StubHub Holdings, Inc. Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026

Okay. All right. With that, I think we're going to kick off our next fireside chat. It's my pleasure to welcome StubHub to Communacopia and Technology. Your first Communacopia conference as a public company. Your IPO was going on during this conference a year ago, so I remember that well.

Oh, that's right. Time flies.

That was a year ago now. Let's start. I think a lot of investors know the brand, but don't necessarily know the story of the company. Eric, I always try to think about taking a step back before we take a step forward. Why don't you talk a little bit about the journey the company's been on that's brought you to this point?

For sure. No, thanks, Eric, and thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Yeah, no, it's hard to believe StubHub sold its first ticket in 2000. I think it was August, September 2000, right around there that it started. I've been doing this a long time. When it really first started, people have a hard time remembering there used to be people selling tickets out in parking lots and street corners. If you wanted to go see a 49ers game, you could go wander around and try and get a ticket in the parking lot from someone. It was really all about trying to create access for people to make it safe, secure, and make it work. That's how it started and really built from there.

Went on and built a company called viagogo that was the European and then global version of StubHub. We really realized that the opportunity was a lot bigger than just ticket resale, that effectively consumers and fans do not care about a primary or secondary ticket. They just want a ticket to access the events they want to go to. If you are a seller of a ticket, whether you are a fan, a broker, a season ticket holder, an artist, a venue, you want to reach the largest number of people you can with the best distribution, the best data. That was sort of an insight. Then went through the adventure of we bought StubHub back from eBay to combine the companies, as you know, Eric.

The thought there was always we could take the company back, combine them, and really build a global leader where we would restore its growth, restore its leadership share, and throw off the cash flow and improve the margins the way that it should. Do that with the core. Then be able to build into the next set, as I say, of sort of open distribution, all tickets, and build an advertising business. So we went ahead and did that. Lived through COVID. A lot of other things. Always used to say live events will be the last thing that goes. Hopefully COVID proved that is the one thing that could at least pause it, but not stop it permanently. So it has come back with a vengeance. People love live events. We are really excited because we have been able to now take the business and grow it, restore the share, throw off cash, and really position ourselves now for this next chapter of what we want to do.

Okay. Maybe just one housekeeping matter before we start. The clock in the front does not seem to be working. So I do not know if we could adjust that. That would be great. Thank you. Just want to keep you on time. Let us pivot from that to talk about the current consumer environment, because as you talked about, this has been a very resilient end market. There has been a lot of debate around the consumer over the last 12, 18 months, K-shaped economy, all of these things. But there has been a lot of resilience and a lot of strengths in live events experiences. Talk a little bit about what you see from the consumer right now in your business.

Sure. Consumers love live events. As I say, this has been a constant across decades now. It is interesting as we look at it and some of the things we see. One is that there has been this real shift to experiences over buying goods. If you go on and you look at what people are putting on their Instagram or sharing, it is not about, I bought this car, I bought something. It is I am at this game, I am at this Taylor Swift concert. It is really where people want to be and how they want to live. That has created a tremendous interest and dynamic in live events. The other thing, Eric, is that following that, because of the explosion of content creators and the Internet and whatnot, and TikTok, you get more and more content being created that people want to see.

There was a guy years ago named Matt Rife, who was a comic who started on YouTube. Next thing you wake up, he is selling out shows. You have this, and now you have a global phenomenon that we see that basically whether it is BTS coming to the States or you have a global event like the World Cup or artists traveling anywhere, it is really phenomenal how people will spend on events. It is really that good. As we like to say also on the sports side with something like football, if you are a Green Bay Packers fan, for example, and you want to go to that game, getting a Packers ticket, you are probably going to cut a lot of things before you cut your Green Bay Packers ticket that you can go without.

All those things have really combined to create what we have seen as a really resilient and phenomenal market that we are in, where consumers are just so enthusiastic about going to events.

Speaking of enthusiasm and big events, we had the World Cup here in this part of the world this summer. Talk a little bit not only about the World Cup idiosyncratically and what it did for the business, but more importantly, when you get new users coming to the platform from some big event like that, how should investors be thinking about long-term value that can be created out of that traffic that comes to you?

Yeah, no, that's a great point, Eric. I think the World Cup particularly is phenomenal both because it illustrates the specific case of what's exciting about the World Cup and what it meant, but I think also the things that you're alluding to and what it says. World Cup's obviously a phenomenal event. You've got so many games going on in a short period of time, truly global, people from all over the world coming in. The first thing was really exciting for us to provide so much, excuse me, access for people to all of these events, because I remember in 1994 when the U.S. hosted the World Cup prior, there was no StubHub, and I was wandering around outside the Rose Bowl trying to negotiate with someone and hope I could get a ticket.

It was a great illustration of what happens when you can give access to people to go to these events. It was phenomenal. Obviously drove a phenomenal quarter for us, and we grew over 30% and really showed that we would capture that. I think that probably more deeply, what you pointed out, Eric, is that it's got much greater knock-on effects, we believe, than just the one time of having a phenomenal event and those results. What do I mean by that? One is that you've now captured all these new users globally and domestically who have now had a great experience with the platform, went to a phenomenal event. They know you, and that's going to help you help us develop that relationship, have people coming back, et cetera.

The other thing is it's just a phenomenal proof point for the power of the ticket resale market and how it created access for consumers, and particularly for people to go back globally around the world and say, "Wow, look, there's a service like this that we should use that's giving me access to go see these matches, go where I want to go, when I want to go." The other thing I noticed that FIFA ran its own open market exchange, which was a great proof point of how that makes a ton of sense for content. In so many ways, we think it illustrated the power of what our platform can do, not just in the moment of what the economics are for the World Cup, but for what it means going forward.