EventRegist’s founder didn’t let a successful career stop him from starting up

Think you’re past your entrepreneurial prime? Think again. Not all successful startups are born in dorm rooms and founded by 20-somethings. Kosuke Hirayama, the CEO of event marketing service EventRegist, is proof that playing the long game can be just as effective.

Hirayama, 41, put in more than a decade of work at some of the biggest tech companies in the world before founding his own company. After attending high school in the US and receiving a bachelor’s degree from California State University, he headed back to Japan and joined Yahoo as a producer in 2000 – back when the number one domestic search engine had just 300 employees. He would later move to Microsoft, then Google, before joining a subsidiary of Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS) as a television producer – with a focus on bridging the gap between TV and the internet.

In 2011, Hirayama broke away from the corporate life to create EventRegist. Each of the company’s four co-founders are former colleagues from his days at Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google.

“We’re all thankful to those companies,” Hirayama tells Tech in Asia. “We gained a lot of experience and learned a lot by working for the big guys. Most of us are in our late 30s now, so we’re not necessarily like the young guys starting something in their dorm rooms. We might be a little bit late as far as ‘startup age,’ but we can move fast thanks to our experience at those big companies.”

He adds: “Especially when it comes to going B2B, startups need experience. We have a shortcut because we know exactly how the business side works.”

Live experience

EventRegist is a one-stop-shop for creating events, selling tickets, and managing attendees. The online service (with companion apps for iOS, Android, and Windows phones) also allows event planners to choose a custom URL for their event page, add widgets to their personal or business site, view real-time event data (i.e. how many people are at the event right now compared to total tickets sold), and more. Hirayama was inspired to enter the events space for two reasons: dissatisfaction with traditional “offline” B2B event planning services and the importance of what he calls “live experience.”

Today, we are living in a digital era – everything is digital. At the same time, we believe that the importance of live events will increase. Every kind of content – TV, music, pictures, videos, and so on – can be digitized and copied. The live experience, actually meeting up with people, cannot be copied.

EventRegist has helped organize some of the biggest tech-related events in Japan: the New Economy Summit (spearheaded by Rakuten’s Hiroshi Mikitani and attended by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe), Tokyo Game Show, SoftBank World, Ceatec Japan, and TechCrunch Tokyo, just to name a few. The startup’s work extends beyond Japan – and beyond tech. Last year, the company organized a sumo wrestling tournament in Jakarta, as well as the recent Nikkei Asian Review Forum in Singapore.

You don’t need to be a bigwig to benefit from the service, either. EventRegist doesn’t charge a handling fee for free events. If you put a price on your tickets, the company takes an eight percent cut. San Francisco-based Eventbrite, an international heavyweight in the event planning space that has raised nearly US$200 million in 10 funding rounds since 2006, charges 2.5 percent plus $0.99 per ticket – in addition to a 3 percent processing fee if you opt to pay with plastic. Domestic rival Peatix charges 2.9 percent plus 70 yen (US$0.67) per transaction.

Hirayama explains that EventRegist’s flat-rate system, without any hidden fees, isn’t necessarily more expensive than rival services with lower percentages and per-ticket costs. For example, if a small event costs 1000 yen, in the case of Peatix, that’s 1000 yen x 2.9 percent plus 70 yen – or 99 yen per ticket. Using EventRegist, 1000 yen x 8 percent comes to only 80 yen per ticket.

For large-scale events that may cost more, Hirayama says that organizers are willing to splurge on great customer service.

“Our goal is to solve event organizers’ issues. In other words, adding value is important, not just selling tickets. The percentage of a ticketing fee is not such a big deal among all of the other issues event organizers face. Customers are willing to pay more if the system solves more their concerns better – things like providing a faster registration system, getting more sponsors,

Capitalizing on change

High expectations