In 1975 in Arizona, Albert Leffler, a box-office ticket seller, Peter Gadwa, a computer programmer and Gordon Gunn, a businessman, sat down to a dinner of homemade lasagne and sangria to thrash out business ideas to speed up ticket sales.
These were the early days of using computers to allocate seats at theatres rather than trying to sell tickets online — a phenomenon that only took off decades later.
Since then, Ticketmaster has become the biggest seller of concert and sporting tickets in the world. The business has changed hands a number of times, including in a 1993 deal with Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft with Bill Gates, who paid up to $350 million for what was thought to be an 80 per cent