XLIVE is proud to present its second annual list of Emerging Leaders. Our group of 2022 winners includes young event professionals — across both B2B and Fan Experience — whose innovation, creativity, and drive are pushing the industry forward. We will be featuring all of the winners on XLIVE over the coming weeks, so be sure to check back!
Benji Friedl was first introduced to the events industry through various jobs he held following his graduation from college, which included his first music festival experience at Bonnaroo. Friedl staffed the information tent, which quickly became overrun with festivalgoers’ lost iPhones and other belongings.
“It was insane that we were still dealing with paper and a spreadsheet,” notes Friedl. “There were hundreds of thousands of dollars in people's stuff sitting on tables, and I thought there's got to be a better way to do this.”
Friedl ended up founding Liff Happens with his brother Warren in 2018 to address lost and found issues at festivals and events. They began building the tool and trialed it at Firefly and Lost Lands to see what features were needed and would be most beneficial to both fans and organizers. Since then, they have continued to attend festivals and iterate their software to improve it further and make it more robust.
“The breadth of loss has been a very challenging problem, particularly in the event space, because you have such extreme conditions,” Friedl explains. “For example, we're building a software tool in a place that might not have internet. That's always fun. And as we continue to tackle new problems, we're getting presented with larger challenges.”
One of these challenges is fans’ increasing willingness to lose their phones thanks to Liff Happens’ phone registration feature, which gives them a sense of security, and they become less careful. He adds that theft is also a big problem, and he is working to find ways to leverage Liff Happens to measure instances of theft and possibly also provide education to fans to reduce the risk of having their belongings stolen at events.
Liff Happens has returned about 65 percent of lost items across all of the festivals they’ve worked this year, and that number is closer to the 70 to 90 percent range for high value items such as phones, wallets, and keys.
The company holds all lost and found items for up to a year, until the next event cycle, and then will dispose of them accordingly. Items such as sunglasses, for example, are donated, and phones are wiped and then sold by an electronics partner. Any value that’s recovered from these processes is also donated — Friedl is adamant that the company doesn’t profit from any lost items, otherwise the incentive to return them would be gone, and this month they will be donating around $25,000 to charities from items that were not able to be returned from 2021 shows.
Moving forward, Friedl is looking forward to continuing Liff Happens’ international growth after working their first international festival in the UK this year. He and his team and also working to expand protection features to items other than phones that are typically more difficult for lost and found processes.
“You don’t have user ownership data for things like keys and backpacks,” he explains, “so we can't compare you to a ticket record and let you know that your item has been found. We're introducing little tags that are QR coded and really straightforward. You just register it and add it to your account. We eventually want to be able to build a globally connected lost-and-found network — starting with the US — which we’re already doing small trials for and we hope to do for real next year.”
Friedl’s favorite part of building this software for the events industry is getting to work with his brother, who is a computer engineer. “Building a company has been a roller coaster, but being able to do it with somebody that you can absolutely rely on, no question, has been amazing,” he says. Friedl also notes that Goldenvoice Guest Services Manager Vicky Garza has played a big part in the creation and success of Liff Happens. She was one of the first people to take a chance on the tool and has been overwhelmingly positive and supportive throughout its journey.
Outside of events, Friedl’s life revolves around his eight-year-old chocolate lab. He loves taking her on walks and runs, buying her toys, and spending as much time with her as possible.