Founder Stories: Eric Tobias of Opendate

Long before Eric Tobias was building software for live entertainment, he was working on the very edge of it. As an Indianapolis high schooler in the early 1990s, Tobias was a ball boy during one of the greatest eras of its NBA team, the Indiana Pacers: Reggie Miller, Detlef Schrempf, Mark Jackson and the ‘Dunkin Dutchman’, Rik Smits.  It was a basketball-obsessed teenager’s dream job in a basketball-obsessed state, but it also became what he describes as an early education. In leadership, ego, culture, and what high performance actually looks like up close. 

Years later, he could still trace real lessons back to that period. Such as watching three head coaches with sharply different styles, seeing how those styles changed the mood and performance of the wider organization, and learning, almost subconsciously, what it meant to be part of something bigger than himself. He says that experience gave him the confidence “to take big swings” in his life and work.

Tobias was born in Peoria, Illinois and his father worked for Sears. They lived in Morton, Illinois, for the first few years of his life before Sears transferred his father to Indianapolis, and the family moved around the time he hit school age. It is where he has called home ever since. The young Tobias mowed lawns, delivered papers, worked retail, and by college was already building websites as a side hustle while the commercial internet was still taking shape. At the time, he was interviewing for marketing roles with large companies, many of them on the West Coast, when his father and uncle nudged him toward a different option. 

“My father … was very entrepreneurial and then … my uncle had a very successful business career and we were at Thanksgiving of my senior year and they were kind of ‘why would you not just keep doing what you're doing?’ I didn't think that was even a possibility. And it really kind of… opened my eyes up.”

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Entrepreneurs are made, not born.

Once he accepted what many young kids have to - that professional sports were probably not on the cards for him - he became fascinated by something at the intersection of art and logic. “I wanted to be an athletic shoe designer. I wanted to work for Nike and I wanted to design shoes,” he says. He would sketch designs, think about how they might be marketed, as well as obsess over baseball statistics on the side. “The math plus the creativity… that was how my brain worked,” he says, adding that technology later proved to be “that perfect blend of the two”.

His first real business emerged from this blend.

While still in college, Tobias helped a group of brothers launch a website connected to their automotive battery business. He is pretty blunt about it now, calling it a “terrible idea”. Shipping car batteries was cumbersome, and demand was limited. But the traffic coming to the site told a different story. People were looking for cell phone batteries, digital camera batteries, and camcorder batteries. These products were much more difficult to find in this period of the late 1990s. So the original concept evolved, and after graduation Tobias and the same four brothers launched Batteries.com. They each put in a small amount of money, bought the domain for $25,000, and got moving. It was, as he puts it, the point where he was “off to the races” and has “kind of never looked back.”

Technuity followed, building on the same market knowledge but providing consumer electronics space for the B2B market. The two businesses were acquired by Audiovox in 2007. Tobias then founded iGoDigital, a SaaS business specializing in AI-driven e-commerce personalization, product recommendations, and predictive marketing. It would go on to be acquired by ExactTarget, which was in turn acquired by Salesforce. That sequence matters not only because Tobias has successfully built and exited multiple companies, but because it shaped how he thinks about startup ecosystems more broadly. In his view, exits are not just a scoreboard item for founders. They are how a region compounds. “Those exits produced a bunch of reinvestment,” he says. For Tobias, this is one of the central ingredients in building the next generation of meaningful companies in places like Indiana.

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Building, Exiting, and Giving Back

That belief in the cycle of reinvestment also helps explain why he has remained involved in High Alpha, the Indianapolis VC firm and Venture Studio that was formed by himself and other ExactTarget and Salesforce colleagues. Tobias says he moved into an operating partner role at High Alpha at the start of 2025, staying involved with boards and founders where it is useful, while stepping away from making new investment decisions.

In 2019 the chance to take another ‘big swing’ appeared from left field.

Tobias and two future co-founders bought The Vogue, a historic music venue in Indianapolis. The original motivation was not software. It was civic as much as commercial. The venue mattered to the city, and they wanted to make sure “it continued to be part of the fabric of the community,” he says. But after buying it, they ran into an operational reality familiar to anyone who has ever entered an industry that still runs on muscle memory and a contact book. Tobias says they started asking basic questions: where are the systems, how is this tracked, how is that managed? The answers were not encouraging. “There weren't any systems,” he says. “It was all in people's heads and email.”

The pandemic then froze the events business just months after they bought the venue, which was a blessing in disguise, as it gave the team some time to think. Out of that came Opendate, which Tobias co-founded in 2021 with Scott Kraege, Andrew Davis, Adam Darrah, and Joel Hubartt. “It's an AI platform for live entertainment,” he says, one which helps venues and promoters book artists, promote shows, sell tickets, and settle events. In other words, it takes venues like The Vogue, which have long relied on scattered tools, tribal knowledge, and inbox archaeology, and helps make it operational, and thereby more efficient and scalable. 

The business announced in January this year that they had raised a $14m Series A funding round, led by High Alpha. According to our data from Dealroom, it is by far the largest raise in the state this year and Opendate is the “fastest-growing ticketing platform and alternative to Ticketmaster.”

Tobias is unusually candid and open about the emotional impact of building companies. He says that during his 20s and 30s, he often felt he “had to survive,” with every hour of the day going into the businesses he was building. Later came “a period of a lot of therapy” and self-reflection, which seems to have sharpened his view of what founders get wrong after an acquisition. The attachment that helps someone endure the hard years can become a liability once the deal is done. “You have to emotionally detach from this thing because it's not yours anymore,” he says. 

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The Emotional and Geographic Landscape

His practicality also shapes how he talks about the Midwest.

Tobias is plainly bullish on Indianapolis. His family is there. His network is there. But he is careful not to lapse into the usual regional boosterism. He describes Indianapolis as having a “small town kind of feel, but big city amenities” and says it is “a great place for building things” because of the density of relationships and the quality of life. At the same time, he is skeptical of founders using geography as an excuse. More collaboration across the region would help, he says, but “you have to be careful that doesn't become a crutch” because “great companies can be built anywhere.” 

That may actually be the most useful part of his story.

It is not a fairy tale about a founder who always knew exactly where he was headed. It is a story about someone who kept learning how to spot the system underneath the visible business: the leadership dynamics in pro sports, the market signal hidden in search traffic, the ecosystem value created by exits, and the missing operating layer inside live entertainment. 

And maybe that is why Opendate makes sense coming from Eric Tobias, even if it initially looks like a deviation. For him, technology has seemingly always been about translating our messy human realities into something that can actually work at scale.

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