I co-founded RushTix in 2015 with Johnny Funcheap of funcheap.com as a subscription event-membership platform — last-minute tickets to live arts and culture in your city. We started in San Francisco and grew across the Bay Area. Our mascot is Roscoe, a personality-driven chat bot we built to recommend events.
Roscoe wins at the Watson Developer Conference
In November 2016, Roscoe entered IBM’s Watson Developer Conference Bot Competition. Roscoe went live on-stage for a bot-vs-bot roasting competition against another “comedy” bot — but that bot was no match for him. Roscoe absolutely destroyed his competitor with zingers that sent the crowd wild.
I just have to say: this was REALLY HARD to do in 2016 — it took a lot of time and logic to make a bot that could roast another chatbot.
Roscoe also took home “Most Useful Bot” for his day job — finding events for users on rushtix.com. From IBM’s conference write-up:
“Built by Jill Bourque, Roscoe helps you find interesting events in San Francisco. Roscoe connects with rushtix.com to get you added to the guest list.” — IBM Watson Blog, Nov 2016
A decade before ChatGPT, building a useful chatbot meant doing Natural Language Understanding by hand — defining every intent (find a show, buy a ticket, get on the guest list), every entity (a venue, a date, a comedian, a city), and every dialog node in the decision tree that mapped intent + entity combinations to specific responses.
Tedious, but a real exercise in figuring out what an audience would actually want from a bot. A lot of what made Roscoe useful in 2016 maps directly onto what we’re building at avalonOS today — just with the LLM doing the heavy lifting on the understanding side.
Pandemic-pivot to livestreaming in 14 days
On March 16, 2020, the live-event business basically collapsed overnight. In two weeks, I built a ticketed live-streaming platform from scratch.
At first we tried all kinds of formats — circus, drag, cooking. Then we tapped into comedy, and things went bananas. Within nine months, RushTix was the category leader, with $1.6M in revenue.
On New Year’s Eve 2021, two shows in one night brought in over $170,000. It was a pretty crazy experience.
We worked with comedians like Patton Oswalt, Sarah Silverman, Jeff Dunham, John Cleese, Tom Papa, Maria Bamford, Myq Kaplan, and Jake Flores — and built features like the “AUDIO-ance,” which fed real-time laughter back to the comedian so the room actually felt like a room.
What I learned during the pandemic: people don’t just crave content. They crave presence. The shows worked because we engineered presence at scale — real laughter, real audiences, real performers in a real moment. That insight is the through-line to avalonOS.
Press from the livestream era
- The New York Times — Jason Zinoman on RushTix and the rise of livestream comedy
- Forbes — CEO of RushTix Jill Bourque Says Live-Streaming Comedy Is Here To Stay
- AWS for M&E — RushTix inspires nonstop laughter with Amazon IVS
- Yahoo Finance — Why this company is live-streaming comedy shows
- GirlTalkHQ — How RushTix CEO Jill Bourque Pivoted In 2020 To Create The Biggest Comedy Club On The Planet
- Authority Magazine — Female Disruptors: Jill Bourque of RushTix
- Vanyaland — Jill Bourque’s comedy expertise drives RushTix success upstream
- All Things Video Podcast — From Live Events to Live Streaming
Back to roots
After the pandemic, we returned to RushTix’s original premise — last-minute tickets at ridiculously low prices. Roscoe is still here too, working a slightly different beat as your personal deal hunter.
Today’s RushTix runs in twelve cities across the US, UK, and Australia — SF Bay Area, LA, NYC, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, London, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane, and Adelaide.