Rival

Staff Product Designer, c.2017-2020

Ticketing is a $200B marketplace where none of the stakeholders are happy. Inventory is fragmented, prices are confusing, the purchase experience is painful, and fans absorb the risk. At the same time, teams and artists are losing out on $15B in the secondary market while 40% of all live event tickets go unsold. And on top of that, venue operators only confidently know 10% of their audience, escalating security concerns and making it impossible to target, personalize, measure, and learn.

Founded by former Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard and backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Rival set out reset the game by building the first new primary ticketing platform in twenty years.

Building an operating system for the world’s most-coveted live events

The basic format of the access credential has not changed since the Roman Colosseum 1700 years ago. So we re-invented what a ticket was – secure access to any place or any thing for any period of time – and rebuilt it from the ground up.

Natively cloud-based and enterprise-grade, Rival’s platform consolidated primary and secondary ticket markets, access, inventory, commerce, and security into a single digital ecosystem connected to fans’ identities – redistributing billions from arbitrageurs, growing GTV through dynamic pricing and open distribution, and introducing teams and artists to 100% of their fans.

All that, and it could handle the hardest technical challenge in e-commerce: 2M fans seeking 20,000 unique pieces of inventory at 10 AM on a Saturday morning.

As staff product designer, I led the design effort on Rival’s enterprise software, design system, and brand.

I joined Rival in 2017 as the second designer and thirteenth employee, when the product was little more than a keynote presentation. Over the next three years, alongside a wonderfully bright and hard-working team, we turned that vision into a reality.

First, we built Alpha and Beta products that supported event creation, seat manifests, inventory management, event sales, and role-based access control. Then – with the Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche, and Los Angeles Rams on board to launch the platform at Pepsi Center and the brand-new SoFi Stadium – we delivered best-in-class solutions for complex functions including distribution management, plan and season sales, order management, payment processing, resale distribution, and interactive seat mapping.

As we prepared to debut in Denver in March 2o2o, the world was flipped on its head. Fast forward, and Rival was acquired and shelved by the very rival we set out to challenge. So it goes.

The Team

Design: Narbeh Dereghishian, Cory Roth, Chris Wang, Hari Ramachandran. Product: Ben Collier, Adam Stone, Caitlin Roberts, Ryan Black. Engineering: Michael Dodsworth, Aaron Craig, Jacob Williams, Chad Wyszynski, Molly Karcher, Sam Bernard, David Begin, Adam Weiner, Matt Palmerlee, Zach Brown, Danny Williams, Zach Holt, Tim Chavez, YingAn Wang, Rich Tetsall, Jonathan Bergknoff, Jacob Jernigan, Mike Sutjipto, Jenny Astrachan. QA: Danielle Song, Alex Pulda, Michael Johnson. Operations: Brad Suter, Andy Schaefer, Tyler Hagle, Levi Hammock, Zach Leff. Leadership: Nathan Hubbard, Duncan McPherson, Ryan Lissack, Ann Bordestsky.