Ticket reseller StubHub went public on Wednesday. Although StubHub’s shares closed 6% below their IPO price of $23.50, valuing the company at over $7 billion, the public debut itself is a testament to the co-founder’s decades-long perseverance.
StubHub CEO Eric Baker co-founded the company with Jeff Fluhr in 2000 while they were attending the Stanford Graduate School of Business. This was shortly after the dot-com bubble burst and Nasdaq crashed, but the pair didn’t give up.
“Stupid competitors went away and many of us got a real opportunity to build a lasting business after getting through that dip,” he said on a Bessemer Venture Partners podcast in 2022.
A couple years later, the business was growing, but Baker and Fluhr didn’t see eye-to-eye on the direction of the company. In 2004, Baker was pushed from the company.
A year later, Baker relocated to London, where he founded Viagogo, a StubHub for Europe. Growing Viagogo had plenty of challenges, but he dreamt of merging it with StubHub, according to the podcast.
