San Diego’s Eventful Looks to Put Consumers in Charge, with Backward Glance at eBay

[Corrected 8/8/11, 11:35 am. See below.] Eventful CEO Jordan Glazier likes to describe the San Diego Web-based startup as an “eBay for local events and entertainment,” and there are more than a few similarities.

One of them is Glazier himself. Before joining Eventful in 2006, he spent five years as a general manager at the San Jose, CA-based giant. Glazier refers to his time at eBay as a five-year study in the economics of marketplaces, supply, and demand, and he was deeply involved there in developing and managing three of eBay’s biggest business units: consumer electronics; computers; and business & industrial. His predecessor, Eventful founder Brian Dear, also had worked at eBay (as well as San Diego’s MP3.com), and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network is among Eventful’s prominent investors.

Eventful, which began in 2004 simply as EVDB (as in Events and Venues Database), also has long since evolved into an eBay-like online exchange that is both global and local. The company’s Web-based platform hosts roughly 5 million local events at any given time for some 20 million users worldwide. Eventful users can search the website by category, performer, or venue to find events in their local markets. Concerts and shows are the big draw, of course, but the site also tracks sports, political rallies, and other activities. A comprehensive movie section features local movie show times, trailers, reviews, and links to buy tickets.

“It’s the best way to get the word out about local events,” Glazier says. “Every month, 20 million people rely on Eventful’s local markets, which includes 80,000 people in San Diego who are using Eventful monthly to answer the question, ‘Honey, what do you want to do this weekend?'”

[Corrected 8/8/11, 11:30 am to show company raised $20 million, not $30 million.] Today the seven-year-old company has 60 employees—up from seven employees just five years ago—and has tripled its revenue each year for the past two consecutive years. The company has raised a total of $20 million in three rounds (the most recent was in October 2008), and it is not currently looking to raise additional capital. Aside from Omidyar, Eventful’s investors include Twitter co-founder Evan Williams; Zynga founder Mark Pincus; entrepreneur and digital media guru Esther Dyson; telecommunications giant Telefónica; and the venture firms Draper, Fisher, Jurvetson and Bay Partners.

Since Glazier stepped in as CEO, Eventful has expanded its

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.