StubHub closing San Francisco office, laying off employees

StubHub announced on LinkedIn last week it will be closing its San Francisco office by the end of the year. The tech company occupies space at 199 Fremont Street in SoMa, according to its corporate website.

CEO Eric Baker wrote a letter to employees that he posted on LinkedIn, saying that the Shanghai office will close as well and that “the majority of our employees in both locations” will be laid off. Baker attributed the decision to the need to “streamline and optimize operations following the merger of StubHub and Viagogo” and claimed that “the business is performing strongly.”

The company will center its corporate operations in New York City and Los Angeles, as well as “focus on in person participation” in its hubs in Utah, Switzerland, Ireland and Taiwan. The ticket marketplace has 161 employees based in the Bay Area, according to LinkedIn, though it’s unclear how many will lose their jobs.

Eric Baker and Jeff Fluhr founded StubHub in San Francisco while they were Stanford Business School students in 2000. Baker left StubHub in 2004 and later founded Viagogo, a company with a similar ticket resale model to StubHub, in Europe. He bought StubHub back and merged the company with Viagogo in February 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic throttled in-person events for months.