Say you want to rent out the Entourage house for your birthday or Eric Clapton’s old house for your rock-and-roll-themed wedding reception.
Eventup, a marketplace for hard-to-get event venues, can make that happen.
Eventup is a brand-spanking-new startup launching today in Los Angeles, and we have to say, a startup idea like that could only have come from Los Angeles, the longtime home of entertainment of America.
“More events are thrown in LA than anywhere else; there are more venues here than anywhere else,” said Eventup CEO Tony Adam. “This couldn’t happen in San Francisco … our business could only start successfully here.”
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And this particular startup idea couldn’t have happened without Science’s trademark mix of local talent and Valley capital. Science is the area’s newest tech incubator, and Eventup is the first Science company to reach a public launch.
Adam, a former MySpace employee, came by the VentureBeat office in San Francisco to chat about the company.
“You don’t want to be the bride at a hotel ballroom and watch another bride walk by,” he explained. “You want your event to be unique and memorable.”
He and the rest of the Eventup team are focused on creating entirely unique and highly memorable experiences for normal consumers. It’s a bit like Airbnb for upscale events.
“Unattainable properties are now attainable,” said Adam. “Rodeo Drive houses, Malibu beach houses … we even have access to The Bachelor mansion.”
The idea sounds hip enough, but Adam emphasizes the business model behind it, too. The company is “focused on solving a real-world consumer problem,” he continued.
“I’ve planned conferences and I know how hard it is to find a venue. I’ve spent days doing it, and even event planners can take as long as 18 hours just finding a place.”
We talked to one of Eventup’s backers, former MySpace CEO Mike Jones. Jones and Color co-founder Peter Pham founded Science to bring ideas like this one to market.
“When Peter and I were originally working on this, we started with marketplaces, places we could find underused inventory and find buyers for that inventory,” said Jones.
“At first, I said, ‘Venues — is that really that big?’ We eventually realized there are very few aggregated venue directories. We started talking to high-end real estate companies and homeowners, and we realized that these people wanted to rent out their homes.”
Eventup ended up sourcing around 400 venues in the greater Los Angeles area alone, creating a consumer marketplace just as Jones had wanted.
And the fun doesn’t stop with the venues. “We now have access to catering, insurance, DJs, entertainment, valets — once you have the venue in place, it’s just the start of the funnel of the events industry,” Adam revealed. “We’ll be getting into that, too.”
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