Cirque's Acquisition Growth
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A story about how Cirque du Soleil grew into a billion-dollar entertainment company through acquisitions and innovation.
"Cirque du Soleil does $1 billion a year in revenue, which is insane. 5-10% of all Las Vegas tourists go to a Cirque show when they're in town. The idea was to do a circus but with no animals - only human performers doing crazy acrobats with great costumes.
They built that into a real juggernaut and then bought Blue Man Group and VStar Entertainment. They do 10 million in ticket sales a year for Cirque du Soleil, Blue Man adds another 2 million, and VStar adds another 2 million. In total they do 14 million tickets sold per year.
VStar started when some guy was watching Sesame Street in the 1980s and thought Sesame Street should do a live show. He raised $500 from someone, mortgaged his house to get an extra $25,000 in home equity. With that $525,000, he got the license to Sesame Street and started doing live shows. Then they expanded to Muppets shows. Eventually that whole operation got bought by Cirque du Soleil.
VStar also owns the Paw Patrol live shows, which alone did $40 million in ticket sales in a year - and that's just tickets, not including merchandise."
Shaan Puri
Host of MFM
Shaan Puri is the Chairman and Co-Founder of The Milk Road. He previously worked at Twitch as a Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming, and Emerging Markets. He also attended Duke University.