EP 350 – Buying a Ticket Online: A New Era for Events and Organizers? – Nicolas Deppenweiler – tessera

Read the best-effort transcript below (This technology is still not as good as they say it is…):

Michael Waitze 0:04
Okay, let’s do this thing. Hi. This is Michael Waitze, and welcome back to the Asia Tech Podcast. We are joined today by Nicolas Deppenweiler, a co founder and the CEO of tessera. Nicolas, thank you so much for coming to the show. Before we jump into the main part of this conversation, let’s give our listeners a little bit of your background for some context.

Nicolas Deppenweiler 0:25
Okay, so, so I’m French, very obvious to here, as you may guess. So I live, not really my entire life in France, because my parents are both in the army. So I had the chance, I would say, to live in Africa, in South America, and now in Asia. So I’ve been actually in Singapore for seven years. Initially came to do an internship. Then, you know, after after an internship, you tell yourself, I’m going to stay here for a couple of years, and then you will see go back to Europe. But here we are seven years later, so still in Singapore. So yeah,

Michael Waitze 0:58
so I love talking about this. Nicolas, I have to ask you now, so you’re French, right? But how old are you? I have to ask I’m 29 so you’re 29 years old. Let’s do some simple math. So let’s subtract seven. So you were 22 when you arrived, and how long did you live outside of France when you were a kid? Because your parents were in

Nicolas Deppenweiler 1:18
the army, so I would say probably 1/3 of my life before that, so half of it was basically in South America, and the rest was in Africa. So

Michael Waitze 1:27
if you think about it, you’ve spent actually very little time living in France.

Nicolas Deppenweiler 1:33
Yeah, and I think that’s probably the funny part is like, I have two sisters. One is actually living in Canada, the other one is living in Martinique. So it’s kind of a family thing. I would say, love it. None of us actually staying in France.

Michael Waitze 1:43
But don’t you think this gives you a completely different worldview, and there’s nothing wrong with France, per se, right? Like, I haven’t lived in the United States in 30 something years, and I think that the big benefit to me is it changes the way I think about the rest of the world, but it also makes me more adaptable. I’m wondering what you think you’ve taken out of this moving all over the world kind of thing.

Nicolas Deppenweiler 2:04
I mean, definitely agree. I think you will you see that the world is very different. So when I was in Africa, in South America, in Asia or in Europe, yeah, people are just, you know, behaving very differently. So I will say, Yes, you get to understand how people basically are, and I think that makes you more adaptable. But that’s also something that, in the end, I think you are also looking for. So I mean, that when you’ve been, you know, in a place for seven years, then you want to see something else as well. I think that’s part of, also, of of the journey that that that, I mean,

Michael Waitze 2:37
yeah, I think it’s completely true, like there’s this idea of, should I settle in one place? Or should I just keep moving on because I want to either learn more or I just get bored in one particular place? Let’s talk about Tera I always think that the best entrepreneurs, and we’ll get into what makes a great entrepreneur later, if you don’t mind, like they’re trying to solve a problem that they’ve had. Right? I was teaching this innovation course once in the class asked me, like, where do we get ideas from? And I said to them, don’t you ever have this thing in your day to day life where you’re like, I wish somebody would fix this thing, and then I’m like, that’s your idea. Like, fix this thing. So tell me, how did you come up with this idea? Like, why do you think this needs to be fixed? And what are you fixing? Actually?

Nicolas Deppenweiler 3:18
Yeah. So it’s exactly what you said. So actually, tesserae, in a nutshell, we are building a kind of a next generation ticketing platform, right? Really, in one sentence. The thing is, I used to attend a lot of events. From an end customer perspective, I always felt that, you know, buying tickets, you know, we sell scam. You know, basically, it’s such an annoying process to go through, yeah, and so, so, yeah, I basically experienced it from a named customer perspective. Was like, damn it. You look at every other industry that have evolved so much of the last 15 years, and it feels that ticketing is the exact same way for the last 1520 years. I was like, why nobody has ever done anything about it, right? And so that’s basically how it started. You know, brainstorming with my co founders, you know, discussing with people in this space a bit more. Yeah. So really, really, that’s really how it started, like, kind of a year and a half ago now.

Michael Waitze 4:07
So normally I would ask you, like, run me through the process that tesera does, but I want to wait for that. I want you to run me through. And you don’t have to name the name of any companies per se, although feel free to if you want to, but run me through the process of what a ticketing experience felt like to you. And maybe as you go along and explain that, just say, like, why would they do this thing? Why do I have to do that thing? Do you know what I mean? And then tell me how you’re solving that.

Nicolas Deppenweiler 4:36
So I feel, for me, is the way you currently have, let’s say you experience ticketing is, it’s just a long process. I think we are living in 2024 in a world where people are looking for simpler is better. Yeah, right. You want to be done with things in in three seconds. You want to have as little you know, apps on your phone as you can Yeah. And so ticketing is a process where, whenever you just want to go. Say, to attend an event, and then you have to go into an app, potentially download an app that you don’t want to download. At first, you have to sign in. You have the old billing ways. They ask you, you know, to fill in your dress, to ask if your billing address is the same as your, you know, kind of your card or something like that. So it takes you five minutes, all in all, you know, to buy your tickets on the existing platform, so it’s just a long process that you have to go through. And so what we actually want to do as we go into that a bit more, maybe later, but it’s just to simplify everything, right? Make it easier for the organizer, make it easier for the end customer.

Michael Waitze 5:39
I have found over time that there are a lot of events that I want to attend, and as I’m going through the ticketing process, I’m just like, You know what? This is too hard. Just like, never mind, like, all this kind of stuff you should already know about me, whether it’s on my phone, my native language, like all this kind of stuff, you should already know. Why does it take me 15 minutes to buy a ticket when I can do everything else with like, one click? Does that sound fair?

Nicolas Deppenweiler 6:02
So that brings me to, I will say also some the vision that we have also at Tera is, I think we are living in the world where those ticketing platform that we all use have become so big, so much bigger, actually, than many of the organizers. So they are the one dictating the roots. What I mean by that is, is they are, I mean, for financial reasons and so on. I can go into more detail later. Please. No, go, go, go. They will. So, you know, if you are an an organizer, you are really actively small, right? 99% of the organizers are not like Taylor Swift of this world, yeah, right. They are very small, yeah. They had, they have very, I would say, ample and modest ambitions when it comes to the events that they’re organizing. But they are facing, you know, big, big ticketing platform that will, for example, with old all the money until seven or 10 days after event. But you on your side when you organize the event, you have to pay the venue. You have to pay out of things. So I would say the overall ticketing process has been such a pain, not only from the end customer, which, as I mentioned, this is how it started, on our side, but also for an organizer perspective. And those platform have become so much bigger. They’ve made so much money. Why would they need to change the way they were operating for the last 1520, years? Right? So we all know those platforms, platform like ticketmasters and so on, right? Yeah, yeah.

Michael Waitze 7:23
Well, Ticketmaster, at least from the news that I read, has run into a ton of problems, at least in the United States, for a bunch of different reasons that we can or cannot get into. That’s up to you. But are they also running on some legacy systems as well? Is there a technology advantage that you have too, and it’s not the only advantage, but is there a technology advantage that you have as well building on a modern tech stack that they just simply cannot do, because transitioning from whatever they built on 15 or 20 years ago to whatever the new stack is just takes too much time, too much effort, and it’s just too big of a change, of course, if that makes sense,

Nicolas Deppenweiler 7:57
yes. I mean, if this is this is the exact same as what we see with banks and fintech. Banks are too big. They are not agile enough. They cannot do anything, and that’s why there is, you know, a lot of like, space for fintechs, when you think about it, because if the bank had the agility to change processes, a lot of FinTech would have not succeeded, you know, doing what they did. So it’s the exact same with ticketing, meaning that you face with previous platform that are so big that, have you know, not changed the way they handle payment, the way they handle operations for the last 20 years. Which means that, on our side, from a tech perspective, it’s so much easier to come in with new technologies. So we are also using Blockchain. We can go into this in a bit more detail, but just simply, right, making, you know, payments. So we are partnering with stripe, for example, which means that the organizer can create its own stripe and then collect the money as it comes. So technically, you solve for these cash flow problems that they had, you know, with other platforms, right? So,

Michael Waitze 8:54
yeah, so it sounds to me like you’ve done, you and your team have done a ton of research on this, like I hadn’t thought about it before, that the ticket company would pool all the money and then only pay you after the event. Like I always want to do. I always think about this in reverse, like, if I go to a restaurant, right, and I have this incredible meal, there are seven of my friends there. It’s like $1,500 meal. And I’m like, don’t worry about it. I’ll pay for this in seven days. Like they would, they would call the cops, right? They would literally call the police. Was, were there any other things that you can detail that during the research phase of building tessera, you found out, like, I can’t believe they do that as well. Like, there are there other examples of this?

Nicolas Deppenweiler 9:35
So it’s very good question, because actually, the approach that we have, we have a very problem, than solution, than technology. I strongly believe that nobody really care about the technology. Nobody does as long as you solve for a problem. So what we actually did for the first 810, months was actually to talk to organizers, because we saw it from an end customer. But let’s talk to organizers. So we talked to organizers across, you know, Australia. Southeast Asia, Europe, music, sports, be to be very countless organizers, and it actually felt like therapy. It felt like, Oh, finally we can talk about our, you know, our ticketing problems with you guys. So that’s how actually we would realize, oh, there is a rickshaw problem, because at the end of the day is all the organizers would have said, we have no problems ticketing. There is no business to build because at the end of the day, they are the one paying, right? So it’s always as you answer. It’s always like, you always go to the same restaurant next to it. Let’s say you always go to the same place to eat your pizza next to it, there is another pizza, but you just don’t go there because you’re used to it, but actually maybe twice as you know, much better than the one that you try. So it’s always, that’s the answer that we got. It’s like, well, feel so good to talk to you guys, but we are using a Ticketmaster. We’re using Eventbrite. That’s just the way that’s been. Feels like there is no other solution in the market, right? So that’s really kind of how, how things started.

Michael Waitze 10:50
Yeah, and tell me, like, what other What other problems were there? I love this idea of therapy, by the way, just been waiting for someone to come and talk to them. It’s like every other relationship. I just want to talk to somebody about how I can fix this. Were there any other this. Were there any other issues that came

Nicolas Deppenweiler 11:04
up? So actually, we had three, three main issues that, you know, always came back, right? So the first one is the one that we initially started, which was really the post that we had at first, which is, how do you guys handle secondary market, right? Which was the scam? How do you handle the fact that, you know, people like getting scammed all over the place. We saw Taylor Swift, Coldplay, Bruno Mars in Singapore, yeah. How does it feel that, you know, because at the end of the day, when people are getting scammed, you never see people like you are scam. At the Taylor Swift concert, you are not scam by Ticketmaster, you see what I mean, oh, by the solutions. It feels like, it feels like the blame goes to the organizer. But then, you know, and then you know, those ticketmasters and so on, they’re just looking sideways, like, Yeah, we did what we had to do, end of the story. So that’s the first one. They don’t only look at it from a scam. They look at it from a data, because we also know that from the big organizer. Obviously, this is only relevant to the one person that see secondary market as a huge opportunity. So the name that I mentioned, so they will look at it as like, what’s the percentage of resale? What’s the price that people are reselling at? What’s the revenue that actually would come from C to C transactions? They look at it from a data side, right? Because we know in 2024 data is king in the way you are able to make decisions. But they are lacking every single data. But not only, you can also look at at who actually owns the tickets? Because if you buy the tickets, you will less sell it to me. They will never know that I got the ticket. They will only like do all the marketing towards you, but maybe you saw the ticket. You actually don’t even care about even that much. Yeah, right. So they don’t have any information. So that’s really that the big one, the big boys, right? The big agencies, the big promoters, the CAA, the AEG, the Taylor Swift, you know, those ones. The second problem is the one that I mentioned, which actually is the one that the cash flow management, which is the one that we actually didn’t really look at, yeah, that’s when we You only know that when you talk to organizers, right, because on your side, you pay, you pay, whether you pay, right? You know, if it goes to ticket, you know, to even prior to the organizers, you just pay for the ticket, you get the ticket, end of the story. But the thing is, for them, they did, all told us, and this is true across 100% of the organizers like cash flow, cash flow, cash flow. It came back all the time, right? Can we get the money quicker? And then the third one is the process. It takes me so much time to to set up an event. It takes so much time for my customers to buy tickets. So how much? What’s the traffic that I’m actually losing on every single transaction because of the lengthy, you know, five to 10 minutes process just to buy tickets? Yeah. So that’s the three main problem that we’ve identified. So

Michael Waitze 13:33
can we go through these? The secondary market, obviously, is a fascinating thing. I mean, how does it work if I buy a digital ticket, right? And let’s say I print it out, right? So I don’t have a QR code, or I have it, but it doesn’t really matter, and then I sell it to you. Like, where? How do you fix that? Do you know what I mean? Because let’s say, let’s say I buy a ticket and all I get is a QR code, or all I get is some kind of code, but, like, I lose my phone, or my email gets hacked or something, right? I’ve still paid for the ticket. Like, how do you fix all this news? Is this part of the blockchain solution?

Nicolas Deppenweiler 14:04
Yes, it is. But the funny part, before even going into the blockchain, I’m not a big the biggest blockchain I want. I want, I want to use technology that makes sense, in this case, Blockchain, to build a product that speaks over to everyone. So I want my mom to be able to buy second and, yeah, so can

Michael Waitze 14:24
I get back to the thing you said before that I really liked a lot, that was, I identify a problem, I identify a solution, I apply whatever technology is relevant. Nobody cares about it, right? So to say, like, this is a blockchain solution is not the thing that you’re saying. And you’re right. Nobody cares on the example I always use, and maybe you know this, maybe you don’t, is, like, you know TCPIP like, that’s how the internet works. That’s how messaging on the internet works. Your mother doesn’t care about that, and she doesn’t need to know, because nothing she ever does says, what’s the what’s the Internet Protocol address, right? She just doesn’t need to know anyway. Go ahead.

Nicolas Deppenweiler 14:58
Yeah. So. But every single thing we’re doing with the blockchain or not, I’m not sending it to my mom if she can do it, if she managed to do it, means good. If she cannot, means I do something wrong, exactly. But even before going into this, whenever we’ve even before we build this, a lot of people told us, guys, you have to choose between primary market or secondary markets. Why you have to? Because, because today you have the Ticketmaster of this world and you have the ticket swap of this world, right? So basically, whenever it’s like secondary market, you will basically sell your tickets on Facebook, marketplace carousel in Singapore, you will have ticket swap. Basically it’s two different ecosystm. My, my vision, and our vision at this is we believe that, no they we shouldn’t have to choose secondary market should not even exist. If the primary market solution would have continued innovating, right? If Ticketmaster would have continued innovating like back 1520, years ago, they would have built an ecosystm where you can resell your ticket within the within the Ticketmaster ecosystm, but they didn’t do it. So they feel today, to give a bit of background, they feel today that you hire me to sell the tickets. I’m sure I’m sending my QR code and of my job I did. What had to do? Yeah, done. Look done. So that sounds like a you problem. So what we are doing, that’s why we are trying to so that’s why we say no, we are going into the primary market, because we feel that’s the roots of the problem, and that’s we want to build a new ecosystm. So what does it what happens, basically is an organizer will list an event, the ticket will go through this. But then when the ecosystm is the one that can basically add the conditions to the secondary markets, do you actually authorize or not secondary market sales? Do you if you do it, do you limit at the existing fit? You know that has to be the fair value of the event, because you don’t want people to make money from it. Yeah. So that’s why, and how do we know that is because technically, I’m before actually working at this I was working for food Panda, so my expertise comes from a consumer tech background. Go ahead, and what I mean by that’s like, the way you identify a customer is always like, you have the device ID and you have the customer ID, yeah, we add a new column which is the wallet ID. We think that every single digital entity which is the ticket, will belong to Wallet ID. So if you sell it, from you to me, that good wallet ID, which allows me to track what happens, which allows me to track who actually owns the ticket, the percentage of free sale, blah, blah, blah, blah. So that’s that’s the ecosystm that we’re building. So we’re trying to build up the ticketing marketplace, but an entire new ecosystm.

Michael Waitze 17:30
So I love making equivalencies here, and I was making some notes. I love this idea about combining the primary market with the secondary market. And I don’t know how much you know about the stock market and IPOs, but I’ve been involved in 1000s of IPOs, and what normally happens is, if I, if I’m involved in the syndication of the IPO, right? So my firm is is responsible with a few other firms in selling the IPO to the end clients. What we also do is called market making. So once the IPO prices, once we sell it to those people, we make a market in those stocks so we can keep track of where those prices are. We have bids and offers, right? So what I’m willing to pay and where I’m willing to sell it. And the idea, I hadn’t even thought about this before, but the idea that the ticket market didn’t work that way for this long is actually kind of incredible, since the technology has kind of been there to do this for 25 or 30 years. But you’re right. It’s the brittle thinking about the existing ticket sellers, and the fact that they got so big meant that they didn’t have to do that. But I also love this idea. So does that mean that, to Sarah has a ticket wallet as well?

Nicolas Deppenweiler 18:38
So yeah, we, we partnering with the startup. So whenever you, you know, whenever a customer, basically sign up using Google, we are creating an invisible wallet for them. Again. I want my mom to be able

Michael Waitze 18:48
to buy it. Yes, you just need to know she has a wallet. Yeah, go ahead.

Nicolas Deppenweiler 18:52
I mean, she has visibility on it, because we have right. I think I’m up to transparency. But what I mean by that is like she just want to know that from an end customer, as you said, from an organizer, you want to know those you know the primary, primary investor, secondary. You want to know what’s going on. Yeah. From a secondary platform and customer perspective, you just want to buy a ticket. You want to be done with it. So basically, that’s that. That’s wherever you buy the tickets, as long as the price is okay with you, or this is transparent, that’s basically the only thing that you care about. So that’s the, I would say, the difference that we’re making, and to use it, to use an example, right? That you mentioned is, I’m French to as of now, there is the Olympic Games, right, happening in Paris. So a year and a half ago, about tickets, right? So they build the own ecosystem, and they actually say, Hey, you can resell your tickets as part of the, you know, like the Olympic, you know, our website, you just go and you sell the ticket. So I was like, Oh, actually, good experience to see how they do it, right? And so, for example, when I resold my tickets because I couldn’t attend, you know, you know what happens? It’s like, even to show you how lengthy the process is, they told me, so I bought. Tickets. They told me, Oh, we take 5% on the seller. We made 10% on the buyer, on every single you know, ticket. But not only I was like, Okay, you take your fees, that’s your fees. No, you do it the way you want. But they say, Oh, you will receive your money in 45 days. 45 days. So, so I’m like, 45 days. What would you need 45 days for? And so this is just about those process where everything is handled manually. You have people checking manually the tickets and so on. Yeah. So just to use the example of the Olympic Games, kind of to give a bit of flavor to the secondary market. So

Michael Waitze 20:36
talk to me how tessera manages the secondary market trading, because it’s essentially trading right of this asset. And can I make a point first or ask another question first? But, but remember this, I want to understand how the secondary market works. You use Coldplay and Taylor Swift its examples, because there are two big bands, two big acts that are constantly touring, and everybody knows their names right? They hate it if they sell a ticket for, let’s say, 175 bucks, and then somebody has to pay 1500 bucks actually buy it in the secondary market, right from some kind of scalper. They hate that. And again, it’s not because they’re not getting the money. They don’t need the extra 1500 bucks, right? Because they’re already wealthy, but their reputation is tarnished because now their concert doesn’t cost 175 which is where they priced it, but it cost 1500 bucks. 1500 bucks, and it just changes the whole dynamic. So how do you manage that secondary market in a way, to help them protect their reputation, but also to make the process, like again, more transparent for people, so they actually know what they’re doing? Because sometimes you could buy a ticket that’s fake as well, right? And that’s a problem too. We can talk about that later, but

Nicolas Deppenweiler 21:42
go ahead, yeah, of course. I mean, for the fake part, actually, for us, we are moving entirely away from QR code moving forward. So what do you want to sell? Right? Technically speaking, you can only choose to send the QR code, you know, 20 minutes before the actual events, right? So technically, you limit by 99% the number of basically, you know, black market and happening. But to go, to go back to the question that you ask for us. We are all about empowering organizers. So what I mean by that is, like, if you allow people to make money from secondary market, because you will have two different kind of players that we talk to. They are the one that will say, I don’t want anyone to make money from secondary markets because I don’t think it’s fair to make money. Basically on my back. Yeah, right. So I will limit to the fair value, right? So in this case, no, no point for scalpers to come in just buy tickets, because you will be limited to sell on the platform. So how does it work? It means that you have a profile, you choose resale, and then basically you can, you basically choose the price based on what the organizer said you could do, right? But then some organizers, you know, you mentioned the 1005 to be honest, some organizers, they don’t even care about the reputation that much. What I mean by that’s like, on top of the data, they can make money from C to C transaction. So we charging transfer fees that goes back to the organizer. So if today you buy, you know, this event like $100 $100 let’s say 50, right? So they limited to, like, you know, like, if I correct, if I do it, like, 5000 over, basically, they limited to the revenue that they making, right? But if, let’s say, suddenly you can make 6.6 1400, because of C to C transaction. So if they look at it from a sort of revenue perspective. So some of them will tell you, actually, first, I can make money. Second, if I see that people are reselling tickets at 1005 then I know that my next event, I won’t charge 150 it gives me a bit of a more pricing strategy. I was gonna ask that too. So, so that’s that’s and that’s what we do, is like you do the way you want, right? So that’s from the condition that they initially set up when they actually even create the events.

Michael Waitze 23:47
Yes, so when, and you’re probably too young to remember this, but like when the first few versions of the iPhone came out, people would like wait in line for them from other countries outside the United States, where the iPhone wasn’t officially released, you know, from, mostly from Asia, they’d fly to New York or fly to LA and they’d buy like, 10 of them, and then they’d fly home and resell them at a price that was ridiculous, because people wanted them, if no other reason than for the status, but also because it was the coolest, because it was the coolest product out there, right? And what Apple started doing was they started going, Yeah, great. You can buy three, right? Like you can’t buy 30 of these things, so there’s a little bit of secondary market management there as well. But also, I can’t imagine going into a pizza shop for the best pizza in New York and then walking out on the street and going, you know, where there’s a line. And I see these restaurants actually in Bangkok now, right? Because people will line up outside this very okay restaurant for like, two hours. But what does that mean? If I go in and buy it for takeout, I can go outside and sell it for like, double the price. It just doesn’t feel right to me at all. Anyway, it doesn’t like I was gonna say, it doesn’t feel like in any other market, that that’s okay, but somehow in the event market, it is. But I do like this idea that you’re gathering this data, because we again, in the stock. Market, we talk about price discovery, right? If I put a bid in the market and it just keeps getting hit, hit, hit, I’m going to change my bid. I’m going to lower it by 5% and if I put an offer in the market and people just keep lifting my offer, I’m going to change my I’m going to move the market around. And I guess you’re suggesting that, if you’re trying to empower the organizers, you’re giving them market data as well data that they didn’t have before because they didn’t know where stuff was getting scalped, and now they can maybe reprice their stuff to a price that’s fair, or at least more indicative of where the market is. Yeah,

Nicolas Deppenweiler 25:31
they, you know, if you talk to organizers today, and that’s the reason why, also, you have more and more events organized across different you’ll see more and more conferences. You know, in this part of the world, you see more and more, but they are very limited in terms of the data that they’re getting. Not only secondary market, but actually, if you can, you know, you can also look at the primary markets. They don’t really get much. They don’t really get the time of admissions of people. They don’t really get all those metrics, you know that will give you more insights for you to build better events, right? So that’s why, actually, you feel that the events they you know, so in a way, it does not, it does not be as professionalized as other industry, because of, you know, less data to play around and less data for them to be able to make better decisions,

Michael Waitze 26:13
right? So how do you do this? Right? Because I’m thinking this idea of like, there’s a ton of data, but people don’t really want the data. They just want the insights that the data gives them, right? So are you collecting all this data, potentially anonymizing it, but still understanding, like data cohorts, and doing a bunch of data analysis? And the organizer knows, like, actually, I thought the Taylor Swift concert was like 80% you know, 16 year old girls. And actually it’s, you know, it’s a 50% 40 and over, and then 25% 16 year old girls in the but the balance is like some combination of men, but once you give them those statistics, then maybe they’re targeting for their ticket sales can be better, and like you, can change all of the market dynamics around this. Are you doing that too? Like working with the organizers big and small, right? We keep using Taylor Swift, but still, I may want to make an event, and I would need the data to understand what to do for my next event. And I’m not Taylor Swift, yeah.

Nicolas Deppenweiler 27:06
So I think, for the time being, right, we are, we are really staying more into the the data, such as, you know, the percentage of XYZ, you know, whenever you go into the demographics, that’s, you know, GDPR compliance. That’s something you’ve got a bit trickier. So at this stage, it’s just what data is more like at the end of the day, I also believe that you need to talk to organizers to say, Guys, what data do you need? Right? Data do you need? So and So, everything that we are in you know that we can collect through basically ticketing of payment. We can actually share that with you, right? Of course, from GDPR, obviously, compliance and so on. You cannot share who is who, right? But you can just share some of the that will say, benchmark, some of the group, you know, for Yeah, so, so that’s a bit how we trying to do it. And I think data is something always like a work in progress, right? So it’s like, what data more do you guys need? What data can you collect? What you know, information will we can we basically add as part of the process on this, but without, once again, without making it too complicated, so that, you know, we it’s always a fine line between, you know, you want to collect as much data as you can, but then you know that platform because as heavy as others, and then, you know, basically you lose the edge on that front. Okay, let’s switch

Michael Waitze 28:22
topics a little bit, because I think this is really interesting. You saw me just like typing into the Google machine because I wanted to understand something that I didn’t know before. According to the internet Ticketmaster’s annual revenue is over $16 billion that is just a ton of money. Okay, so this is going to make like a right hand turn, maybe neither, not I nor you expected, but if it’s the case that like tessera, can get to $5 billion in annual revenue, which, let’s do it, yeah. Does it change you from only a ticketing company to also a FinTech company, because now you have all this money, like going through the pipes right of tecera all over the world in multiple currencies, in multiple occasions, in multiple time zones, all this kind of stuff. Does it change the way you view the future of what tecera can be and does it open up the opportunity? Right? So think about this. It also said Ticketmaster sells 500 million tickets a year. That’s 500 million transactions. And if you if everybody buys like five tickets a year, it’s still 100 million people. I don’t know how many people it is, right? You’re now talking about 100 million people. You can sell other financial services to. Like, how are you looking at this idea of when you grow really big? What else can you do with all this money and all the resources and all the data that you have that are going through the system? Yeah,

Nicolas Deppenweiler 29:51
so I think it’s a very interesting, interesting question. That’s really a question that I also get a lot from VCs as well. Yeah, I’m sure. So the. It so. So actually, we believe that ticketing is the easiest entry point. Go ahead, space, right? What I mean by that is like we have, we have more ambitions in the future, right? So let’s assume that we reach, you know, size, and then we start to have, you know, big clients and so on, yep. What we want to do is you can, there is two roads that you can take. We don’t want to be seen as an event ticketing platform. We want to be seen as an event management ecosystm, yep, right. And what I mean by that is, like you can go into financing aspects. So which is, you know, the FinTech so I can, you know, now, until now, you were struggling to get money after the event. Now I can give you some money for you to better before the event. Focus on before even and then, you know, I can give you the money you I want you to focus on providing better experience for people, right? So that’s 111 basically the FinTech rule that we could take another one will be when you talk to organizers, right? You have to find the new you have to find out a lot of things you know that you know it’s not easy to find, like, why we could buy will build, for example, a marketplace or for organizer to to mix and match, basically, venues and, you know, organizers and some promoters as well, that you know can take ownership of some piece of it. So you can build a much wider ecosystm. That’s, that’s what I mean by the event management ecosystm, where everything is accessible for from the Tesla platform, right? You get the ticketing, you get the payment, which is covered, obviously, but then you get financing opportunity. You get, you know, kind of venue quicker as well. You don’t have to yourself go to the venue to discuss with the founder, to get it so it’s an entire ecosystem that we are trying to build. So I’m going

Michael Waitze 31:46
to give you an outlier opinion. If I, let’s say I schedule an event, a big event, money, 2020, right? And I expect, or actually, let’s go even bigger. Let’s say the Singapore FinTech festival huge, 60,000 people. They’re coming from all over the world, right? It’s a three day event, and let’s say some storm happens and the event just doesn’t go off. There’s an insurance aspect to this as well, right? I’m just looking at Ticketmaster’s 500 million transactions and thinking, and the reason why is because I have the largest insurance podcast in the world, right? So I think about insurance in this context all the time. Context all the time, and the key is they’re always looking for platforms for distribution, for insurance products and for customized insurance products. And if tesera gets as big as you expect it to get, you’re looking at a massive opportunity in the insurance space to partner with a large insurance company that says we’ll underwrite both the ticket, delivery, the event, delivery, all this kind of stuff that you’re talking about. Have you considered the InsurTech angle for this as well?

Nicolas Deppenweiler 32:49
Not really. I think what you mentioned is very interesting. I think that’s the first time I hear it from, you know, we know it from our financing and so on, but not so much insurance. But what you mentioned is actually interesting. Of course, this is even when you become big, that becomes even more relevant, for sure. But yeah, and this is, this is a very good, good opportunity as well, depending on, you know, the size, like you just have to be open to opportunities and, you know, players to partner with, yeah. Okay, interesting, actually, yeah,

Michael Waitze 33:21
we can talk about that offline whenever you want. What is the status of Tesla? Like, when was it founded? What’s the status of it now, as the product rolled out? Like, where do we stand?

Nicolas Deppenweiler 33:33
Yeah, so, so right now, we actually incorporated a business middle of last year. Okay? So we have a team of we hire, you know, we have team excellent, very talented team of six on top of, you know, the two co founders, very engineering, you know, team, very product driven at this stage, obviously. So we actually started to have our first events back in March. So now we are talking to, I will say, much bigger events. So we have everything that’s, you know, like the cash flow management solution is already available, you know, cost, you know, and you know, everyone can basically use it. We are still building a bit. We are in the midst of finalizing the secondary market solution, which is, you know, the blockchain ecosystem. The reason why is because you have to find your product market fit, right, even if I build, even if I build the best secondary market solutions for the Taylor Swift of this world, they will come to me and they will say, they will put up me on the show. They will say, That looks amazing, but show me that you can, you know, handle 5 million people connecting on the platform at all time. So you need to build your credibility to go there. Okay, so that’s how we basically build this, go to market strategy, which is, let’s work with a lot of organizers that also can help us build the best platform possible when it comes to primary markets. And then we are trying to go slowly with bigger events and so on, which actually some that we are talking to, so that, you know, we build this credibility, right? So for us to go to market strategies, credibility, credibility. Bit got

Michael Waitze 35:00
it. What have you learned from the from the smattering of events that you’ve already done, like the stuff where you thought, like, Oh, we didn’t think about that thing. Do you know what I mean?

Nicolas Deppenweiler 35:11
Okay, so one thing is, the ecosystem is quite, quite complicated. I feel that when you talk about ticketing, the reason why, you know, I think two reasons. The reason why, for example, you don’t have, you know, you had a lot, you know, back five years ago, you had a lot of ticketing, you know, those like blockchain solution that comes in. You look at NFT, it’s obviously NFT tickets feels like an amazing synergy. But at that time, you didn’t have any pain option, right? You had to buy risk crypto, uh, painting, you know, tickets was very complicated. So at that time it was a bit like, you know, good on paper. But sadly, it’s not really the good timing, yeah, what I mean by the ecosystem is like, there is two ecosystem within the ecosystem. You have the Ticketmaster of this world, right, which is for the big, big one. And then you have the Eventbrite, cystic ticket, you know, Ferry, all those ones that are more mid to small size events. And so that’s basically two ecosystm within the ecosystm and independently, they work very differently. When you go to the big one, you have promoters, have the news, you have, you know you have, so you have the artist. The artist is signing a global agency. The global agency is working with promoters. The promoters is working with tickets. It’s a much bigger ecosystm much harder to go through. But basically what I mean is like the ecosystem is complicated, and sometimes you think it’s simple, it should be simple, but then you have so many people to basically walk around and play with and just discuss. And some of the partner will tell you, Oh, me, I’m an artist, but I don’t hire you any global agency promoter. I do everything in house. And then the other one will say, Oh, me, I don’t want to, I don’t want to deal anything. When it comes to, you know, organizing, like Harry style, for example, in Singapore, I don’t want to do anything. So those things, right? So it’s just a complicated, you know, ecosystem to navigate

Michael Waitze 36:56
in. So you mentioned venture capitalists before. Are you funded.

Nicolas Deppenweiler 37:02
So we did. We completed our angel round few, few months back, like a year now ago. We actually joining upworks, which is an accelerator in Taiwan, right? So it’s will be made vague blockchain and as well, had the weak consumer tech, which is exactly what we wanted. So in order for us to get this credibility and so on, we’re actually looking for to do our seed round. And I think just, just in a nutshell, we have a very different approach. When I told you about the, the the very, you know, the I told you three problems, right? The first one is the blockchain. The second one is the the cash flow, and the third one, I said, the process, right? I feel so we are living in and if you look at this right now, we are building everything on intent. So because I’m a consumer tech expert, if I may say, you realize that when you build a consumer tech platform, you only have two ways to build a platform. Do you focus on Discovery, or do you focus on intent? What I mean by that’s like when you look at the grab for example. Why grab is brilliant? Because when you look at the grab transport, they trick leaks. You’re done, right? And that’s the objective, right? You order your grab is coming to pick you up. You don’t have to open the app anymore. That’s it, yeah. But when you look at grab food is very discovery. You scroll and so on, yeah. And when you transpose that, when you look at ticketing, every ticketing platform I’ve been built on the discovery engine, you go there, you have to download the app, you scroll up, right, left, and so on. But the thing is, when you look at ticketing, nobody is loyal to ticketing platform. Yeah, nobody cares artists. So it has to be for us. Our strong opinion is that to be very intent driven, yeah, I want to be done. So for example, in tessera, right, there is a we build something which, which for us, was something, okay, we just do it simple. We can do it. And that’s something that a lot of organizers, oh, it’s a game changer for us, which is you can buy a ticket without having to sign up within the IG or the Instagram, ecosystm, someone can buy the tickets with Apple Pay in five seconds to get the tickets we create in the back end. So what I mean is this vision of like intentions, intention, intention, over discovery. It probably what also makes us different. And this is also, to go back to the VC topic, this is also a lot of the vision and the approach that we have that also makes us different on top of, I would say, the tech stack with the solution that we’re building,

Michael Waitze 39:21
yeah, because you’re building an entire different tech stack, if it’s based on intention as opposed to discoverability. And you’re right. Like, I don’t care who sells me the ticket. I want to, I want to go see Harry Styles or whatever it is, right? And however I can do that in the way that’s easiest for me. Like, I really want to be able to do it while I’m having dinner. Should we get some Harry Styles tickets? Let me do that. Boom, boom, boom. I’m done. Okay, give me the catch up, right? It should just be that. Just be that simple. We shouldn’t have to worry about a bunch of different things. There’s so many different ways you can do it. I’d love to see what the back end on this thing looks like. Okay, look, this has been amazing. I want to ask you one more question before I let you go, if you don’t mind, okay, what makes a great founder, right? Or a great. Co founder? You’re sitting there thinking, I’m working at Food panda. I’m doing this thing, I’m learning about consumer tech, but I want to start my own company. Am I going to be a great like, what do you think when you think about what makes a great founder?

Nicolas Deppenweiler 40:15
It’s a good question. I liked it. It’s a short question, but that sometimes may quite a long answer, but maybe short for me, I feel I don’t know if I’m a great founder, but I think I’ve learned since I’m a founder, I’ve learned to listen much more than I usually used to speak. So I think for me is listen, listen, listen to basically. So being a good listener, for me, is something that I believe makes a part of what a good founder should be. And also you need to you need to be able to know your strengths and know your weaknesses. Yeah, and so that you surround yourself with people that are much better than you are doing things you cannot do, whether than basically thinking maybe the corporate I hire people just for the sake of hiring so they can just take workload away from me, right? Right, right. So I think this is, this is it’s all about, you know, curiosity, being a good listener and trusting people, right?

Michael Waitze 41:15
Yeah, okay, I’m gonna let you go. Nicolas. Nicolas Deppenweiler, a co founder and the CEO of tessera., I think you’re gonna make it. Man, it sounds really great. I love the thing you’re building. Hopefully. Yeah, I really want to thank you for doing this.

Nicolas Deppenweiler 41:40

Thank you so much, Michael, for your for your time and the opportunity. And now looking forward to catching up with you in Bangkok or in Singapore when you’re around. Definitely.