Vivid Seats Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Vivid Seats fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings conference call. Following management's prepared remarks, we will open the call for today. I would now like to turn the call over to Kate Coppolis. You may begin.

Good morning and welcome to Vivid Seats fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings conference call. I'm Kate Copples, Head of Investor Relations at Vivid Seats. Joining me today to discuss Vivid Seats results are Stan Chia, Chief Executive Officer, and Larry Fay, Chief Financial Officer. By now, everyone should have access to the company's fourth quarter and full year earnings press release filed earlier this morning. We have also provided supplemental earnings slides. The press release and earnings slides are available on the Investor Relations page of Vivid Seats website at investors.vividseeds.com. During the course of this call, management may make forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws. These forward-looking statements are subject to the risks and uncertainties as described in the company's earnings press release and other filings with the SEC. On today's call, we will refer to adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP financial measure that we believe provides useful information for our investors. you will find a historical reconciliation of adjusted EBITDA to the corresponding gap measure in the earnings press release and other filings with the SEC. And now, I'd like to turn the call over to Stan.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. It was both a record-setting milestone year and a comeback year for Vivid Seeds with the rapid return of live events that began during the second quarter. Our performance continues to build on our positive momentum and reflects the clear desire of fans to return to their favorite events. Early in 2022, we reached our 100 millionth ticket milestone. It is an accomplishment that reflects our profitable growth at scale and is another example of the incredible momentum we are seeing as a brand and as a business. We believe our marketplace delivers a seamless and trusted experience for fans to safely buy tickets so they can attend more of their favorite events. I'm proud that we have played a part in creating over 100 million customer memories. Larry will take you through the fourth quarter results and 2021 full year numbers in more detail. But first, I want to comment on some highlights. For full year 2021, despite limited volume in the first quarter, we delivered our highest annual Marketplace GOV ever of $2.4 billion, exceeding 2019's Marketplace GOV of $2.3 billion. We delivered $443 million of revenues and $110 million of adjusted EBITDA. Following record-setting third quarter performance, we are pleased to have delivered another record-setting quarter for Marketplace GOV and revenue in the fourth quarter, despite the impact of Omicron. Throughout 2021, we not only rebuilt the business to its prior scale, but also pursued and executed on a number of strategic objectives that will enhance our long-term opportunities. First, with the return of live events happening more quickly than originally anticipated, we pulled forward our brand launch into the fourth quarter of 2021. Since the launch of our rebrand, we have seen a meaningful increase in awareness in the geographies we targeted with our brand efforts. We view brand awareness as an important pillar with meaningful long-term benefits, and our guidance reflects incremental brand investments for 2022. In parallel with these brand investments, we will continue to be aggressive with additional performance marketing spend that will grow in line with Marketplace GOV. As we see competitive marketing and pricing pressures continue to build, we remain armed with a strong balance sheet that we are poised to utilize aggressively to compete. We believe Vivid Seats comes from a place of strength, given that we are already scaled and highly profitable, even on the first transaction. We also saw strong adoption on the seller side with over 100 new sellers added to Skybox since mid-2021. Skybox, our proprietary ERP that we offer to sellers free of charge, was already one of the most widely adopted in the industry, and we continually upgrade this platform to support evolving seller needs. Next, in December, we completed the acquisition of Betcha Sports, a real money daily fantasy sports app with social and gamification features that allow fans to utilize their skills and engage with their favorite live sports. The acquisition of Betcha will allow Vivid Seats to extend our marketplace technology into the online gaming sector, accelerating our journey into naturally adjacent areas. Betcha has an intuitive and simple-to-use interface that allows both casual and superfans multiple ways to play and win together. We believe this acquisition can significantly increase our TAM and, more importantly, create a monetizable engagement platform that allows a unique ability to bidirectionally drive efficient customer acquisition. User engagement within our product ecosystem remains central to our long-term strategy, and Betcha users are highly engaged, placing on average more than 10 entries per month. While Betcha is still a small business, we are excited to continue building and integrating our products and brand to leverage engagement across all our categories. We've been incredibly impressed with Betcha's team and look forward to leveraging our collective expertise and passion for live events. Additionally, we continue to forge partnerships that will help us deliver exceptional experiences to our customers. We renewed our multi-year deal with ESPN as their official ticketing partner And as part of this partnership, deployed an extensive media campaign across ESPN platforms to introduce our new brand and drive awareness to the more than 150 million fans ESPN reaches each month. Expanding partnerships with category leaders like ESPN bolsters our efforts to solidify Vivid Seats as the marketplace of choice. Finally, we have continued to invest in our customer service. In the fourth quarter, we officially opened a new customer experience facility in Coppell, Texas. Vivid Seats has a track record of providing excellent customer service and for the last three years has been recognized by Newsweek as one of America's best companies for customer service. We remain committed to continually raising the bar and increasing customer satisfaction. Our success this year is a testament to the strength and dedication of our team. In January, we were proud to once again be recognized by Built In as one of the best places to work in Chicago. I am also proud that we have continued to support and raise awareness of important causes. To celebrate our 100 millionth ticket milestone, we donated $100,000 to Music Cares, the leading music charity in the United States, to help strengthen Music Cares relief efforts, supporting those in the music community and their families. Additionally, in light of the current humanitarian crisis, we are joining all those calling for peace in the Ukraine and lending our support during this horrific time. Through our charitable organization, Vivid Cheers, we will be donating $100,000 to help those most in need. With that, I will turn it over to Larry.