Beyond Ticketing: Ritesh Patel on AI, Capital, and the Future of Live Events

Ritesh Patel shares an entrepreneurial journey that started with coding as a child, building software as a teenager, and hacking together DIY livestreams for club nights long before that was mainstream. In this episode, he explains how those early instincts grew into Ticket Fairy, a company that began by applying ad-tech and gamification to event growth and is now expanding into working capital, AI-powered workflows, and banking infrastructure. He also shares why better software alone was not enough to win in a crowded market, how he and his brother make a co-CEO model work across continents, and what founders can learn from focusing on product, customers, and real sources of competitive advantage.Show Notes[00:00] Teaser: Ritesh recounts rigging a DIY livestream for a club event in 2000.[00:53] Show Intro[03:27] Early entrepreneurial wiring: coding at 9, building products at 13, and incorporating a company at 16.[05:02] Bristol, house parties, club nights, and the leap from student events to real audience-building.[09:24] The original Ticket Fairy concept: turning ticket buyers into affiliates using ad-tech logic, attribution, and fan rewards.[11:26] Bootstrapping, repeated VC rejection, landing Justin Kan as an early investor, and then getting into Y Combinator.[13:32] Building software for independent promoters by encoding best practices they could not afford to build themselves.[15:13] Why the co-founder relationship worked better as co-CEOs than as separate conventional titles.[19:35] How the co-CEO model works in practice across a distributed company split between San Francisco and Dubai.[22:45] A deliberate “build year” and the strategic work streams that converged into a new growth phase.[24:45] The real reason competitors won deals: access to working capital, not just product strength.[27:05] Launching a capital product through private credit to compete for larger, more established clients.[27:58] Moving beyond ticketing into AI agents, workflow automation, and banking rails.[31:11] Quick Fire: book recommendation, tool/app, grounding habit, and startup advice.[35:53] Show OutroQuick Fire ResourcesBook: Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts — AmazonTool/App: Claude Code