Andrew Dreskin, Eventbrite president of music and board member.
Andrew Dreskin, co-founder and former CEO of Ticketfly and TicketWeb and now 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 said 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 said. “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.”
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).
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," Dreskin said. "Eventbrite is a fantastic company and it’s a very interesting board. … I think my appointment to the board makes a statement to the marketplace: Eventbrite is committed to the independent live music scene.”