StubHub IPO: Should You Buy In?

Billy Duberstein, The Motley Fool

Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 9:00 AM 8 min read

After a long pause, it looks as though the market for initial public offerings (IPOs) may be heating up again. Even amid tariff uncertainty clouding the near-term picture, several private companies are now on track to go public.

One interesting prospective IPO is StubHub, which filed an S-1 registration form recently and plans to sell shares soon on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock ticker symbol STUB.

The debut of the world's preeminent secondary ticket offering site offers investors an interesting candidate for their portfolios. The story includes a founder returning to lead a company from which he had previously been fired (Steve Jobs, anyone?), 30% growth in each of the past two years, and a new growth opportunity that management is only beginning to cultivate. But is the price right?

StubHub was co-founded by Stanford MBA student Eric Baker in 2000 with a vision of becoming the premier online secondary marketplace for tickets to live events, including sporting events, concerts, and theater productions. Prior to online marketplaces like StubHub, secondary market ticket-seekers had to go through ticket scalpers near the venue or look up a professional ticket broker. Those options, obviously, were plagued by fraud, usurious markups, and an overall lack of transparency that online marketplaces bring.

StubHub found some success and built itself into a well-recognized brand, but Baker soon clashed with his co-founder over business strategy. With his co-founder owning a little more stock than he did and the board siding with his co-founder, around 2004, Baker was actually fired from the company he founded.

After getting fired, Baker went to Europe and founded a competitor, called viagogo, in 2006, which is essentially an international version of StubHub, as StubHub hadn't really managed to penetrate Europe yet. Eventually, StubHub sold itself to eBay in January 2007 for $310 million. While Baker was still a shareholder and did pocket lots of money from the buyout, he also thought StubHub had sold out too soon.

Baker was soon proven right -- or at least, he proved himself right. In 2019, Baker's viagogo agreed to buy StubHub back from eBay for a whopping $4.05 billion. Today, StubHub hopes to hit the public markets at a significantly higher valuation than that, as I'll discuss soon.

While the acquisition technically closed in February 2020, the deal then had to go through the U.K.'s regulatory review, which took 18 months. Of course, this coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, when both businesses were under extreme pressure. During that time, StubHub had to lay off a majority of its staff and abruptly changed its cancellation policy, offering customers 120% credits instead of cash refunds to hang onto whatever cash it had collected.