The Future Of Work. Curtis Cheng Is Making Big Moves Expanding His Live Entertainment Ecosystem.

Many times, the public knows the big names in any given industry. For ticketed events they are Ticketmaster, AEG, Vivid Seats and StubHub. What is not common knowledge outside the business are the players who shape the future and drive innovation. 

Curtis Cheng, CEO of Ticket Evolution/DTI management is on a mission to expand the world of ticket resale into a global community of people who sell goods. Cheng and his team build and buy companies which service ticket sellers with products which manage inventory and delivery, assist in pricing, operate business to business exchanges and soon provide capital or its credit equivalent in a twist on factoring.

Cheng has been an early adapter of change as the event ticket resale market evolved into a software driven multi-billion-dollar global industry. He has been watching as those same sellers pivoted during the past year when live events all were cancelled. Cheng observed the growth of individuals and small businesses trading video game players, sneakers, collectible trading cards, outdoor heaters, non-fungible tokens, crypto-currency, and a broad assortment of other goods. Cheng also observed the behavioral shift as these people who learned how to earn a living building their own businesses as new wave electronic merchants or “sellers” as he calls them were able to earn enough money that post pandemic, they would likely remain entrepreneurial rather than returning to their former career paths. There is a certain romantic “cowboy” notion to the idea you can establish a shop online, from anywhere on the planet where there is stable internet and earn a stable income trading goods.

There are external indicators which confirm Cheng’s insight, most significantly the growth StockX.com, the online marketplace run by former StubHub and eBay veteran Scott Cutler which evolved in the past year from a platform which verifies authenticity of and enables trading collectible sneakers to a global resource which also makes a market in streetwear, electronics, handbags, watches, trading cards and other high demand items. 

In the past year we have seen ten years of growth in acceptance of online delivery. It is like when Uber UBER first came out. All of us were raised to never take a ride from a stranger, now that is the preferred mode of transportation in most cities around the world. Similarly, going to a store seems archaic when, for almost anything, two minutes on the computer or a smart phone gets that item delivered to your home the next day. Being a merchant used to mean building bigger and bigger buildings to hold a broad variety of goods, and hoping they sell. Now, Macys M is dying, and Sears is effectively dead. Curated goods are the trend and that requires specialization. Therein lies the opportunity for Cheng and his management by building the tools to support entrepreneurs who acquire the specialized market knowledge to acquire and resell the merchandise.

DTI Management this week is announcing several significant steps planned during the pandemic pause. First, DTI merged with Ticket Evolution (TEVO), a Business-to-Business event ticket marketplace where sellers trade inventory amongst themselves, and at the same time acquired Ticket Vision which is a software driven ticket pricing tool. Along with the TEVO merger came new external capital commitments from multiple sources to fund expansion of the TEVO business.  

DTI’s wholly owned 1Ticket subscription software business which powers the back-office management of ticket monitoring for retrieval, delivery and delisting from markets immediately upon sale is ramping back up as live event ticket sales return. In addition, DTI is announcing its new partnership with Legends (online as Legends.net) a major premium experiences company well known in the world of sporting events and hospitality. Their reach is incredible in sports and live entertainment globally, and their roster of partners includes almost every significant name in the business.

In another coup for TEVO, Sandeep “Sam” Soni, co-founder of PrimeSport LLC, former Chief Revenue Officer of On Location Experiences (now owned by Endeavor) will be joining the Board of Directors. Soni’s deep experience and extensive relationships in the ticketing and sporting event worlds should prove transformative as he helps guide management through this next phase of expansion.

This combination of fresh capital, a full-service integrated suite of software platforms which enables sellers both small and large to acquire, sell, price and monitor inventory in real time, partners with deep experience and broad reach and the current shakeout of winners and losers post pandemic has created opportunity for the bold and the innovative. Ticket Evolution may become the base of the broader seller economy Cheng envisions. Why not? Tickets are high demand, high supply and global. There was this other company which started with a similar niche selling books, then slowly added one vertical after another. Last I checked that company, Amazon AMZN , appears to be doing well.

Cheng became known in the ticket world as a ticket broker, someone who made a living buying tickets then reselling them to people who either were unable to get the tickets themselves when they were put on sale, or who did not know when tickets were sold that they would later somewhere at the same time as an event they wished to see. Cheng built up his company, then called Dreamtix which is how we first met when I called him for help getting my parents seats for a show they wanted to see on Broadway while they were visiting Manhattan.

As tickets moved from the old school network of brokers and the consumers with whom they built relationships to an electronic trading market across multiple national platforms, Cheng was early to see how to expand his presence by aggregating sub-brokers and using his greater presence to negotiate lower fees on the markets where tickets sold. Dreamtix became DTI management which lived in the space opened by arbitraging lower sell fees across greater volume gained by offering to share that price advantage with sellers while keeping a percentage for itself. Cheng built a formidable operation, one of the prominent aggregators in the ticket world.  

In 2016 DTI management had grown large enough to attract a $75 million investment from CVC Capital Partners and New Amsterdam Growth Capital. Lee Shenker, currently President of DTI and formerly General Counsel at ASC Ticket Company brought his skill set to DTI in 2017. DTI was then already on a hot growth run, upending the ways things were done and rethinking how to deploy both human and financial capital.

Like most of the live entertainment world, the nearly instant closure of all performing venues globally resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic upended all plans and shut down virtually all activity beginning in March 2020 and just now beginning to return. The question facing each company in the space was what to do next and how to pivot from no action to positioning for when the business resumed. DTI had acquired 1Ticket in 2017. 1Ticket is a critical piece of technology which monitors seller’s accounts and pulls into their point-of-sale system tickets which have either just been purchased, or for those which are delivered electronically closer to the date of an event, the actual ticket itself when it becomes retrievable. Also, because sellers list the same ticket on multiple platforms, the 1Ticket software monitors sales and once a ticket sell anywhere it is removed from markets everywhere within a minute or so. Without this sort of technology there would be endless confusion as tickets listed on multiple marketplaces could be sold but appear to still be available for sale. 

Cheng’s combination of access to venture capital, advisors with relationships in the world of sports and entertainment, and software which enables sellers both large and small to scale with flexible technology gives his vision for growing the seller community credibility. We spoke at length last week. Below are links for our conversation in both video and audio podcast format:

I have observed something in Cheng which I do not often come across. He is creative in a practical way.  Very few people begin as a ticket reseller, graduate to partnering with substantial venture partners, remember to bring along the partners who helped the business grow and figure out how to leverage a once in a lifetime crisis to reformat a platform to redefine the parameters of what can be achieved. Cheng has capital, technology, access, vision, and a network of loyal sellers who use his products. There is no reason this aggregation of capability cannot fuel an expansion out of the ticket world and into a broader market of curated products, experiences, and limited-edition supply chain logistics. The internet is a funny place. Sometimes, all it takes is for an established business to expand is add one more tab. I am quite sure Cheng has more than a few new tabs planned. That is how he becomes the guru for the future of work, by building the path for sellers to succeed and powering their growth through technology.