Business View Magazine | July 2022

98 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 7 T he events industry may have had a rocky few years but some industry players are trying to turn recent disruption into new opportunities. Certainly, that’s the case with Passage, a full- service event platform based in Detroit, Michigan. “Before I started Passage, I ran a payment technology company by the name of Core Merchant, which allowed me to learn a lot about the payments industry,” Alex Linebrink, CEO and co-founder of Passage, explains. “I sold that company in 2014 and got together with my friend Patrick Misch – an incredible software developer. Patrick ended up being my co-founder at Passage.” Linebrink identified the world of ticketing and payments around events as being an interesting industry to explore. While there were already event platforms in the market that were doing an adequate job of managing events using generic feature sets, there wasn’t the same functionality for specialty, niche events. He notes, “I came at the task from a pretty unique angle… I grew up around a lot of haunted houses. My father was born on Halloween, so every year for his birthday we would build a haunted yard instead AT A GLANCE PASSAGE WHAT: A leading provider of event ticketing, payment, and management WHERE: Detroit, Michigan WEBSITE: https://gopassage.com/ age Let the events begin!