Vivid Seats Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Vivid Seats second quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Following management's prepared remarks, we will open the call for Q&A. I would now like to turn the call over to Kate Africk.

Good morning and welcome to Vivid Seats second quarter 2024 earnings conference call. I'm Kate Africk, head of investor relations at Vivid Seats. Joining me today to discuss VividSeats results are Stan Chia, Chief Executive Officer, and Larry Fay, Chief Financial Officer. By now, everyone should have access to our second quarter earnings press release, which we released earlier this morning. The press release, as well as supplemental earnings slides, are available on the Investor Relations page of VividSeats' website at investors.vividseats.com. During the course of today's call, management may make forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially, including the risks and uncertainties described in our earnings press release, our most recent annual report on Form 10-K, and our other filings with the SEC. On today's call, we will refer to adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin. which are non-GAAP financial measures that provide useful information for our investors. To the extent reasonably available, a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to their corresponding GAAP measures can be found in our earnings press release and supplemental earnings slides. And now, I would like to turn the call over to Stan.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We are halfway through 2024, and pleased to deliver another strong quarter with great revenue and adjusted EBITDA growth. In the second quarter, we executed with discipline, delivering great results while opportunistically leveraging our unique assets and capabilities. These results are evidence of our differentiated offering, dynamic model, and our strong market position. We made progress this quarter across a number of key priorities But to begin, I'd like to touch on our financial highlights. In the second quarter, I'm proud to share that we delivered 198 million of revenues and 44 million of adjusted EBITDA, representing 20% year-over-year revenue growth and 42% year-over-year adjusted EBITDA growth. Larry will speak in more detail, but these results demonstrate our ability to drive strong growth, capture repeat orders, and generate strong unit profitability. After remarkable growth years in 2022 and 2023, live events remain a priority amongst consumer spending as we continue to see a preference towards experiences while growth has moderated towards more historical norms. On the supply side, the industry has displayed a great breadth of events in 2024 with women's sports and soccer tournaments making a significant mark while we lap an outlier year in 2023 that had an unusually high number of the most popular artists touring in the largest venues. We expect year-over-year growth to accelerate in the fourth quarter once the industry has fully lapped 2023's summer concert slate and once stadium shows go on sale for 2025. We continue to execute against our strategy and drive differentiation through our investments, which have been a source of our strength and our bearing fruit. Skybox Drive is in the last stage of its beta phase, and we are excited to prepare for its formal launch in the coming months. This is another example of how we continue to innovate and build on our best-in-class products. Skybox is the ERP of choice for the majority of professional sellers, and Skybox Drive takes that powerful tool further by addressing another key seller need, technology-driven pricing. We look forward to onboarding sellers from our existing large install base of sellers using Skybox. On the buyer side, we have focused on encouraging repeat behavior, which is a fundamental aspect of our broader strategy. With our industry-leading loyalty program and engagement initiatives, we continue to shift toward a higher mix of accretive repeat orders. These strategic efforts have proven successful, and midway into 2024, we are trending higher than the mix of repeat orders achieved in 2023. Our priority remains building for the long term, and we have seen our loyal base of customers continue to reward us, pun intended, with stickier volume that yields greater profitability. Our investments in building our international platform and our acquisition of Vegas.com are also progressing nicely. We remain on track to launch internationally by the end of the year. For Vegas.com, we are continuing to drive incremental orders through synergized inventory on Vegas.com from Vivid Seeds. Additionally, our cross-sale campaigns are now fully underway. This has resulted in tens of thousands of customers being reached each month, combined with impressive email open rates of almost 50% and very accretive customer acquisition onto VividSeeds in fans' home markets. We have also continued to invest in other channels and engagement vehicles as we continue to efficiently attract and retain buyers. Game Center is a key mechanism that we employ to attract both existing and new customers to our app. As gamification continues to positively impact consumer behavior, we've seen users almost always browse or purchase tickets when playing. With over 340,000 customers now playing and almost no marketing dollars spent, Game Center is proving to be an extremely efficient channel to drive app downloads, app engagement, and ultimately accretive app orders. Even as we diversify our marketing channels and drive efficiencies and repeat orders, traditional performance channels remain an important part of new customer acquisition. On that note, we are excited to announce that our board recently appointed Adam Stewart as a director to be effective upon board composition changes expected to occur in November in connection with our transition from being a controlled company under NASDAQ rules. Adam will join our board with extensive media and entertainment experience at leading brands, including almost two decades at Google. Currently, he serves as Vice President of Consumer, Government, and Entertainment at Google, where he oversees advertising partnerships and integrated solutions across YouTube, Google.com, and mobile. As an expert in performance marketing, a seasoned technology leader, and an experienced board member, we look forward to benefiting from Adam's insight and guidance as we continue our focus on building shareholder value and executing our long-term growth strategy. Upon the effectiveness of Adam's appointment, we will have a majority independent board. Next, I'm pleased to share that our balance sheet now allows additional strategic flexibility following our opportunistic June refinancing. We upsized our existing term loan by 125 million while simultaneously lowering our interest rate on the entire loan. We are excited to have this incremental cash available to deploy with the financial discipline that we've always shown towards our existing pillars for capital deployment, share repurchases, and strategic M&A. We continue to evaluate opportunities for both with a keen focus on increasing shareholder value. In summary, it was a solid quarter where we drove very strong revenue and even stronger adjusted EBITDA growth and furthered our strategic objectives. In an industry benefiting from long-term secular growth, we continue to expect our differentiated offering and dynamic model will deliver a double-digit growth CAGR. With that, I will turn it over to Larry for a more detailed review of the quarter.