At 29, Dylan Gavin has already built and scaled Ireland’s first web3 trading community to six-figure profits, earned Salesperson of the Year honors at Wayfair, and is currently pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration at Harvard while running a startup that just launched across 27 countries. His latest venture, TicketSoft, represents what could be the most contrarian bet in the live events industry: that discovering events matters more than selling tickets to them.
In January 2026, TicketSoft launched version 2 of its Discovery platform, a global event aggregation service that Gavin describes as “the Skyscanner for live events.” The platform now spans 27 countries, with Ireland serving as the initial go-to-market focus where the company aims to achieve full nationwide coverage of public events. The move signals a strategic departure from how virtually every other challenger has attempted to compete with industry incumbent Ticketmaster.
“While Ticketmaster and others have built moats through exclusivity contracts with venues, most challengers failed because they tried to fight exclusivity head-on without first owning demand,” Gavin explains. “We saw a gap: there is no single source of truth for all the world’s events. In other industries, this already exists. For transport, you open Uber in almost any country and instantly know how to get from A to B. There is no equivalent for live events.”
TicketSoft Founder and CEO Dylan Gavin
The thesis is deceptively simple but strategically sophisticated. Rather than competing for exclusive ticketing contracts—a battle that requires significant capital and established relationships—TicketSoft is building what Gavin calls “demand infrastructure.” The goal is to become the default starting point for anyone asking the question: “What’s happening near me?”
From Personal Pain Point to Platform
The idea for TicketSoft emerged from a problem Gavin experienced firsthand. In 2018, while working full-time on Elision Financial—the blockchain trading and education community he founded after dropping out of Atlantic Technological University—Gavin purchased a ticket for the Forbidden Fruit Festival on the secondary market. The ticket turned out to be a duplicate and failed at the gate.
“That showed how broken ticketing really was,” Gavin recalls. At the time, he was already immersed in blockchain technology through Elision Financial, which he had scaled to six-figure profits in just six months during the first retail crypto cycle. The ticketing fraud incident crystallized a realization that would shape his thinking for years: ticketing was still living in the stone ages compared to what blockchain could enable.
By 2021, with the rise of NFTs, the use case became clearer. “I was never interested in speculative art,” Gavin notes, “but digital signatures for verification made perfect sense for tickets.” COVID-19 slowed initial plans, but the vision never left. In March 2024, after a career path that included high-performing sales roles at Wayfair, Diligent, and SmartBear, plus founding the boutique marketing agency OneAgency, Gavin took the leap. He trademarked TicketSoft, raised initial capital, and began building.
Building the Moat Through Demand
What distinguishes TicketSoft’s approach is the sequencing. While the company is developing blockchain-secured ticketing technology designed to eliminate fraud and give organizers control over resale, the Discovery platform launched first—and is being treated as the primary competitive advantage.
“Discovery is more valuable than checkout,” Gavin asserts. “Once we fully solve this problem for fans and own demand, the natural next step is to onboard our strongest verticals into our in-house blockchain ticketing stack.”
The strategy reflects lessons learned from observing previous attempts to disrupt ticketing. According to Gavin, challengers consistently made the same mistake: they tried to compete on the same terms as incumbents, fighting for exclusive venue relationships that require years to establish and significant capital to maintain. TicketSoft is building a different kind of moat—one constructed from user behavior and data aggregation rather than contractual exclusivity.
The first version of Discovery shipped in late 2025, initially focused on major U.S. cities. The v2 launch in January 2026 represents a significant expansion in both geographic scope and technical capability, with the platform now spanning 27 countries. While the United States leads in volume, Ireland remains the go-to-market priority, where TicketSoft is working toward comprehensive coverage of all public events nationwide.
The company has begun a six-month marketing campaign focused on what Gavin calls “fundamentals: speed, navigation, and scalability.” The emphasis on technical performance rather than flashy features reflects a pragmatic understanding that discovery platforms succeed or fail based on utility, not novelty.
TicketSoft’s Discovery is now live across on 27 countries
Harvard, Blockchain, and the Long Game
Gavin’s decision to enroll at Harvard while running TicketSoft might seem unusual, but it reflects a deliberate approach to capability building. He is pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration with a minor in Computer Science, describing it as building “the toolset needed to take TicketSoft to the next level.”
The combination of formal education and entrepreneurial execution positions Gavin uniquely in the live events technology space. His early work in web3 and blockchain through Elision Financial gave him technical fluency in distributed systems and digital verification before most traditional ticketing executives understood the technology. His sales experience at companies like Wayfair, where he was named Salesperson of the Year, taught him go-to-market execution and customer psychology. His current Harvard coursework provides the strategic frameworks typically reserved for later-stage founders.
TicketSoft’s blockchain ticketing system, which mints tickets as blockchain-secured digital assets, is designed to address the fraud Gavin experienced in 2018 while giving event organizers unprecedented control over their audience and secondary markets. But critically, Gavin positions blockchain as infrastructure, not marketing. “Blockchain should be invisible,” he argues. “We’re building a Web2-style user experience. Fans don’t need to understand crypto for this to work.”
The Road Ahead
With v2 of the Discovery platform now live across 27 countries, TicketSoft faces the challenge that every marketplace business eventually confronts: converting audience into revenue. The company plans to begin integrating select event categories into its blockchain ticketing system, using the Discovery platform’s data to identify which verticals show the strongest product-market fit.
For now, Gavin remains focused on execution rather than hype. “Most ticketing platforms care more about fees than fans,” he observes. “Resale isn’t bad—lack of control is. Organisers should own their audience.” These principles inform both the Discovery platform’s design and the upcoming ticketing system’s architecture. Event promoters have been taking notice, too. Marcus O’Sullivan, an event promoter for Kappa FuturFestival and CircoLoco said “I’m really impressed with TicketSoft. They’re taking all the right steps to successfully break into the market, and they have the team to deliver on what they’re promising.”Over the last 18 months, TicketSoft has grown into a team of 10, including talent from Ticketmaster, MetaMask, and ConsenSys, and has been advised by leading event promoters globally. The company has shipped a proof of concept, launched an MVP, and is now iterating toward product–market fit. and an institutional seed round this summer.
Whether TicketSoft can execute on its ambitious vision—becoming the definitive global events database while simultaneously building next-generation ticketing infrastructure—remains to be seen. But Gavin’s track record of building and scaling ventures, combined with a strategic approach that challenges conventional wisdom in the industry, makes TicketSoft a company worth watching.
For an industry that has long been criticized for putting fees ahead of fan experience and enriching middlemen at the expense of event organizers, TicketSoft’s demand-first approach represents a genuinely different path forward. If Gavin is right that discovery matters more than checkout, the 27-country platform launched this January could become the foundation for something much larger: a fundamental reshaping of how millions of people around the world find and attend live events.
TicketSoft is based in Galway, Ireland, and currently operates across 27 countries. The company’s Discovery platform is available at ticketsoft.com.
