WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]

ericwaller's comments

ericwaller | 3 years ago | on: Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok

I'm guessing you mean music venues? The short answer is yes, eventually.

The slightly longer answer is that we'll probably be the strongest option for smaller venues that want to do more complex stuff. To the extent that there's always some tradeoff between simplicity and power, we're likely to continue to lean pretty heavily on the power side for our core ticketing system.

ericwaller | 3 years ago | on: Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok

Very cool (well, not the getting screwed part). Most of my experience so far is on the sports side, with music exposure being more indirect.

It's amazing how many ticketing systems of various forms have been built over the years. It seems like one of those things that should be simple, but there are just so many ways to slice it.

ericwaller | 3 years ago | on: Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok

Almost as a rule, in the US at least, large multi-purpose venues sign exclusive contracts with their ticketing provider. That means that all events, including any concerts that come through the building, are ticketed by the venue's chosen ticketing provider.

While we're probably better known as a consumer app for buying tickets, SeatGeek also builds the full set of software you need to run a major venue. Everything from issuing and managing season tickets for the resident pro sports team, to working with promoters in selling tickets to their national tours and hosting the big, high-demand concert on-sales that accompany them.

A big component of our path into the market is that it's often the resident pro sports team that operates the venue and makes the ticketing decision. They tend to be very focused on the fan experience, particularly for season ticket holders, and that's our strong suit.

ericwaller | 5 years ago | on: Edge Computing

This is a great insight for full applications.

But latency (mostly) aside, there seem to be a lot interesting use cases for what is more or less programmable CDN configuration. Particularly when you have a relatively straightforward application (architecturally at least), but want to tap into the very distributed, very scalable CDN layer for little bits of critical functionality.

ericwaller | 5 years ago | on: Why can't I sign in with Facebook anymore?

I'm one of SeatGeek's cofounders, good question.

It was indeed Apple's "Sign In with Apple" deadline that prompted us to make the change (for those who don't know, apps that offer sign in via a third party auth mechanism will also need to offer sign in with Apple), but it's something we've considered on and off for many years.

Two big reasons. The first is that when we work with pro sports teams, fans of that team are able to sign in to their team accounts using SeatGeek. Having Facebook, and potentially Apple, also in the mix there felt like it would lead to a lot of confusion. The second is that while we've seen that sign in with Facebook leads to more sign ups in the first place, we've also seen that it causes confusion for users who are later unsure how they initially signed in, and that confusion can hit just as they're trying to pull up their tickets outside of an event.

ericwaller | 11 years ago | on: Show HN: Fast autocomplete service written in Go and JavaScript

Heh, I always feel a bit bad when people mention this since we're not using it ourselves anymore. Though it's a nice and easy way to get going quickly if you're already running redis (and especially if you've got a rails app).

We're using elasticsearch now which is definitely a bit more of an operational headache.

ericwaller | 11 years ago | on: Official Go support

Go's JSON parser ignores fields that aren't present in the destination type, so the addition of new parameters shouldn't be a problem.

ericwaller | 14 years ago | on: Interview Heuristics

For some context, I work at SeatGeek, Jack's startup, and participate in the later stages of the hiring process referred to in the post.

I think something that a lot of the recruiting/hiring discussions on HN miss is that the hiring process is not only about finding people who are capable of doing the job. It's also about finding people who will thoroughly enjoy doing the job and get along well with the rest of the team.

For example, I spoke to a candidate (in other words he made it through this set of heuristics) whose background was in security and whose primary platform was windows. He was definitely very bright and very well accomplished, but by the end of the interview, I genuinely thought he would have been bored out of his mind at SeatGeek.

Similarly, if you don't use at least one of OSX, git, ruby or python, there's a decent chance SeatGeek just isn't for you. An important caveat, that should probably be in the post, is that if your answer to any of the specific-tech related questions is "no, but I saw that you use X at SeatGeek, and I'm interested in learning more about it", that's probably equivalent to a "yes".

ericwaller | 14 years ago | on: Right versus pragmatic

I actually like the side discussion about restroom design a lot. The difficult part about these types of problems is that the guy who's picking up the paper towels doesn't have the authority to move the trash can.

ericwaller | 14 years ago | on: How I got into MIT when I was 14

I think what vaksel means to say is that Thiel's 20 under 20 project will prove nothing about the value of a college education because his sample consists of 20 of the most brilliant kids around. It would be like trying to demonstrate the worthlessness of a programming course by taking 20 brilliant programmers and having them skip it before starting inevitably successful careers.
page 1
more