Don Vaccaro’s personal interests have shaped TicketNetwork’s 50-acre South Windsor campus, visible from Interstate 84.
An animal sanctuary — home to llamas, goats, chickens and geese — was established in 2013 as part of Vaccaro’s passion for agriculture and animals. A dedicated staff provides daily care year-round, and employees often stop by to relax.
The campus, located at 75 Gerber Road East, also features walking trails, a vegetable garden that supplies produce to the company cafeteria, and an orchard with peach, apple and cherry trees.
Inside, the amenities feel more Silicon Valley than suburban Connecticut: there’s a gym, game room, laundry facility and free cafeteria serving breakfast and lunch. The 200,000-square-foot building, which the company purchased in 2011 for $6.5 million and partially occupies, is powered largely by a 1.4-megawatt rooftop solar array, installed in 2019.
It’s a long way from where Vaccaro started. He began as a ticket broker in the 1990s, entering a fragmented, largely offline secondary market. In 2002, he co-founded TicketNetwork, creating a software-driven exchange that connected independent ticket sellers — a forerunner to today’s secondary ticket market.
The company operates a marketplace covering concerts, theater and sporting events — from Yankees games to the World Cup.
“When we started this company, the basic bet was pretty simple,” Vaccaro said. “Ticketing was going to move online in a much bigger way, and the businesses that understood both the real street-level market and the technology side were going to have an edge.”
TicketNetwork has weathered the rise of mobile ticketing, the pandemic and a wave of regulatory scrutiny, staying planted in South Windsor even when other states offered incentives to relocate.
“We’re not the same company we were in 2002, obviously,” Vaccaro said. “But we built something durable that works for both buyers and sellers.”
