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Founder drama surrounds the planned initial public offering for ticket resale company StubHub.
As the Viagogo-owned StubHub, a prominent entity in the secondary market for sports tickets, seeks to go public, company cofounder and former CEO Jeff Fluhr is openly wondering why he wasn’t a part of an initial registration issued to potential investors.
The StubHub prospectus, an S-1 form filed with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission and detailing the company’s results and corporate plan, contains a lengthy corporate history that discusses Viagogo CEO Eric Baker founding StubHub in 2000 while a student at Stanford Business School. The document repeatedly refers to Baker as a singular founder of StubHub and does not mention Fluhr at all.
The company’s formation, however, was a combined initiative between Baker and fellow Stanford student Jeff Fluhr. As the company developed, Fluhr dropped out of school to be the company’s CEO and led key efforts such as fundraising and the signing of initial sports team and league partners that gave StubHub a critical early stamp of legitimacy. Baker finished his studies at Stanford and later rejoined StubHub as president.
The pair, however, ultimately disagreed about company strategy, had a falling out, and Baker left the company in 2004. Fluhr stayed and helped lead a sale of StubHub in 2007 to eBay, which held the company until an acquisition by Baker and Viagogo in 2020.
“In an attempt to rewrite history, Eric has erased me from the story and written me out of the S-1,” Fluhr, now a venture capitalist, wrote in a lengthy LinkedIn post. “At a time when we should all be celebrating StubHub’s success, it appears old wounds are deep enough to lie about the company’s founding story.”
Other former senior StubHub colleagues also came to Fluhr’s defense.
“I give full credit to Eric and the current team for navigating the post-COVID waters and getting the business to where it is today. I am still an active and loyal customer,” wrote Greg Bettinelli, a former eBay executive critical to the 2007 deal. “With that, I think it’s super petty to not recognize and celebrate what Jeff did for the business from the very beginning.”
StubHub, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.
The planned StubHub IPO, while it doesn’t yet have a target date or projected pricing, is aimed at elevating a major entity in ticketing, both within sports and elsewhere in entertainment.
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