Pat Poels is the Chief Technology Officer at Eventbrite (at the time of this recording, he was the Senior Vice President of Engineering). Eventbrite is a global ticketing and event technology platform, where he leads the world-class, hackathon-loving global engineering team along with the development and strategy of the platform business. He also has one helluva poker face. Previously the Vice President of Software Development at Ticketmaster, Pat was responsible for host system development, where he engineered numerous innovations in the live event ticketing industry.   After a five-year run as a professional poker player (where he accumulated over 1 million dollars in tournament poker prize money), he returned to the wild world of software engineering, which is just as heart-racing for him, but with a much higher reward.