Disclaimer: Unless noted otherwise, views and analysis expressed here are the author's own and based on public sources. The article is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. This is not financial advice. Please consult a professional for investment decisions.

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In the unlikely event you’ve been living under a rock for the last month, US Tech stocks are very passé. According to Jason Lemkin, this “SaaS crash” has been long time coming due to:

1. Corporate budget reallocation towards AI away from “legacy” vendors 

2. Pressure on seat-based pricing - the bedrock of the SaaS business model

3. SaaS growth rates inexorably dropping:

No-one’s safe. With share prices of enterprise titans like Salesforce and ServiceNow knocked by 30%+ YTD, who has time for the mid-cap stocks permanently trapped on the shady side of the valley?

Companies that suffer sustained share price declines risk getting caught up in a vicious cycle. To quote the FT, “Public markets are increasingly unfriendly to companies with equity values near or below $1B: few active managers and research analysts are prepared to cover them”. 

Then again… one man's trash is another man's treasure, right?

Bending Spoons, arguably Europe’s hottest tech company and the subject of 2025’s most popular article, has graduated from hunting midsized video editing apps like Splice and Remini to 9 and even 10 figure take-privates. Since late 2024, the Spoons has pounced on 3 of those, with combined sales just shy of $1 billion:

• Eventbrite with $300M revenue (trailing 12 months)

• Vimeo at $400M

• Brightcove at $200M

Judging by share price trajectories (-80% to -90% vs. IPO levels!), all 3 companies had been left for dead by the market… And this is before the scary 2026 SaaS Crash:

Does Bending Spoons’ contrarian investment strategy make sense? Who’s next on their shopping list? And why isn’t everyone doing this? 

We looked into these questions - and then some:

1. What is Eventbrite & what makes it “hard to kill” despite the chequered history

2. Eventbrite’s three stages of life: disruption, M&A, self-harm

3. Why did Eventbrite miss the boat post-COVID?

4. We put a bunch of US tech midcaps through an AI-powered filter on a bunch of US tech midcaps. Could these 13 stocks be next in Bending Spoons’ crosshairs? 

This week’s sponsors are Reef Pass: THE serial acquisition investors. If you are seeking HoldCo or rollup funding in North America or Europe, you should talk to Reef Pass Investors. Interested? Apply directly on RPI’s website or simply hit reply with a description of your idea + pitch deck.

1. What is Eventbrite & what makes it “hard to kill” despite the chequered history

Eventbrite’s raison d'être has changed surprisingly little compared to 2009, when WIRED profiled the company “making it simple to get tickets for events that are too small for Ticketmaster to bother with”. Specifically, Eventbrite has 2 ICPs: 

• The mid-market: music venues, music festivals - events that sell anywhere between 10,000 and 200,000 tickets; and

• The “long-tail”: basically everything else. A stand-up comedy show. A children’s play. A poker tournament. A RollUpEurope meet-up…

According to Eventbrite’s estimates, these two categories represent one-third of the $80B in global events gross bookings. Eventbrite’s relatively low market share of 14% ($3.3B out of $23B) illustrates the difficulty of penetrating the long-tail profitably. Only 30% of the tickets distributed through Eventbrite are paid. “Paid transaction creators” are thus Eventbrite's profit engine. Thr average paid creator organises 3 events per quarter, with 40 tickets sold per event, $40 average ticket price, and finally a 10% take rate to Eventbrite. 

This includes us, RollUpEurope. And even though our events are nothing like the partygoing bacchanalia depicted below, we probably rank in the top 20% of its “paid creators”. 

In the last 17 months, we have hosted 7 events on the platform. Our events gross 3-5x more than the Eventbrite average. 

Having experimented with Eventbrite’s slicker competitors Ticket Tailor and Luma, we keep coming back - despite its anachronistic UX, limited functionality and chunky fees. 

2 reasons why:

Firstly, as a recurring user, we value the convenience of being able to copy all previous work to the next event. In other words, we are a “high switching cost” customer.      

Secondly, our product requirements are basic (3 types of tickets, no complex upsell bundles etc.) and the numbers are small. Until now, the most we've sold is 200 tickets. 

Do we believe that Eventbrite is leaving money on the table by not enabling us to do more? Absolutely. 

Our blog has nearly 6,000 highly engaged readers. With Rollup Bootcamp, we’ve expanded into training. Soon, we’ll be launching a vendor marketplace. If Eventbrite were to offer a digital community product, we'd happily try it out. But it doesn’t have one, so we’re using Circle instead. 

2. Eventbrite’s three stages of life: disruption, M&A, self-harm

Eventbrite was founded (as Mollyguard) in San Francisco 20 years ago, by the husband-and-wife duo Kevin Hartz and Julia Hartz, plus the CTO Renaud Visage:

In 2009, Mollyguard rebranded to Eventbrite and concurrently closed a Series C round with Sequoia. Sequoia also participated in subsequent rounds D (led by DAG Ventures) and E (led by Tiger, 2011). In 2012, it opened the first international office, in London. At that point, growth really took off. 

Between 2012 and 2018, when Eventbrite went public, its net revenues grew 10-fold, from $31M to $292M. A lot of that momentum came from M&A:

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