Initially Starting StubHub While At Stanford

So yeah, I was a first year at Stanford GSB, and I would've been the class of '01. So my first year was September of '99 to May of 2000 or something like that. And this was a time, so the late '90s was, I don't know how many of you on this call today were adults then, but it was It was a time of the first wave of the internet. The late '90s was when Internet 1.0 really came to life. And so you had companies like Amazon and Yahoo and eBay and Netscape that in the '95 to '99 era were going public, were getting to scale. And some of these companies in the public markets were then enjoying huge valuations, which is reminiscent a little bit of the 2021 run-up in pricing, in that there was this crescendo in 1999 and the beginning of 2000, like there was last year, actually. And then there were a lot of companies also that were going public that had— the companies I just mentioned were all, for the most part, fairly solid companies with real business models. There were also a bunch of companies that didn't have real business models. Um, and really the, the, um, the, the, the, the kind of, uh, general, uh, consensus at the time was it was all— it was all that mattered was how many eyeballs you had. So it was like, you know, how many eyeballs, uh, did you aggregate as an internet company? And it didn't matter if you had revenue or anything else as long as you had quote-unquote eyeballs. So anyway, that, that— because— and I had been working at Blackstone in sort of that most of that run-up, and Blackstone, we were investing in kind of old manufacturing-type companies. So like Middle America, cash flow generating, low growth, but highly cash flow productive companies. And we were borrowing a bunch of money and then buying these companies mostly with borrowed money. And you could make a lot of money that way. And there were really smart people at Blackstone, and I was learning a lot, but I was much more attracted to what was happening largely on the West Coast. I was in New York City, and I was much more attracted to what was happening with these internet companies. And my background, as I mentioned, was, I did have an engineering degree from Penn. And as a teenager, I had started experimenting with the internet with my modem. My dad brought home— my dad worked for AT&T. He brought home a PC computer when I was, I don't know, 10 or 12 years old, along with a modem. And I was using my modem back in those junior high school and high school years to call up call up what were called BBSs, bulletin boards, which was like the predecessor to the internet. And I was calling bulletin boards and downloading programs and stuff. So I had this interest and I was learning to program back then as well and did some programming in college. So I was interested in technology. I was interested in programming computers, but there I was at Blackstone with these boring manufacturing companies. So I really was attracted to what was happening on the West Coast with the internet. Went to Stanford Business School, and in my first year, wrote a business plan for StubHub. My co-founder and I were sitting at lunch one day and started talking. He had a similar background to me, and we were talking about, gosh, we got to do something on this internet. This is so exciting. And so we submitted a— we came up with the idea for for StubHub and wrote a business plan, uh, an executive summary for the business plan for StubHub for the competition. We were selected as one of the 6 finalists, and, um, I think there were like 54 submissions or something that year, and we were one of the 6 finalists. Um, but we decided that we actually did not want to show up for that final round. So if we had shown up for the final round and if we had won the competition, you know, like the Stanford newspaper would have done a little profile about us and about our company, and we would have maybe attracted some more attention. And we decided at that point, we had already decided, I had already decided that I wanted to like start the company. And so I, I felt like it would be an advantage to kind of stay under the radar and not actually attract more attention. So we didn't show up for that final day of the competition. So only 5 companies showed up. Um, and we, and, and we, I incorporated the company in March of 2000, which was exactly the one month before, um, April of 2000 when the entire internet economy kind of collapsed. So in the same way that we've had a huge reset in valuations between, call it, November of last year and May of this year, mostly in tech stocks and now more broadly, we had that same huge collapse in internet stock prices in April. It started in April of 2000. It lasted for the better part of a year or two of downward price pressure on the internet companies that had gone public, and companies that were private suddenly found it very challenging to raise capital. Many of the companies, including companies that had gone public, ended up going out of business because they were burning cash and they had no ability to raise more capital, even in the public markets. So it was kind of a good 24 months of real pain in anything related to the internet. And so this was the environment that I was operating in as a 24-year-old founder, and access to capital was basically nonexistent. So, you know, and we could talk more about that. I think some of the lessons from that, I think, are really important and relevant today, and we should circle back on that. But anyway, so we started StubHub in March of 2000. I finished my first year through whatever it was, May or June of 2000, and I did fine, but I didn't go back for my second year of business school. So I dropped out of Stanford after my first year and ran the company as CEO.