Former Ticketmaster CEO joins EventBrite board of directors

Former Ticketmaster President and CEO Sean Moriarty has joined EventBrite’s Board of Directors as a “key strategic advisor.” Moriarty was with Ticketmaster for 12 years, serving in several roles, including COO and Executive Vice President of Product and Technology. Before Ticketmaster, he served as Executive Vice President of Technology and Vice President of Internet Systems at Citysearch.

EventBrite is an events marketplace enabling online event management, promotion and ticket sales.

Since leaving Ticketmaster in March of 2009, Moriarty has been serving as an advisor to several early stage companies. EventBrite CEO Kevin Hartz approached Moriarty with the opportunity, and Moriarty said he was “impressed with the team and their vision.”

When asked where he sees EventBrite heading, Moriarty said, “It’s somewhat unpredictable. These participatory platforms tend to head in the directions that users take them.” Nonetheless, Moriarty’s strengths lie in being operator-focused and knowing the event ticketing space, and the fit with EventBrite seems natural.

“It’s really a grass roots events management platform that has enabled people for whom tools had not existed before to create and organize events. It’s very much a long tail at this point,” said Moriarty, referring to EventBrite’s focus on smaller events as opposed to Ticketmaster’s focus on larger venues.

Interestingly, in a Techcrunch post earlier in the year, Woodside Capital Partners’ Kelly Porter speculated EventBrite would be a great acquisition target for Ticketmaster. Moriarty responded that “it is very early but great early stage companies that are growing are constantly looked at as acquisition targets. A lot of folks are interested in a business with a great team that is defining and growing a space of its own accord.” EventBrite is not focusing on who may want to buy the company but “on building a great independent company,” Moriarty added.

EventBrite has been used for 200,000 events to date with over $200M in tickets sold via the site. The size of events using the system vary from those with as few as 5 attendees to those with 5,000-10,000. The average event size is 35. EventBrite does not charge for free events but charges $0.99 per ticket plus 2.5% of the ticket price for paid events, and they do not require event organizers to sign a contract.