Venture 101: That's the Ticket

People often ask us what we look for in a company and entrepreneur before we will invest. The short list is:

1) company is or has the potential to be #1 or #2 in its space either nationally or globally.

2) either the CEO or CTO is well known, connected and respected in his/her industry (and experienced), is ethical and is someone we want to build a business with.

3) the business model is compelling and clearly scales. By compelling, I mean that we are happy with each dollar that comes in.  We want to avoid the story: I am losing money on each unit, but I will make up for it with volume. By scalable, I mean that we can see the mechanism or approach by which the company can ramp to be a sizable business.

4) the company is rationally priced

It is a rare situation when we come across a company that is a leader in its space, is doing nine figures in gross revenue and has never taken outside capital. It is even more rare that such a company, given its size, is growing 70-100% a year.  TicketsNow, located in Crystal Lake, IL, enjoys all of these and I am pleased to say that it is the latest addition to our portfolio.

Started on $100 by Mike Domek from his dorm room, TNow is the highest trafficked site worldwide in the premium ticket world. We could not be more excited about backing Mike and his team which includes Kenneth Dotson (formerly CMO uBid and co-founder CBS Sportsline), Mike Stein & Mark Hodes (formerly ran CRM and online marketing at Orbitz), Frank Giannantonio (former Land's End CTO) and Sridhar Murthy (former CFO or VP/Finance at Ariba, Collabnet & Get2Chip).

All readers are encouraged to get their next premium sporting, show or concert ticket at www.ticketsnow.com!