This is really interesting, because I had the same experience happen to me yesterday (the domain was emeraldsummitadvisors.com).
I didn't find much discussion about it, but one theory I saw was that for high-value tickets Stubhub will act as an intermediary to verify the tickets or prevent the buyer and seller from knowing who the other person is (because the original buyer info is typically on a ticket or revealed during the transfer, and the new buyer info is given to the seller).
I assume this is to cut down on scams and other issues related to claims of not receiving tickets.
> I assume this is to cut down on scams and other issues related to claims of not receiving tickets.
If that's the case, why are they using cutouts for it? I'd think that if their purpose was legitimate, they wouldn't feel the need to disguise their identity.
I'd think it would be to prevent being "seen" by Ticketmaster/AXS/whoever and then banned or whatever for scalping activity is my thought. I think there is probably a very good reason to hide their identity or at least obscure it.
A similar thing happened when Uber started in New York City. You needed a livery license to drive there, so they created dozens of livery companies (all with German names) that they registered the drivers to, as a way I think, to make it harder for the city to try to shut them down (the city didn't shut them down but I think that was part of their risk calculus). Lyft originally didn't register liveries for its drivers and was banned from New York until it spun that up and it delayed their entry into the market by a few weeks.
Right. Just use verifiedbuyer@stubhub.com or something like that. There is obviously some deception going on here, whether it's StubHub or someone else.
It could be about optics. They might prefer people direct their anger at a random non-existent stranger for paying above face value than have them direct their anger at Stubhub.
That said, shifting blame for high prices isn't a new problem, so it's surprising the domains were all registered in the last 6 months.
Maybe it's a bigger project around market making and price optimization. I priced mine around 70% of the price of similar available tickets (since mine hadn't sold in the 3 weeks I had them listed) and they sold later that day.
> they wouldn't feel the need to disguise their identity
Wouldn't that tip off the fake seller if they saw the email?
Such things are such a game of whack a mole that I would approach it as invisibly as possible if I were trying to sniff out fake sellers on my site. Even if just to hope to keep them unaware.
Isn't there something that you buy the tickets on LiveNation and then via the website sell them on StubHub. Like they know that the tickets are real...
InkWorks, Inc. | USA | Full Time | Remote (Bay Area) | Founding Software Engineer | Seed Funding
We're a seed stage startup developing software to improve the business workflows of commercial printers.
Print is a $75B business with million dollar equipment purchases and software that looks and works like it was found in a time capsule from 1991. Our software modernizes and streamlines customer quoting and order workflows, improves internal and external collaboration, and enables printers to generate more business and improve customer satisfaction.
This will be our first hire and this role will have have a significant influence on the culture, processes, and tools that will be used.
If you're interested in learning more you can email me at carl@getinkworks.com or my co-founder Jose (our CTO) at jose@getinkworks.com
SF specific anecdote - I had a radical idea while walking up Divisadero last week. What if we removed Divisadero and Geary St. and built apartments where the road is today. You'd have European style narrow streets for pedestrians and could increase the density massively. Imagine taking out the multiple lanes across Geary St and how much housing could be built. Would there even be a NIMBY problem since the road is publicly owned?
Yes, huge NIMBY problem - people drive/bike/ride busses on those streets, and business are on those streets. (not saying they wouldn't benefit from a change, particularly businesses, but many people object to huge changes) You don't need to own something to be a NIMBY.
More practically, the width of even wide streets like Geary is narrower than the depth of a typical SF building - see https://goo.gl/maps/YbJmqxpgEW62. Roads overall take up a huge amount of space in a city, but no single road is all that much area. For instance, it looks like the right of way on Geary is about 110'. If it went the full length of SF (~7 miles), then the whole road takes up less than 100 acres. For reference, Park Merced is 150 acres.
It would be great if all the lightly trafficked side/residential streets could be squished from 60' to 40', you're talking about 50 blocks -> 1000' width, which is over 3 blocks wide and about a thousand acres, which is approaching the size of the Richmond district (and that's just if you squish in one direction). But you can't just pinch-to-zoom in real life :(
> Would there even be a NIMBY problem since the road is publicly owned?
Yes. NIMBYism is entirely about public policy. The fact that the land in question might be publicly owned is irrelevant. If anything, publicly owned land should be more subject to NIMBYism. Public land does indeed belong to the citizens.
I actually think about that all the time. But instead of doing it on Geary or Divis, I think the real win is in SoMa. Our city has six lane streets in some cases -- that's absurd. Build a strip of housing, retail, and parks down the middle of Brannan, and you've turned what I consider one of the least walkable and desirable neighborhoods in SF into somewhere potentially very nice to live.
Thanks for writing this, one of your quotes "Founders often hold too tightly onto solutions and too loosely onto problems" really resonated.
If someone were evaluating their next opportunity to tackle, would you recommend they focus less on identifying a specific pain point (that they may know how to solve), and instead identify a large market and then search for inefficiencies (even if they have less domain expertise in it).
Obviously the intersection of the two would be better (large market with a pain point you know how to solve) but curious which you would optimize for if you had to choose.
I think solving familiar problems is a curse of the startup community. Founders go after problems that are familiar, but trivial. Product finder apps for vanishingly narrow segments. Task management. Or my favorite category, startups that are supposed to help startup founders/investors evaluate startup ideas!
My recommendation is that if you're a "technical founder" - a programmer who wants to be CTO - don't look for problems to solve. Look for business partners who already have domain expertise and a problem that they can explain succinctly (so you see the value proposition), and work with them. There's a whole world of people who can see a massive problem that could make money with a good technical solution, but they don't know how to code and don't really know anyone who can code and is willing to help them.
It seems a counterproductive direction given the recent years explosion of startups and e.g. app development.
People and their pain are very different in general, but rather similar in specific groups. Almost everyone spends almost all of their time in a bubble that excludes the pain points of most of the world. And, for someone with the skills, possibility and desire to run a startup, it's exceedingly likely that your market is oversaturated already.
Pick any demographic metric.
For age, the personal pain points of 15-30 people have an overabundance of solutions, but the pain points associated with 53 year olds or 9 year old kids have more gaps and possibly even more paying power.
For lifestyle, the pain points of single young adults are oversaturated while needs of large families (possibly excluding baby-apps) are not, again, due to the peculiarities of startup employee demographics.
For types of location, even the minor pain (inconvenience?) points of people living in highly dense urban areas have all kinds of startup solutions, while pain points specific to millions of people living in USA rural areas are pretty much ignored.
For social groups, the subcultures popular in Silicon Valley have their specific needs filled much more than the various minorities and cultures which are mostly elsewhere. Pardon me for a crude example, but for example, there is a competitive market in gay dating apps/services with a lot of solutions developed; however, the USA LGBT population is comparable in size and thus purchasing power to the Mormon population - if you're starting a new service, which market has the larger potential for you to serve a need that's not already served by existing solutions?
For technological aptitude, the needs of early adopters are obviously served by new tech, while you definitely can build solid businesses designed to serve the far more numerous people who want to avoid bleeding edge tech or even don't have the skills or desire to use industry-standard tech - if they still have the same needs, then making that tech more friendly to them or more distant from them (having you do stuff for them by that tech, instead of having them interact directly in detail) will bring you good revenue.
I tried to write the long answer and it turned out as a wall of text composed of parenthetical caveats. Then I tried to right the short answer and it turned out as a medium length yet confusing answer.
The truth of the matter is that people are barely evolved ape/chimps and do pretty much whatever suites them as long as they don't get their ass kicked for it.
What are ways this can be bet on since these are non-public companies?
So far I've identified:
1. Commercial real estate. Could take a short position on any public companies (ex. CBRE) though they're likely too diversified to drive them down to zero.
2. Hiring. Could bet against LinkedIn? Most local recruiters / agencies are privately owned and the public ones are diversified.
3. Ancillary services. Seems like start-ups serving start-ups so there's no publicly available position to take.
4. Tax Revenue. Assuming a contraction, can you bet on local municipalities being short on budget / revenue with a smaller tax base?
Might be a fools errand to short these if the excess capacity can be picked up by all the behemoths (Google, Facebook, Apple).
I wouldn't dare take a short position on SF residential real-estate although outlying areas might see a larger contraction.
A short position on SF real estate is probably good from several angles: possibly overheated tech market, geographic diversification of the tech industry, and strong movements to build more residential capacity.
Geographic diversification of the industry seems to be a thing. A few years ago the major SF/SV VCs were pretty much restricted to investing in Bay Area companies only. Today I see a lot of non-Bay Area things in their portfolio. YC is a stubborn holdout here but in general I see the industry diversifying. The real estate costs are a factor-- in our own case moving to the Bay would about double our burn rate. That doubled burn rate would be going only to real estate (by way of higher salaries to afford it and higher office space costs).
Investors should just start cutting checks to real estate rentiers directly and bypass the middleman.
Shorting SF real estate seems like a really, really bad idea to me. There have been a lot of articles recently about the research that SF real estate has been going up 6.6% a year for 60+ years now. Of course, there have been some downturns along the way, but the only way to profit from these downturns with a short position is basically perfect timing. I'm sure someone will do it, get lucky, make a killing, and be the subject of lots of "look how smart this person was" articles, but we probably won't see any articles about the tons of people who tried to do the same thing, were unlucky with their timing, and lost their shirts.
Because people buying homes tend to not live alone. And 150k is pretty middle of the road for established tech workers in SF, so in reality you're looking at two people making 200k each.
400k/yr can buy you a home in the Bay Area easily.
I think I'd probably say it's possible rather than easily done. But why force young couples to ante up such a huge buy-in just for the opportunity to work at all the local companies? Even the YC partners are starting to point out, correctly I think, that expensive housing is becoming a significant headwind to Silicon Valley's future.
I like the idea of shorting LinkedIn. My main fear heat would be that someone would drive the price up by acquiring them if you wait too long with cashing in on the short.
I'm impressed by their plan to 5X their top-line in one year and improve their margin at the same time (which would indicate either raising prices or reducing subsidies).
Or getting more API partners or converting more suppliers to use the sponsored/promoted placement within the app.
And 5x top-line growth in a year isn't completely crazy at all for a growth-stage startup of Postmates's size. Aside from normal organic/word-of-mouth and paid growth, they can also launch in new markets.
Location density of the deliveries has got to have a massive impact on their effectiveness. I'm highly skeptical of their ability gather groceries and deliver to 5 separate locations within 1 hour. Even in a dense area where it's 5 minutes between each location (plus parking, plus entry / exit and delivery) that's 25 minutes minimum.
The longer the time, the lower the $/Hr. The further away the locations are, the higher the transportation costs are for the driver, further cutting into their actual take home pay (not including, miles, depreciation, insurance, etc...).
Instead of making deliveries after the order (and trying to bundle orders and deliveries), I would think a dispatch model where one set of workers go out in the morning and make the orders and deliver to a central location. Then have a second shift make deliveries, but that would make it difficult to maintain the independent contract status of their workers.
Agrees on the location density point - the route for the driver has got to be near perfect for their model to work.
The dispatch system is an interesting thought. I wonder if it fully aligns with their delivery time promise.
I think the dispatch system points to another 'lever' however - certain recurring orders can be lazily filled. i.e. when the shopper has no rush orders he/she can fill her free time filling orders which are upcoming, but not immediate
I didn't find much discussion about it, but one theory I saw was that for high-value tickets Stubhub will act as an intermediary to verify the tickets or prevent the buyer and seller from knowing who the other person is (because the original buyer info is typically on a ticket or revealed during the transfer, and the new buyer info is given to the seller).
I assume this is to cut down on scams and other issues related to claims of not receiving tickets.