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. Budget reallocating 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? 

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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:

Bizarrely for a programmatic acquirer, Eventbrite didn’t have the strongest PMI team.

Case in point: Ticketfly. 

According to an Alphasense expert interview, “Eventbrite at one point realized the long tail is only so big. They tried to get into the mid-market, specifically music. The platform they [had] built for self-service people wasn't really sufficient for music venues, music festivals”. 

Ticketfly was exactly that platform: a niche vendor with a strong position in midsized US music venues. In September 2017, Eventbrite acquired Ticketfly from Pandora, a struggling streaming service, for $201M ($151M upfront and $50M in convertible promissory notes). It looked like hell of a bargain: Pandora had paid $450M just 2 years prior.  

Shockingly, not long after the acquisition (in June 2018) Ticketfly succumbed to a cyber attack, which left “certain consumer data” - i.e. millions of names, email, addresses, and phone numbers - compromised. 

So how did Eventbrite respond?

This is the firm that “takes a one platform strategy to quickly migrate the acquired creators to the Eventbrite platform”. The firm in the midst of an IPO. Eventbrite shut down Ticketfly and migrated customers to Eventbrite Music. In the process, multiple high-value clients fled due to gaps in service e.g.:

• No longer having access to a 24/7 telephone support for ticket purchasers; 

• Faced with $10,000+ bills for email marketing, a service formerly provided for free (this is pre AI though!); and

• Not having access to customizable fee schedules that separated fees and taxes incorporated into a ticket price. 

Wait, how do we know all this? Because Eventbrite’s disgruntled shareholders filed a class-action lawsuit (which eventually yielded a $19M payout). 

The lawsuit accused Eventbrite of concealing the true extent of the Ticketfly debacle in the IPO prospectus. Eventbrite did come forward eventually. A March 2019 earnings call took a huge bite out of the share price, after the management revealed problems with the migration.

It’s telling that, in 2025, Eventbrite generated $290M in sales - almost the same level as in 2018, the year it went public. Back then, it priced at $1.8B ($23/share), with the stock surging 59% on the first day of trading. By December 2025, before Bending Spoons came along and put Eventbrite out of misery, it was trading at $2.50/share. 

Same revenue, 1/10th the valuation. 

But hang on. Given that Eventbrite’s key peers like Live Nation and CTS Eventim are trading at levels substantially above pre-COVID highs, the question is:

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

I posed this very question to Oscar White, the founder of Beyonk - an online event ticketing system (check them out!):   

As Oscar put it,

“Post COVID, the market has become more competitive, increasingly shifting toward lower-priced generic tools on one end and 100s of vertical-specific platforms on the other. For example, Beyonk focuses on visitor attractions such as farms and animal parks, where operators need tools for daily capacity management, timed entry, and operational control rather than one-off event ticketing. Eventbrite remained a broad, general-purpose platform, ill-suited to these requirements.”

Some evidence to back Oscar’s claim. Remember Eventbrite’s enthusiasm for the live music industry? It was rather short-lived. To quote the Alphasense expert once more, “2020 came along and the pandemic hit and they [Eventbrite] completely abandoned the space. They fired the entire music team, so anyone who knew about music venues was let go”. 

After firing 45% of the staff, including most of the Music division, Eventbrite missed out on the post-COVID live entertainment bonanza.   

And then came the Great Organiser Fee Debacle. 

In September 2023, Eventbrite introduced fees for events with 25+ tickets. As Oscar explained, Eventbrite’s hand was forced due to structural cost challenges: “A large proportion of activity on the platform relates to free events, which generate little or no processing revenue but still incur infrastructure, support, and operational costs. This has weighed on margins and limited operating leverage”. 

To be fair, faced with a bombed-out share price and an anaemic cash flow profile, Eventbrite didn’t have much choice:

Still, following major backlash, Eventbrite did a U-turn in September 2024… but the damage had been done. In the 9 months to September 2025, Eventbrite’s net revenue, gross profit, and adjusted EBITDA were down by 12%, 16% and 32%, respectively (source). Driving these declines was the exodus of “paid creators” whose ranks dwindled by a whopping 15% between Q2 2023 and Q3 2025.   

So why is Bending Spoons attracted to a legacy business seemingly on an inexorable decline? And who could be next on its hit-list?

4. We ran an AI powered, 3-stage filter on a bunch of US Tech midcaps. Could these 13 stocks be next in Bending Spoons’ crosshairs? 

We asked 2 Eventbrite competitors what they thought about the transaction. Both seemed nonplussed, viewing the deal primarily as a “yield play”. Indeed, at 1.5x revenue Eventbrite looks like a Constellation-style bargain:

Buying $100M+ revenue software businesses for 1x? This can be done - if you’re Constellation Software

Both competitors expect Eventbrite to “be more of the same horizontal product - but with a higher paid/free user ratio and a much lower cost to deliver”. The deal press release lends credibility to this hypothesis, listing initiatives like: 

• A dedicated messaging feature

• Introducing AI for easier event creation

• Improving searchability

• Creating a system for the secondary ticket market

Suppose we could’ve ended the article here - but since Bending Spoons is very unlikely to stop at Eventbrite, why should we? Instead, with the help of  AI (and common sense) we built a 3-stage stock screening model to identify who could be next. 

For the avoidance of doubt, we’ve absolutely no idea whether any of the companies mentioned below are in discussions with Bending Spoons (or anyone). Zero. Nada. And this is definitely not investment advice!! Please consult an expert before taking any investment decisions.

Finally, we should note that, since negative share price performance is a key criterion, the risks are heavily skewed to the downside.    

Now, with the disclaimer out of the way, behold our “proprietary” stock screening model: the BS Takeover Filter. In Stage 1, we asked the model to rank several hundred US Tech Stocks based on 5 criteria: 

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