Integrating Ticketing Platforms after an Acquisition

Achievements  

• Led Ticketfly’s architecture through its acquisition by Pandora for $450M in 2015 and by Eventbrite in 2017.
• Enabled the migration of most of Ticketfly’s client base and the capture of the corresponding revenue before the ramping down of the platform 3 years later.
• Enabled continuous operations for the clients remaining on the Legacy platform by monitoring and maintaining infrastructure and services.

Story  

Eventbrite is an event ticketing platform offering individuals and venues with an integrated solution to manage their live events, market and sell their tickets online.

Eventbrite acquired Ticketfly in 2019. In that context, key capabilities of the Ticketfly platform had to be integrated into the Eventbrite platform and clients migrated.

I was Ticketfly’s Chief Architect at the time of the acquisition. My contribution at the organizational level was to offer a model for structuring the cross-functional teams based on Domain Driven Design. The benefit being low coupling between the teams to allow for more independent operations, resilience and an org more easy to scale.

At the technical level, I trained the Eventbrite teams on the Ticketfly architecture and participated in porting Ticketfly’s “enterprise grade” authorization system to the Eventbrite platform. I also helped define scenarios to handle migration of users and data between the systems. This allowed the business to capture most of Ticketfly’s client base and corresponding revenue before the ramping down of the platform 3 years later.

On the Ticketfly side, myself and a few others managed operations, applications maintenance and AWS infrastructure. This enabled continuous operations for the clients remaining on the platform, supporting their businesses and protecting Ticketfly and Eventbrite’s reputations.

It is sad to witness the end of the great enterprise. But I am happy that it was ultimately a story full of successes both on the tech and business sides.