Age: 33
Occupation: CEO, Showpass
Lucas McCarthy isn’t just a tech entrepreneur. He’s also a master at cultivating community. That’s what he does through Showpass, the ticketing and events platform he founded in 2014. Showpass isn’t just where you purchase tickets for big concerts, festivals or global sporting events, but for everything local, too: community curling, dance recitals, swimming pools, even timed entry to berry-picking fields and corn mazes. The platform’s bread and butter is helping clients with all kinds of complex event organization and helping people find things to do in their city, by marketing events based on their preferences and interests.
Since 2014, McCarthy has grown his tech-company-that-could from three employees to 110. Showpass grew four-and-a-half times between 2020 to 2022. That’s no small feat in the best of times, but, in a pandemic, when you’re in the business of helping people gather, it’s monumental.
Showpass helped popularize concepts such as outdoor hotel concerts that met public health requirements. “We would put a concert on [a hotel] deck and you could hang out on your [balcony] and watch the concert safely,” says McCarthy. “And we financed some of these. We did a lot to engage in everything that we could to make an industry that was dead, alive, because we needed it just as much as anyone else.”
Showpass has expanded throughout Canada, the U.S., U.K. and Australia and is on track to have $1 billion in managed annual sales next year. McCarthy’s achievements have been recognized in Deloitte’s 2023 Technology Fast 500 rankings, but his proudest accomplishment is that no layoffs occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. “If you asked some of our investors at the advent of COVID what they were anticipating with this company, it was ‘good luck.’” Looks like McCarthy didn’t need it.
Thank yous
“The team, the family and the friends that support them, so that they can support us.”
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