All right, so why don't we go ahead and get started now that we're here at 9:20 A.M.? So thanks to everyone for joining us here this year at the Raymond James TMT and Consumer Conference, and we're thrilled to have this session today with Vivid Seats and CEO Stan Chia. Stan, thanks for joining us. Of course. Thanks for having us, Andrew. Before we dive into some of the particulars, because I think 2025 is shaping up to be a pretty interesting year concert-wise based on the emails that I've been getting in my inbox lately, but why don't we start with kind of the 30,000-foot view of the company? So for those who are maybe newer to the story or just kind of diving in, where does Vivid Seats kind of sit into that live events ecosystem, and what do you think is worth calling out? Yeah, of course. Yeah, Vivid Seats, we have been around as a technology marketplace now for over 10 years. We are in the secondary space, have a proven track record of strong, profitable growth and significant cash generation, I think, over our 10-year horizon. We've always positioned ourselves as a marketplace, and therefore when you look at the products that we've built and invested in, I think we have fairly differentiated products across the ecosystem. On the buy side, we are the only ones with a loyalty program. We've also got engagement programs for consumers, whether that's in real money daily fantasy or our trivia product, Game Center. On the seller side, we are the leading ERP in Skybox, and in addition to that, we have a distribution platform that powers brands like Capital One. So I think continuing to invest across that, and I think if you look at our results last year, posting close to $4 billion in GOV on the backs of that, $142 in adjusted EBITDA, with, again, historically about a 60% EBITDA to cash flow generation. Great. So why don't we start maybe with the macro backdrop? I guess, can you maybe give a brief history of demand and supply trends since the pandemic? I know there's a lot of variability in there, but maybe specifically this year and some of the changing dynamics as we start to look into 2025? Yeah. I always think you start when you look at the industry and you say, "This is just an amazing one to be a part of," both pre-pandemic as well as post, because you've got these great secular trends on both the demand and supply side. On the demand side, you continue to see folks across multiple demographics. I always jokingly refer to myself as a geriatric millennial who is enjoying stuff in the bands I grew up watching or touring, so to speak. Your question earlier, AC/DC announcing a major stadium tour last week for 2025. So you've got a lot of those concerts out there, folks like myself loving it, wanting to go. And as you age younger, you see, I think, the younger demographics certainly prioritizing their spend on experiential components versus materialistic ones. And so I think you've got that big shift on where they want to spend. On the supply side, whether it's the teams, whether it's the artists, I think most notably artists, if you think about them being able to monetize selling records in the past and concerts as a conduit or live events as a conduit to driving, call it the physical goods sale. Again, that's sort of shifted into a streaming world where an artist's income is now estimated to be primarily 90% from touring. And on that, again, huge trends, I think, towards both supply and demand pushing forward and lots of growth in that. When you look at what the pandemic did, I think on the backs of that, we certainly saw lots of, lots of demand. And I'd say the common conversation we have is around, was there pent-up demand? When did it end? Is it still happening? I would say we certainly saw in the back half of 2021 and throughout 2022 a lot of pent-up demand being released. And I think 2023 was what you saw as really the demand stabilizing back to what we saw in terms of those secular trends and growth on the consumer and interest side. On the supply side, I think what isn't talked about a lot, which we've seen, is we've sort of been saying alongside pent-up demand, there's probably pent-up supply. And as pent-up supply starts to normalize, you'll see a digestion year for the industry. We thought it was going to be 2023. Certainly wasn't. I think if you go back and you think about all the mega artists that toured last year all at the same time, all competing for weekend slots and stadium slots, there was going to be a pent-up supply kind of digestion. And we think that's this year where from where you had all these major artists touring in stadiums, I think you had periods this year where you had no artists in stadiums as a lot of the promotional organizations looked to stabilize and kind of return to normalcy in terms of how they put artists on tour. Sure, and then maybe as we get into 2025, I know since you reported in November, now we're kind of getting into the announcement and on-sale season. How's that shaping up based on what you've been seeing over the last couple of weeks? Yeah. I think prior to our earnings, I think as we reported, there weren't a lot of announcements. So I think we'd been cautiously optimistic that based on other industry information and data points that we were seeing, that it would be a pretty good calendar for 2025. Post earnings, we certainly see some of the announcements start to drop. And I think we remain really cautious but optimistic about what we're seeing. AC/DC announced a major tour. Kendrick Lamar announced a major tour. You've got Post Malone with Jelly Roll out there, My Chemical Romance. So a lot of, I think, great names going back to the stadiums, which we saw a little bit of a lack of in 2024. So I think certainly some optimism that we see going into 2025. And I'll be there for at least two of them, probably three. All right. Me too. So despite that kind of changing events mix and the scale of the events, one thing that hasn't really varied as much seems to be consumer demand in terms of macro exposure and things like that. It's actually stayed quite resilient. One, is that still the case? And how are you thinking about that outlook as you get into your planning sessions for next year? Yeah. Yeah, I think this category, especially when you think about consumer demand, I think about it very much as a FOMO category, right? Where I think while it's definitionally discretionary income, it just doesn't behave like discretionary income. Case in point, if you look at this last quarter and certainly you look at other industry points, I think Ticketmaster reported on a blended basis that their third quarter was down almost 20% on a year-over-year basis, which reflects some of that supply digestion that I was talking about. But if you say, "Hey, what's happening on the consumer side and what do we see?" I'd point to one of the best World Series you've ever seen consumers absolutely willing to spend on events like that. You've seen great traction in women's sports. You've seen college sports, all of these things there. Sports having, I think, a great year in terms of the matchups. But as it reflects consumer spending, I think if you saw a softness in consumer spending, you'd see that ubiquitously across all the categories. We certainly haven't seen that at all. In fact, I think concerts have remained strong from a consumer standpoint. It's just a lack of supply, I think, that has driven some of the softness that we've seen. And then maybe quickly, can you remind us on the sports side about that kind of supply issue? Because it does appear relatively constrained in terms of the number of games is fixed, more or less. But you do have things like expansion of the college football playoff, increased interest in women's sports that are kind of maybe providing a tailwind to that side of the business? Yeah. I think historically you've had in the United States, you've had Major League Baseball, the NFL, the NBA, and the NHL as really good anchor tenants. And as you said, there's not a lot of incremental supply. There's been an expansion to certain playoffs, but that's really one or two games. And then more or less they're fixed for the majority of the season with the NBA kind of innovating with in-season tournaments and in-season playoffs. I think you've got a little bit of that. So that's historically been what we've seen as a more finite or constrained supply base. However, I think we continue to be pretty optimistic as we see growth in new and emerging categories. I think as Messi landed in the United States, I think there's been a renewed and increased interest in soccer, certainly. And so we look to the MLS, hopefully to continue spurring that growth. You've also got events in North America like the CONCACAF Cup that's played here, as well as the World Cup coming in a few years. So I think you've got interest in that category. You've got F1 also standing up on the backs of, I think, really strong interest, again, post-COVID with now events in Miami, Austin, Vegas, as well as I think UFC starting to really pick up. So I think across that, you've got a lot of emerging trends. I think still the four major leagues continuing to hold the lion's share of spend, but certainly a lot of optimism for potential growth on the out years. Awesome. I wanted to shift gears a little bit and talk about the loyalty program, which you mentioned at the top of your remarks. I know it's kind of a, given that ticketing is maybe a lower purchase frequency category and this is a buy 10, get one free, it may take a little bit of time to see the benefit from that program. But now that it's been in market for a bit, how has that been for customer uptake and retention? Yeah. Yeah, we've been really excited about this. When we think about buy 10, get one free tickets, I'll start with, it's a ticket offering, not an order offering. And so when you think about the behavior we try to drive with our users, it's either bring another friend. So I wasn't going to invite you, Andrew, but hey, now that I know you better and I'm close to redeeming you, I'm going to invite you along. I'm worth a free ticket. You totally are, right? We'll take that redemption point. So I can increase, call it the party that you're going with, which is more tickets per order, or you can order more frequently, both of which I think are great behavioral drivers. And as we've reported, we've continued to see over the past few years now, continued increase in purchase frequency. And perhaps more telling as we look at the percentage of repeat orders as a mix of our total business, we're close to 60% now, especially if you look at the end of last year where we ended the year at 59% repeat orders. And when you look at when we started the program, much, much lower than that, or closer to the 40% mark. So I think lots and lots of growth in repeat orders as a percentage of our mix, behavior on the frequency side, and I think continued excitement and refinement in terms of how we target users to be a part of our rewards program. Great. And then one thing that I think maybe gets overlooked a little bit, or certainly the majority of my conversations are on the demand side of the equation, but with Skybox, I mean, that's a pretty differentiated product that you guys have. I guess, one, how has the reputation of that ERP platform kind of progressed as people get more familiar with it? And two, what level of tech investment and things do you need to do to continue to push that forward? Yeah. I think Skybox continues to be a really strong product for us. When you think about the makeup of the industry, 80% of the secondary marketplaces is sourced from professional sellers, and we have almost 60% of professional sellers on our Skybox platform, which when you put that together means 40+% of the entire industry flows through our infrastructure. We continue to, I think, make significant investments into the product to innovate it, to add both performance reliability, but more importantly, I think services onto that. Most recently in our earnings announcement, we announced Skybox Drive, which is a pricing platform that sits on top of our Skybox ERP, has moved beyond beta and is now into the market with launch. I think in the first 10 days, we saw over 100 users onboard onto the platform with the waitlist now in the hundreds as people continue to share incremental interest onto that, so I think we've continued to make investments into the platform that has continued to drive what we believe to be pretty strong and sustainable share growth there. Very interesting. Maybe touching on the M&A front a little bit. So you've been fairly active recently picking up Wavedash in Japan and also Vegas.com. So I guess how have those integrations progressed and what should we expect out of them in the near term in terms of either opening up new markets or that cross-sell opportunity, particularly from Vegas? Yeah, I think it's both. I think when we look at maybe Wavedash as the quicker response first, we are and have talked about our other organic investments being on building out our international platform. We've primarily been a North American-based business, but we believe that our product offering is very competitive in the international landscape as well. And so as we've been organically building, we have been also looking for inorganic opportunities to accelerate our international efforts. We found Wavedash, which is the market leader in Japan. And so that accelerated our international deployment where we're now number one in Japan. We continue to learn from that both in terms of what's happening in the local market, where and what we can continue to build out in our own organic product suite to be ready for some of the other markets as we launch in terms of whether it's currency, understanding local sellers, understanding local events and some of the modifications we need to make to adjust to that. But certainly very excited on that front. And already as we went through this year, lots of great cross-sell opportunities there. As you can imagine, we are the official partner of the Los Angeles Dodgers who happen to have a star player named Shohei Ohtani who might have a fan in every Japanese citizen out there. So I think a lot of amazing opportunity where we were able to cross-sell and cross-brand across those platforms. Vegas was, again, a very exciting acquisition for us that we looked at and saw Vegas as a market with lots of tailwind, right? I think earlier this year you had the Super Bowl there. You've got F1 there as well. And Vegas's roots were very much tied in with the community, with the local venues and box office offering a great discovery funnel for all visitors from an authoritative perspective who visited Vegas. One of the limitations, if you will, on the Vegas platform is because it only served one market is that when users who went to Vegas went home, there was no need for the platform anymore. Whereas in our case owning Vegas, we are clearly national. So at minimum, we've always looked at Vegas as a, and by the way, Vegas is a profitable cash-generating asset as well. At minimum, we looked at Vegas as a profitable user acquisition asset, right? As users go to Vegas and they participate in the events there and utilize that platform, as they go home, we can introduce them to Vivid Seats where we've already profitably acquired that users into our ecosystem. The second component of where we've really liked Vegas.com is on the inventory side. Vegas has inventory that comes from many of the local box office and venues from great relationships there. Vivid Seats with our broad array of events are able to now supplement Vegas with incremental offerings. When you look at the two things we talked about there and what we've disclosed in our last earnings report, from an inventory integration perspective and what we're offering, we're run-rating at 1% of the entire business now is cross-sold inventory through Vegas. And I think we continue to see growth along that. And we're excited to continue using that platform with the benefit of synergized inventory from Vivid Seats to drive volume. And then on the backside, our strongest campaign across all of our CRM channels is our Vegas cross-sell campaign as people go home into markets, right? And we talk about when you look at campaigns, whether they're email or push, we see open rates of over 50% on our campaigns that introduce Vegas users to Vivid Seats, which is multiples higher than any other CRM campaign that we have. So I think lots and lots of excitement about both the assets that we've picked up with the talent that's there, but on the synergies that we are starting to and will continue realizing on the go forward. I definitely want to dig in on the marketing point in just a second, but at the top of your answer of the last question, you mentioned kind of those organic international expansion opportunities, and I know the secondary market maybe functions differently in a few different markets. Like I know the Premier League doesn't really have a secondary market because you have to sit in a certain section, so I guess given those peculiarities in different countries or different markets, how does that affect where you're choosing to allocate your investment and where you're making your efforts in those international expansions? Yeah, it's a great question, Andrew. I think the international markets are markets that are poised to evolve. And certainly I think what we see are trends that would indicate that they are conforming towards more of what we see in the United States where there's liquidity, there's a large and free market that's open. The U.K., for example, I think the CMA made a very strong statement earlier this year when they were asked to regulate the industry and they said, "We don't need to regulate this anymore. It's a very competitive industry that's out there." So I think we continue to look across those dimensions. It's a world out there. And we see all the countries prioritized by size. We see obviously those with perhaps which are slower on the evolution curve will be lower on our prioritization list. But there's certainly many, many countries that are out there that have a thriving secondary that we see is only poised for further growth. Awesome, and so maybe on that marketing point, something you've called out over the last several quarters, that's a very intense competitive environment, so how would you characterize where we're sitting on that now and how are peers spending in terms of LTV versus CAC ratios and things like that? Yeah. You know, maybe just starting on the last one, as you said, this is a lower frequency category. So I always go anyone who's looking at LTV CAC models should be very thoughtful about the frequency assumptions that folks are making to hit a certain threshold because unlike other very high frequency e-com where perhaps a very high CAC justifies LTV where you have that opportunity to bring in traffic, I just don't think you have the frequency here. Hence our investments into things like loyalty and being very judicious on our own acquisition strategy. As we've talked about in the past, on a first-time order basis, we are still profitable on that, right? We've always, and that's how we've driven a lot of the profitable growth for us. We are profitable on the first order. Then, on the repeat with our investments and the other tools that we have to bring people into our ecosystem or back into our ecosystem, we are multiples of that profitability on repeat orders. That's generally been our model. What we see in the landscape, and we've talked about, is we're probably at a very strong point of marketing intensity in the industry where we see many peers spending a lot on the marketing channels. Our strategy has been, as we've continued to look and look, I think with discipline at what we believe to be rational spend, I think we have tapered our strategy to make sure that we are foundationally strong in terms of continuing to drive unit economics at the right level at the transaction level. I think you've seen us able now, as you look at our last quarter, we've continued to have strong take rates, strong flow through to margins, so continue to drive that in face of, I would say, intense marketing competitiveness, the strength of our repeat order program. Gamification is another big element of how we differentiate. Our Game Center product now has 400,000 people playing that. We spend almost no marketing dollars on that to get people in. And as people come in and they use that, that's a high frequency product that keeps you in and keeps you in free of charge, right? So as you're playing those games on a daily basis, you're staying in our ecosystem. As you play those games, we see you almost always browse for tickets after playing that game. So again, just a great way for us to continue building an ecosystem where we believe building a differentiated product and winning customers is the right way to go instead of perhaps spending and winning transactions. And so maybe if we summarize a lot of the factors that we've been speaking about over the course of our conversation, like event mix, loyalty impact, marketing spend, and things like that, how are you thinking about your margin trajectory kind of from a high level? Yeah, I think we go back to, I think take rates, if you start there, have been just remarkably consistent for us, right? Like I think in the entirety of our existence, if you look at our take rates, they've always been almost exactly where they were. What you saw was our take rates stepped down about 100 basis points when we introduced loyalty, and that's because loyalty is just accounted for as a contra revenue. And so instead of the marketing expense, you're seeing it hit take rate. So if you look at that, in essence, what you see is just continued, I would say, consistency and the opportunity to drive take rate strength. On the EBITDA and margin side, I think where you see us continue to try to invest is to ultimately grow the business, and we see strong opportunity for EBITDA margin gains. I think historically you've seen the business perform well in that, and I think moving forward, we continue to see no reason why we can't continue to get leverage on that line as well. And then quickly on capital allocation. So what are the priorities there? I know any appetite for further M&A? And if so, what types of capabilities or businesses might you be looking for? Yeah. Yeah, I think we've always shown, I think, a strong desire for M&A where the assets make sense, as we talked about, whether it's TAM expansion, whether it's capability expansion, we're certainly happy to do that. I think we're also, from a capital allocation perspective, happy to look at buying ourselves, right? I think as we've got a $100 million share repurchase authorization, we think there are other factors that could be potentially impacting the stock, and we're always happy to buy ourselves where we believe we are undervalued. So I think we look at those two things, and I think when you talk about capital allocation, it's always worth looking at our leverage ratios as well. I think it's always been a business, like I said, that historically generates 60% of EBITDA to cash flow conversion. And so as we've in our three-year journey as a public company, I've talked to many. I think the right target there is somewhere in the 3x gross leverage range. We're currently at 2.6 gross, 1.3 net. And I don't see any reason why we'd ever have to get over 3x gross leverage. Great. So I think we do have a couple of minutes if anybody in the audience has anything that they would like to ask. For those of us newer to the story, how should we think about your strategy and go-to-market relative to other similar sites, whether it be StubHub or others? What's your sort of niche or just point of differentiation? For the benefit of the webcast, the question was about your differences in go-to-market strategy and your market segmentation between some of your competitors. Sure. Yeah, I think it starts from where we look at ourselves as we look to build platforms that offer really differentiated value to users. So on the consumer side, if you were to shop around, I think what you'd find is you'd find fairly competitive pricing at Vivid Seats. Beyond that, what we offer you is the opportunity to win loyalty with us. So buy 10, get one free tickets, right? It's a great reason to convert if you're a first-time user. Once you've got entrenched currency with us, we don't see a reason why you would go to a different platform. Hence the strong growth in our repeat orders as a mix of that. And then beyond that, that kind of greenfield opportunity that we've seen is when you're between transactions, giving you an opportunity to engage with our platform and brand through our various games. We have Vivid Picks, which is a real money daily fantasy offering. Our active users there play 15 entries a month. Every one of those data points is a personalization point where we start to learn what teams, what players you're playing with, which allow us to then surface, I think, personalized recommendations in a way that nobody else can. And so I think you've got all of that backed with service that we continue investing in. We've been recognized by Newsweek five years in a row now as best customer service and ticketing. So I think across that comprehensive suite of offerings, I think we are humbly, I think, quite differentiated across the competitive set. And then if you were to look at the competitive set broadly, I think what they offer is an ability to facilitate a transaction. And that's about it across every single platform, right? You transact, you name the competitor that you want. Once you transact, you're done. There's no reason to go back to that platform, right? I don't know why you picked that platform, but if you did, there really isn't another reason to come back, and therefore, I think we have done the opposite, which is give you every single reason to come back to us, and we feel pretty confident and optimistic about our strategy there. Personally and anecdotally on the loyalty program, they got me with that one. It's been. I've enjoyed the free ticket, let's put it that way. Maybe as we start to wrap up here, I know we've covered a lot of ground in terms of the go-forward path, but if you had to call out one thing or one metric that you feel like investors should really be focusing on to understand the story and track progress into 2025, what would you call out? Yeah, you know, I think I would look at maybe two things, right? I think when you look at, again, maybe the landscape and those who are out there and us, I think in the face of rising, I think competitive pressures, we're still guiding towards mid-single digit EBITDA growth on a year-over-year basis. Our repeat order mix are actually trending higher, right, than they did at the end of 2023. We haven't disclosed that yet, but we ended 2023 at 59%. That's an annual metric. We've talked about that. It's trending higher. So if you look at the strategic things that we've talked about and then focus on repeat orders as a mix of the business and continued growth in EBITDA, I think that's a very strong profile versus others who might not be able to show those same performance indicators. Awesome. Well, we'll keep an eye on it. Stan, thanks for joining us at the RJ Tech Conference and looking forward to keeping in touch.