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Joker Broker Laughstub Takes Twiistup 7 'Wild Card' Demo
LaughStub.com's Scot Richardson and Nasi Peretz, the winners of Twiistup's Wild Card Demo Night. (Lisa Borodkin/LAist)
A comedy club ticketing business, Laughstub.com, will be laughing all the way to the Skirball Center on Thursday, as winner of the "Wild card" competition for a Showoff spot at Twiistup 7.
Twiistup 7 kicked off at UCLA's Anderson School of Business Wednesday night with a keynote speech from Samasource founder Leila Janah and a rapid-fire, round of presentations from 8 hopeful startups vying for a spot among the Twiistup 7 Showoffs.
UCLA's Anderson School co-sponsored Twiistup's Wednesday night event. The Wild Card presentation provided a mini-business school lesson for the entrants and the mixed crowd of Twiistup attendees and Anderson MBA candidates. After each pitch, moderator Mark Suster provided constructive feedback on each entrepreneur's presentation, earning him the nickname of Twiistup's "Simon Cowell" for his cruel-to-be-kind approach. Further in the "Idol" vein, the Wild Card winner was determined by audience text-message vote.
Laughstub.com prevailed over online personal trainer FitOrbit to take the Wild Card spot as a Twiistup 7 Showoff. Both the comedy club ticketing business and the personal trainer service reflect Twiistup's identity as LA's tech startup showcase, taking homegrown local industries to the next level with technology.Laughstub is the brainchild of Scot Richardson, a 8-year veteran comedy club producer, created over the past 8 months with Chief Technology Officer Nasi Peretz. Laughstub plans to be a LiveNation or Ticketmaster for comedy clubs, providing web ticketing services to the 60,000 people per night who see live comedy. Along with ticketing, Laughstub also provides web design, sharing, discovery, email list and calendar services.
Narrowly missing the cut was Nick Desai's 15-month old startup FitOrbit, which matches users with personal trainers through a web interface.
Sponsored message
Other Wild Card entrants were social stream analytic Citizennet, event photo aggregator site WeFridge (email your Twiistup 7 photos to "twiistup@wefridge.com" for a demo), social auction site Bidsie, location-based Twitter client Social Guides, document markup and management application Ignite and distributed FTP software product Transfolia.
Laughstub joins the other 10 Showoff startup companies as Twiistup 7 continues Thursday at 9:00 a.m. at the Skirball Center. Twiistup's daytime speaker discussions and presentations will be followed by Twiistup's signature Hollywood premier-style party, this time with a "Casino Royale" theme. Tickets available at the door or through Eventbrite.
Photo of Twiistup Producer Francisco "The Man" Dao by Lisa Borodkin/LAist
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