How does someone with a background in philosophy and political science stumble into the wild world of crypto? Jim interviews Sander, one of the earliest employees doing business development at OPEN Ticketing. He takes us on a journey from his first failed crypto startups to the commercial success and ambitions for OPEN Ticketing. This one’s packed with insights on how to balance the tightrope between Web2 and Web3, and strategies to disrupt industry giants.

J: Tell me more about your background.

S: I studied philosophy and political science back in the days. During my studies I stumbled upon crypto. This is almost a decade ago to the day and have worked for crypto companies ever since. I worked at a Scandinavian Bitcoin broker called Safello, which IPO’d. In the meantime I founded a company called Bitstraat. We were producing POS terminals to allow Bitcoin payments in brick-and-mortar shops. And that didn't fly at all. And we knew it, but we still had fun and learned a lot.

J: How did you end up at OPEN?

S: Through Bitstraat, I got to know Kasper Keunen (blockchain developer at OPEN) who was writing a whitepaper for GET Protocol (now OPEN Ticketing), and I joined the team as a result. The vision was to introduce a blockchain based ticketing standard. A protocol for normal events made sense, but we needed to prove the concept to get meaningful clients.

So we built our own ticketing system called GUTS Tickets, which is now a successful ticketing company in the Dutch ticketing space. We're doing all kinds of events such as festivals, concerts, livestream shows, theaters, museums, etc. From small events to stadium size.

We also have a white label product which allows partners to basically utilize the very same products as we have at GUTS, but then under their own branding. Additionally, there’s our Digital Twin product with which we just serviced the Dutch F1 Grand Prix and got all attendees a collectible ticket.

Our end game however, has always been and still is becoming the onchain standard for tickets.

https://x.com/SanderRegtuijt/status/1621620795645501440?s=20

J: What’s your role like?

S: I was one of the first employees and rolled in as a Business Developer. I didn't even know what it was (it’s still a vague role). But what I do on a day-to-day basis is maintaining contact with larger clients or the largest potential leads, learn from clients and strategize product strategy, and initiate meaningful products being built, Web2 and Web3. A lot of our clients aren’t interested in crypto whatsoever, but they do like some features that we offer that are on Web3 reels, but they don’t know about it. This is perfect in my opinion.

And recently, together with one of the founders, I was tasked with getting a raise finalized. We announced our $4.5M raise last Summer.

J: What are the benefits of having a Web2 company under one umbrella with your Web3 protocol?

S: The first possibility is staying alive. It might be the sole reason we’re still here. As a business developer, I've been monitoring the onchain ticketing space and there have been around 200 onchain ticketing partners companies. Now, most of them started as protocol, and that's a hard sell. No ticketing system in its right mind will trust you to do anything onchain with them. We’re processing tens of millions of funds for our clients and most important to them is proven stability, stability and stability.

That’s why we had to prove the use-case ourselves and starting eating our own dog food with GUTS. We’re the only one that have both a top-down as well as bottom-up approach. We’re making money through GUTS Tickets and are actually selling tickets which enables us to learn how ticketing works and build the protocol based on that.

J: How do you, as a startup, disrupt a monopoly like Ticketmaster and Live Nation?

S: The best way is literally trying to convince individual artists. We literally knocked on the doors of artists that were known in the Dutch ticketing space and publicly expressed their dissatisfaction with secondary ticketing. Some of them were very enthusiastic about it and said, okay, here's the phone number from my manager. Let’s figure it out.

That's how we got our first clients, which we are still very grateful for because they have allowed us to learn a lot about ticketing. And if these artists are big enough they have the decision power to say no, we’re going to do it this way. It takes balls to pioneer, but we prove day in day out the current status quo doesn’t need to be. Applying this lingchi - a death by a thousands cuts - strategy, is successful.

J: What music has been in your personal rotation?

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2YrSP4k1Qm7NfOhcWbj9uE?si=45cd6b891d214269

J: What are the benefits for event stakeholders to do things differently?

S: Event organizers are usually strapped for cash to organize events. They can either go to a bank that usually declines the loan, or have to pay an interest of like 20-30%. Or they go to, Ticketmaster or whatever ticketing system, and then in return have to let go of their management, data, and still pay huge interest.

So we came up with a decentralized event financing product, allowing organizers to sell tickets to investors or hedge funds that currently don't have access to this asset class of event tickets. The benefit for stakeholders is that they have liquidity upfront.

J: To your knowledge, what’s the latest in event discovery?

S: Speaking for myself, it's mostly my personal network. In my 20s, if someone was throwing a party, they usually would create a flyer for it and then that flyer is sent everywhere. But I rarely receive flyers these days.

J: These are your IG Stories nowadays.

S: Exactly. There are a lot of platforms being built that want to aggregate everything that's going on culture-wise in specific areas. And a prominent way for them to monetize this is taking a cut from ticket sales through the platform. The hard thing here is that they need to integrate with either the ticket companies or they have to manually add the new events in those specific areas. That doesn’t scale well.

J: Let’s round off with a lightning round of questions. Answer quickly, don't think too much kind of thing.

S: Let’s go.

J: Dream collab to host tickets with?

S: Our enemy, Ticketmaster.

J: Small party or a big party?

S: Small party.

J: Summer holiday or Winter holiday?

S: Summer holiday.

J: Watch a movie or play a video game?

S: Play a video game.

J: Favorite festival?

S: Lowlands.

J: Best concert you've ever seen?

S: That would probably be Radiohead. Somewhere in the 2000s.