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Robert Davari is the CEO and co-founder of Tixr, a live event commerce marketplace he launched in 2013 with fellow UCLA graduate Patrick Stavro. Their goal? Modernize the ticketing industry (i.e., make it less annoying and painful for everyone involved).
Over the last 13 years, Tixr has grown into a platform that powers 700+ partners across sports, music festivals, venues and nightlife, travel, attractions, comedy, and fandom conventions in 60 countries. They just announced new partnerships with the San Jose Earthquakes and Houston Dynamo FC. Here, Davari shares how it started and how entrepreneurs can find success going up against the big dogs in any industry.
Please introduce yourself and give the elevator pitch of your business.
I’m Robert Davari, founder and CEO of Tixr, a modern ticketing and commerce platform built for large-scale global entertainment brands. We power everything from ticketing to hospitality and fan commerce in a way that’s designed to be intuitive for fans and more profitable for organizers. We help event organizers create better buying journeys and unlock new revenue streams with the control to package, price, and sell their events on their own terms and full ownership over their data. We also give fans more freedom to manage their purchases with self-service transfers, resale, upgrades, and even returns for credit, without adding work for the organizer.
What inspired you to create this business?
I’ve always been passionate about live entertainment as a fan, and I kept seeing the same pain points around ticketing, issues that still exist today. The turning point came when I spoke with people inside the industry and realized no one actually loved the products they were using, which is rare in any successful category.
My co-founder and I both came from technical backgrounds, so we saw those problems as solvable. That’s when we decided to build something people would genuinely want to use, not just something that worked. As industry outsiders, we had the advantage of starting from scratch, creating a modern platform built for today’s behavior, not constrained by legacy systems from a different era.
What is your advice to those who see massive corporations in the space they want to operate in?
You can absolutely compete, but you have to be clear on where the gaps are. In most industries, it comes down to three things: product, service, and speed. If the incumbent’s product is outdated, build something better. If the experience is lacking, out-serve them. And if they move slowly, outpace them.
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