Ticket reseller StubHub went public on Wednesday. Though StubHub’s shares closed 6% under their IPO worth of $23.50, valuing the corporate at over $7 billion, the general public debut itself is a testomony to the co-founder’s decades-long perseverance.

StubHub CEO Eric Baker co-founded the corporate with Jeff Fluhr in 2000 whereas they had been attending the Stanford Graduate College of Enterprise. This was shortly after the dotcom bubble burst and NASDAQ crashed, however the pair didn’t surrender.

“Silly rivals went away and many people bought an actual alternative to construct a long-lasting enterprise after getting via that dip,” he stated on a Bessemer Enterprise Companions podcast in 2022.

A few years later, the enterprise was rising, however Baker and Fluhr didn’t see eye-to-eye on the route of the corporate. In 2004, Baker was pushed from the corporate.

A yr later, Baker relocated to London, the place he based Viagogo, a StubHub for Europe. Rising Viagogo had loads of challenges, however he dreamt of merging it with StubHub, in accordance with the podcast.  

In 2019, when eBay determined to spin off StubHub — it had bought the ticket vendor in 2007 — Baker seized the chance. He secured backing from buyers, together with WestCap, Madrone Capital Companions, and Bessemer Enterprise Companions, buying the corporate for $4.05 billion.

Simply after the merger was accomplished, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. With dwell occasions cancelled and world quarantines in impact, the corporate’s income collapsed.

The corporate scraped by and when dwell occasions rebounded, the ticket reseller income grew considerably pushed by massively common occasions like Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour, and the Tremendous Bowl.

Within the first quarter of 2025, StubHub’s income grew by 10% to $397.6 million within the first quarter in comparison with the identical interval final yr.

“Reflecting on our journey, I’m amazed at how far we’ve come,” he stated in his S-1 founder’s letter when he was, after years of planning to go public, on the precipice of a gap day. “We now have efficiently navigated quite a few challenges, together with the unprecedented influence of COVID-19, which introduced a halt to dwell occasions in 2020.”

In line with the S1, Baker owns 4.7% of the corporate, in the meantime StubHub’s buyers Madrone Companions, WestCap, and Bessemer Enterprise Companions maintain 24.5%, 12.3%, and eight.8%, respectively.