If there was a ticketing equivalent to the checkout impulse buy at the grocery store, it would be San Francisco-based Gametime.
The upstart company in just two years of existence has positioned itself as a prominent source for last-minute tickets. And nearly everything about Gametime is positioned explicitly for millennial consumption.
The company operates only on mobile platforms, with purchasing and actual ticketing all occurring strictly to smartphones and tablets. By acquiring inventory merely hours and sometimes only minutes before a game starts, and often selling it for below face value, the entire value proposition for Gametime is centered around spontaneously consuming more live entertainment. Conceptually, Gametime is also similar to other mobile-focused, on-demand consumer services such as Uber and GrubHub.
Gametime still exists well in the shadow of far larger, more established players such as Ticketmaster and StubHub. But the industry still has taken notice, and the company recently closed on a $13.3 million Series A round of venture capital financing, a round led by Silicon Valley private equity giant Accel Partners and larger than comparable Series A fundings for digital luminaries such as Facebook, Twitter, FanDuel, DraftKings or Uber.
The round also involved several individual titans of the sports industry, including Sacramento Kings managing partner Vivek Ranadivé, Wasserman Media Group Chairman and CEO Casey Wasserman, and David Blitzer, co-owner of the Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Devils.
More than 85 percent of Gametime’s customer base is age 35 and younger, a near total occupancy within the
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Gametime offers inventory in more than three dozen markets, including Chicago.
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millennial audience that is the inverse of the audiences for some pro sports properties.
“We think we can be a real solution to the industry,” said Brad Griffith, Gametime founder and chief executive. The former Chicago White Sox and Colorado Rockies analytics intern formed the company in 2013 after stints with Google and e-commerce company Zappedy. “We have a platform that completely co-exists with every other primary and secondary product out there, and encourages more sampling of live events.”
After starting just in the San Francisco market for Giants games, the company now offers inventory to games in more than three dozen markets, including top ones such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Gametime, like other resale marketplaces, generates revenue by taking a commission on sales, often 10 to 20 percent.
Giffiths’ key colleague in the company is chief revenue officer Colin Evans, a co-founder of StubHub and also an active player in Silicon Valley investment circles.
“We’re catering to an audience that is entirely comfortable with buying things over their phones,” Evans said. “It would not surprise me if a decent segment of our buyers didn’t even have a laptop. It’s all about the phone, and we’ve been able to build a platform that is very different from others out there because everything we’ve built from the ground up is entirely about mobile.”
