New owner guts Eventbrite staff

Ticketing platform Eventbrite has cut “a large portion” of its employees after a new owner known for picking up also-ran internet companies took over the struggling company.

Reuters reports that the platform’s new owner — Italian tech conglomerate Bending Spoons S.p.A. — has made significant cuts in staff as part of their effort to “reshape” Eventbrite. Bending Spoons is “combining staff cuts with a push to improve reliability, creator tools, event discovery, ticketing and checkout.”

Bending Spoons is notable for their acquisition of declining apps and platforms. Among their portfolio acquisitions are AOL and Web 2.0 brands Evernote, Meetup and Vimeo.

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Following a new acquisition, the company often cuts staff and reduces services while leveraging the existing userbase to squeeze more operational profit out of the target company. People in the music industry will be familiar with the process from Bending Spoons’ 2024 “reshape” of file transfer site WeTransfer. After being bought out by Bending Spoons, new ownership fired 75% of staff and slashed services offered to non-subscribers, offering to restore them in exchange for a fee. (5 Mag among many others discouraged use of WeTransfer after the window before file deletion was slashed from one week to just a couple of days.)

Eventbrite has been widely used for their free event listings to draw traffic and eyeballs to local events. The ticketing platform was founded in 2006 and went public in a $200 million stock offering twelve years later. After trading as high as $39 per share, Eventbrite’s stock was available for about $2.30 prior to Bending Spoons’ buyout announcement.

Management at Bending Spoons told Reuters that the company was “accelerating product development” at Eventbrite along with the cuts, claiming several updates including redesigned creator profile pages were already implemented.