Dreskin Appointed To Eventbrite Board Of Directors

Image Courtesy of Eventbrite – Andrew Dreskin

Andrew Dreskin, co-founder and former CEO of Ticketfly and TicketWeb and currently President of Music at Eventbrite, has been named to Eventbrite’s board of directors.

The move is the latest development in Dreskin’s assimilation into Eventbrite leadership. He told Pollstar he and Eventbrite co-founders Julia and Kevin Hartz have been friends for years and would often discuss over dinner and wine the prospects of their companies joining forces even before the 2015 sale of Ticketfly to Pandora.

“It’s not lost on Julia or me that the time we spent competing over the years was not time overly well spent,” he told Pollstar. “We could have be directing our energies towards solving the problems of independent music venues and promoters if we work together….

“Eventbrite is roughly 10 blocks away from where Ticketfly’s office was (in San Francisco). We’re in a similar space. We both have a belief in a strong corporate culture. We both have a strong belief that there should be a thriving independent music scene and great technology offerings for those independent venues and promoters which enable them to succeed. So there were just so many reasons to do it, I’m just glad it came together.”

Eventbrite finally did acquire Ticketfly from Pandora in September 2017, making it the biggest independent ticketing company in the North America (though AXS and Ticketmaster, the ticketing arms of AEG and Live Nation in many ways still dominate the overall market).

That acquisition essentially combined Ticketfly and Eventbrite’s music division, Dreskin told Pollstar, so for the time being Ticketfly continues to operate a brand or platform to serve its existing clients, but the over-arching goal is to blend it with Eventbrite’s products, teams and service platform into one “amazing software platform”, which needs to be done thoughtfully over time.

When asked about whether it was a different experience being in a leadership position for a company that he was not the founder of, he responded that “I’ve been the founder and co-founder of numerous businesses, but those businesses have been part of larger entities as well. Both TicketWeb and Ticketfly for a period were part of larger, public companies. I’ve got a lot of experience running a division as part of a larger whole.”

He said the big goal for the company moving forward is to make life better for promoters and venues by combining the deep domain expertise of Ticketfly in music with Eventbrite’s DNA as a true-blue tech startup.

“I’m happy to be joining the board. Eventbrite is a fantastic company and it’s a very interesting board. … I’m also happy to be part of the team that is opining on the future direction of the business,” Dreskin said. “I think my appointment to the board makes a statement to the marketplace: Eventbrite is committed to the independent live music scene.”