Immersion Evolution: Jeb Terry Leads Multi-City Cosm Venue Rollout

Jeb Terry Jr. is president and CEO of Cosm, the immersive event experience company founded in 2020 that this summer opened two eye-popping high-tech entertainment venues, in Los Angeles and Dallas. These buildings, which some have called “mini-Spheres,” have the potential to transform the venue business. With a third slated for Atlanta, three more on the horizon and a recent $250 million round of funding, the cosmos just might be Cosm’s limit.

Terry, a former Fox Sports executive who played college football at North Carolina before being drafted in 2004 by the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers and later playing for the San Francisco 49ers, is a keynote speaker at this year’s VenuesNow Conference (Oct. 15-16 in Phoenix). Here, the Cosm head offers insights into the rollout of the 2,000-capacity venues, enthusiastic consumer adoption and what markets Cosm may soon conquer.

Cosm’s development is something of an evolution of Terry’s own experiences.

“Every step I’ve had in my career, every experience, from playing football to startup life to Fox Sports, really leans on a lot of those things that I’ve done along the way,” Terry said, recalling his time in 2018-2019 working with now-Cosm chairman, Steve Winn, and his time as a sports broadcasting executive.

“It really started to hatch in and around the core of this experiential offering,” Terry said. “How do you leverage amazing technology to create a different journey, experience? Looking at some planetarium technology that had been around for decades, through (computer graphics firm) Evans & Sutherland, thinking how that could be used differently. What else is at the core of this tech that we could do differently?”

LED technology had advanced, and Terry started looking at putting a prototype together in 2019. The idea to do live sports arrived like the proverbial lightbulb, the old kind.

“It just clicked immediately,” he said. “Gut reaction: holy cow, this works. We’ve been running hard ever since. It’s one of those things where you get goosebumps, you feel it in your gut, like, ‘This is going to be really hard to do, but I see the path,’ and this thing is so good at its base that it’s worth pursuing.”

Cosm purchased Salt Lake City-based Evans & Sutherland in 2020, along with E&S subsidiary Spitz, Inc. and Live Like VR, a leader in live immersive sports and entertainment. This gave Cosm an in-house immersive production, distribution and video streaming tech platform, including app development services.

“They have an amazing history in innovation. They were really at the forefront of computer graphics and have done some amazing work,” Terry said of Evans & Sutherland. “Thinking of immersivity as a whole has been what we’re leaning into, and that team is amazing and core to who we are. We’re in the supercomputer race, and so that’s the foundational tech. It’s what they’ve been building for decades.”

Two Cosm locations have opened this year, the first at the Hollywood Park development in Inglewood, California, home to SoFi Stadium and a stone’s throw from Intuit Dome and Kia Forum. The 2,000-capacity venue sports an 87-foot LED dome, providing a convincing viewing experience that leaves some guests forgetting they’re not there in person.

Cosm’s maiden voyage opened to the public in late June, and was followed by a Dallas location, which opened in late August at the 433-acre mixed-use suburban Grandscape development. A third is coming to the Centennial Yards development in Atlanta, featuring the signature 87-foot LED dome and encompassing 70,000 square feet.

Otto Benedict, svp, facility and campus operations at SoFi Stadium and Hollywood Park, called having the first Cosm on the sprawling campus — which includes cinemas, retail, restaurants and dwellings and is adjacent to Intuit Dome — a point of pride.

“Integrating dynamic companies like Cosm into our retail space furthers our goal to create a tenant mix that is not only unique to Hollywood Park, but also delivers extraordinary experiences for our community,” Benedict said.

Terry declined to discuss what it costs to develop a Cosm venue — a public filing in Texas put the cost of the Dallas project at about $42 million — but was emphatic about the business model, which he called “fiscally responsible.”

“This is a business built on sound economics, which is why we did two at once, why we’ve announced a third, why we’re about to now use it for five and six,” he said. The amount of programming that’s possible, with up to three turns of the house each day, makes Terry confident that the concept has a future.

“We feel good about the capex it takes to go in there,” he said. Winn and Marisol Capital were the original source of liquidity and the company in July completed another $250 million funding round, led by Winn, Marisol and Avenue Sports Fund.

“It’s all about growth right now,” Terry said. “How can we deploy it, scale responsibly and ensure we’re sharing this amazing experience at a global scale.”

The rollout since July has been encouraging.

“Everyone always believed in the potential and then we got to the prove-it moment, and everyone said, ‘Yep, right.’ It was a big lift,” he said.

The infrastructure is sound, Terry says.

“Now we just stamp these out, and our business is about the overall enterprise, about the execution of deploying fantastic technology, an amazing media and distribution arm, leveled-up hospitality to deliver this at scale consistently and time and time again. We’re doing three-plus events per day at both our venues, and that’s the aspiration, where we’re going.”

Cosm brass are pleased with opening sales, he said.

“Our North Star is to deliver that fan experience for people time and time again. Even if they don’t like the content necessarily coming in, they’re going to love the venue and the experience,” Terry said. “From a key performance indicator standpoint, we monitor ticket sales, average ticket price, F&B per-caps, and we do feel great about where we’re sitting right now.”

The food and beverage operation, which includes full bars and table service, is run in-house, Terry explained, while declining to discuss specific sales figures.

“When we were building the business, we were like, ‘OK, we’ll just go work with a third party provider and they’ll take care of it,’ but everyone wanted us to be a concessionaire,” Terry said.

Prospective vendors had ideas that didn’t sync up.

“So, we ended up doing that in-house. We had hired our own chef, Chef Adam. He comes from a high-cuisine culinary background, and as we built the menu, we always said we want the fans to love us and the critics will, at minimum, respect us. So, it’s food for the fan. We want it to taste good, with great ingredients, still be approachable, but in an elevated way.”

The menus also reflect local flavor. Terry cited the Korean corn nachos as an example.

“A little twist and we really want it to be a taste of LA. So you’ve got some Asian flair, some Latino flavor. West Coast, right?” he said. “In Texas, we get a little bit of a barbecue Tex-Mex element in there. You should be able to recognize the menu as Cosm, but with a little localization.”

Social media has propelled word of mouth, with users sharing TikTok and Instagram content that has gone viral and increased foot traffic.

“We initially went out at a $33 average ticket price. We’re exceeding that a number of times, but we want this to be approachable,” Terry continued. “We want to make sure people can come back time and time again. We’re seeing great consumption habits of people coming in and eating and drinking and hanging with us and really focusing on those dwell times. Our goal is to make sure we can try to set a standard of repeats.”

Getting ticket buyers to return time and time again “will truly define our long-term success,” Terry said.

As for site must-haves and where the next Cosm venues will turn up, Terry says London is an international aspiration, but generally, Cosm is best suited as supplemental to an already-bustling development.

“We are not prepared to go to the side of the highway yet,” he said.

“We’re in Hollywood Park, right next to SoFi stadium, in this mixed-use district that has live-work-play elements all going on,” he said. “There’s a brand and a district feel there. We’re all rolling in the same direction. The more people on site, the better. We like to look for 30,000 square feet that’s within some type of area like that.”

In Atlanta, the site is next to State Farm Arena and Mercedes Benz Stadium downtown, set to open by the end of 2026.

“It’s going to be a great one for us,” Terry said. “As we look to our future, we also look to our development partner on these deals. The site can be great, but it’s also about who are we working with on the real estate side that is invested in the district of that place.”

Some additional cities Cosm is looking into include Tampa, Miami, Nashville, Phoenix, Denver, Charlotte and Chicago.

“We’re out right now vetting a lot of demand for who is going to be the next one,” he said, mentioning other interesting markets including Boston, New York, D.C., Indianapolis, Cleveland and Columbus. “We love Austin, Houston, San Antonio. We think that these cities can support a lot of that. We have some in the can that we really like that are coming soon, but that’s the cohort we’re going after.”

On the Cosm content side, there is huge potential to interact with off-site live music, comedy and special events, he said.

“We think that’s going to be a big part of the offering,” he said. “ Just the way we can take you to the sidelines of your favorite game, we can also take you to the front row of a concert.

“How can we take live from Red Rocks into LA and Texas, or bring an O2 concert here, or take Coachella to Texas,” he said. “There’s a lot of cool stuff that we’re looking at. We can put you inside of a cool piece of media or art. And that’s the core thesis.”