Everfest

Everfest
Founded 2014
Founders Jay Manickam, Paul Cross & Brad Dixon
Headquarters Austin, Texas, USA
Website www.everfest.com

Everfest is an Austin-based company that connects the festival community online. Festival-goers can find worldwide festivals, connect with friends, build a calendar and share content about festival experiences. Festival organizers work with Everfest to manage their online presence and market their event to attendees, including a perk system that allows organizers to provide discounts or free items to festival-goers.[1]

Everfest includes festivals of all types, grouping them across 12 categories: art, book, civic, cultural, faith, food, film, historical, music, performance, seasonal and unique. The platform uses an algorithm to recommend festivals to festival-goers based on their likes and locations, as well as festivals they prefer or have attended previously.

History

Everfest was founded in the summer of 2014 by Jay Manickam (co-founder of uShip), Paul Cross (founder of Ticketbud) and Brad Dixon.[1]

In February 2015, Everfest was named one of 50 Startups to Watch by Built In Austin.[2]

In April 2015, Everfest closed an angel round of funding totalling $1.5M, which included notable individual investor Bob Kagle (founder of Benchmark Capital) and a group from ATX Seed Ventures.[1][3][4] Everfest appeared on Product Hunt on April 5, posted by Ryan Hoover (founder of Product Hunt), and finished the day as the second-most upvoted product.[5]

Everfest was named to the Austin Chamber of Commerce's Austin A-List of Hottest Startups on May 14, 2015, one of 12 winners from a pool of 275 nominees. They were one of four winners from 160 in the Emerging category.[6][7]

In February 2016, Everfest was named one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies of 2016.[8]

In September 2016, Everfest acquired competitor Fest300, with Chip Conley (Burning Man, Airbnb, Joie de Vivre Hotels) joining as Chief Strategy Officer in a part-time capacity.[9]

Company culture and philanthropy

Everfest competed in the 2015 Austin Startup Games as part of the ATX Seed Ventures team, earning a $1,000 donation to The Bunker, Austin.[10] The company values experiences of material goods and a cognitive shift towards mindfulness to the self and to one's peers.

Trending toward experience

At least since Emerson's "Experience" (pub. in Essays, Second Series'', 1844), the immediacy of experience in American culture, at least, has been valued over more abstract and mediated ways of engaging with the world and with others. The Internet, including social media networks, is but the latest set of technologies that critics such as Sherry Turkle, 7 T. Gilovich and A. Kumar,[11] Nicholas G. Carr (in The Shallows 2011) and others see as degrading interpersonal relations, as well as warping our perceptions of the world. The desire for unmediated experience perhaps explains at least some of the recent strong growth in music festival attendance, to name but one sort of popular festival.[12]

Echoing Emerson, the anthropologist David Graeber in "On playing by the rules," sees the Occupy Movement and other recent protests (sometimes quite large) as indexing a youth-driven "generational" dissatisfaction with the status quo and its representations.[13] The significance of the gatherings was experienced as much by its participants as by its intended audience, something that would have been lost if mediated by the Internet or any other medium. If the Occupy Movement evidences a political and social frustration that can only be answered by in-person presence, the rise in festival attendance in the US and elsewhere as evidence of a desire for the kind of immediacy that the Internet, however efficient it is at enabling connections, cannot provide.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Constine, Josh. "Do Something Epic with Everfest's Festival Finder". TechCrunch. Retrieved 4 April 2015.
  2. ↑ McLean, Tessa. "50 Austin startups to watch in 2015". Built In Austin. Retrieved 3 April 2015.
  3. ↑ McLean, Tessa. "Everfest comes out of stealth mode, raises $1.5M and plans to hire in-house costume designer". Built In Austin. Retrieved 13 April 2015.
  4. ↑ Meadow, Matthew. "New App Lets You Discover Any Festival, Anywhere". Your EDM. Retrieved 4 April 2015.
  5. ↑ Hoover, Ryan. "Everfest on Product Hunt". Product Hunt. Retrieved 5 April 2015.
  6. ↑ Hawkins, Lori (14 May 2015). "12 more startups in Austin join chamber's A-List". Austin American-Statesman. Retrieved 18 May 2015.
  7. ↑ "Austin's 12 'most promising' startups revealed". TechFlash. Austin Business Journal. Retrieved 18 May 2015.
  8. ↑ "Everfest Ranked Among Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies of 2016". Everfest. Retrieved 2016-02-23.
  9. ↑ Calnan, Chris (2016-09-20). "Austin online festival hub buys San Francisco-based competitor". Austin Business Journal. Retrieved 2016-09-20.
  10. ↑ Lorek, Laura. "SpareFoot Wins Austin Startup Games Again". Silicon Hills News. Retrieved 13 April 2015.
  11. ↑ Gilovich, Thomas; Kumar, Amit (2015). Zanna, M. P.; Olson, J. M., eds. "We'll always have Paris: The Hedonic Payoff from Experiential and Material Investments". Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. Elsevier B.V. 51: 147–187. doi:10.1016/bs.aesp.2014.10.002. Retrieved 22 May 2015.
  12. ↑ Sisario, Ben (28 April 2015). "Live Nation Takes Control of Bonnaroo Festival". The New York Times. Retrieved 22 May 2015.
  13. ↑ Graeber, David. "On Playing By The Rules – The Strange Success Of #OccupyWallStreet". naked capitalism. Aurora Advisors Incorporated. Retrieved 22 May 2015.

External links

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