was curious for this interesting niche of the world that you now [00:31:00] find yourself in. What was the most useful class that you took back in college?

Robert Davari: Hey man, it’s funny. AI was part of the curriculum, but we were learning like lisp, which is a, it’s like an old technology nobody uses anymore, but it was like a early machine learning AI technology, so there wasn’t much relevance to, to what we do today. I’d probably say, I actually think this is gonna be different than what you would think. I think the most important class I took at UCLA was speech, right? There was a speech class where. I was back then when I present, I was writing stuff down and memorizing it and trying to regurgitate and they taught us extemporaneous speaking, which is the concept of you have a general outline of what you wanna say and then you speak naturally and it’s an absolute game changer. It takes a lot of time to practice, but, but I use it every day. I’m using it for this interview right now. I actually don’t. I am very comfortable giving like the broad strokes and just speaking very naturally. So it really was easily the most valuable class [00:32:00] I think I took at UCLA.

Jeff Nelson: I think that’s great advice for any, anybody who would be listening to this that still has a chance to take more courses. What is a, do you have a quote you live by, or a mantra or a favorite quote? Anything that would give us a little insight into you?

Robert Davari: Yeah. Yeah. I think very thematically, I, I use this one quite a bit old. I think this Plato quote, it’s been assigned to Einstein a bunch of times, but it’s necessity is the mother of invention, right? And if you look at our story and everything we’ve been talking about today, we felt it was necessary to do this, and we did it right. It says simple as that. And I, I tell entrepreneurs that all the time. What do I do? What do I build? I’m like, we gotta find a problem and solve it, and things get solved when it’s absolutely necessary. That’s a big part of the Tixr story.

Jeff Nelson: Obviously the Quakes is a big recent one, but when you look all the way back, what was the first Yes, that kind of validated Tixr.

Robert Davari: The first yes, so if you remember back to the early story, I wasn’t able to raise capital and I knew [00:33:00] I was gonna need capital just ’cause you need a lot of engineers and you gotta pay them and it’s a big build. There’s gonna be a long-term build. So the first, yes, was the very first investor that believed in us and invested in us, and he’s a fantastic guy. His name, name, his name is Bud Colligan. He was one of the partners at Excel. He was early on the Mac Project with Steve Jobs, just like a Silicon Valley luminary. Um, and just a wonderful guy. And not only did it validate that he believed in me and in the project and like what we were doing, but he became an advisor to me and really beat me up and toughened me and was like, look, you’re in for a ride. This isn’t your bootstrap telecom company. This is big leagues now. So both in terms of validation, but also in terms of just having a great mentor for all these years, it’d be really fantastic.

Jeff Nelson: If you had an extra hour every day, what would you do? How do you use it?

Robert Davari: I’d play with my daughters.

Jeff Nelson: How many daughters?

Robert Davari: I have three little girls. They’re [00:34:00] babies.

Jeff Nelson: How old?

Robert Davari: One’s about to turn five. One’s about to turn three, and the other one just turned one.

Jeff Nelson: Oh my God.

Robert Davari: Yeah, I know. That’s intense. We’ve been cranking ’em out every couple years.

Jeff Nelson: You are, as they say, my kids are now nine and eight, but when they were younger and I only have two, everybody used to say when they were in that age range. Oh, you’re in it. You’re in it. That’s impressive.

Robert Davari: I’m enjoying it.

Jeff Nelson: Hardest decision you’ve ever had to make as a founder?

Robert Davari: Hardest decision I’ve had to make for Tixr it was probably moving away from my family. I’m from the Bay Area. My parents were up there, my brother was up there. All my closest friends were up there, and I decided to move to Los Angeles to start Tixr.

Both because my co-founder was down here and the eng, his engineering team was down here. But also we wanted to be closer to entertainment, to the larger entertainment sphere. And look, I love the Bay Area. I went to UCLA, so it wasn’t like I wasn’t in LA, but moving away from your parents. I didn’t see my parents for very much for many years because we’re still [00:35:00] heads down on the business.

That was a big sacrifice and a very challenging decision to make. But they’ve now moved down here, so we’re all back together, which is great.

Jeff Nelson: Oh, beautiful. I was gonna say, it seems like that sacrifice is paying off, but even better now to know them nearby. That’s great. Howard, I really appreciate you joining us. This ticketing space, obviously it’s a lifeblood. It’s at the heart of our industry and watching it evolve at a macro level, there’s always that moment, right where the Taylor Swift tickets go on sale and everybody freaks out and everybody wonders how this space is still the way it is. And then you find pockets of people who say it’s changing, it’s evolving. And so being able to learn more from you, pick your brain a little bit today on how Tixr is part of that evolution is really interesting and I really appreciate the time.

Robert Davari: Oh good. Thanks for having me. The, the solutions are out there. We’re building them and there’s other great companies that are. Making change and, humanity and the world progress as [00:36:00] technology changes for the positive. So we’re trying to be part of that. But yeah, thanks for listening. Thanks for the time. Really enjoyed the conversation.

Jeff Nelson: To our listeners, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out to us. My email is Jeff@NVGT.com. You can also connect with me on my personal LinkedIn or connect with us on the Navigate page.

Again, this is Jeff Nelson with Navigate Joined by Robert Davari from Tixr. Thanks for joining us on Navigating Sports Business. Great. Thank you guys. Appreciate it.